The princesses had called it painting class, but it didn’t seem like they were going to do much painting. At least not right away. The woman was passing out sheets of paper to the princesses and princes. Mayah was very glad when she saw she could read the Rajim script with no problems at all. Questions for Discussion with Your Row, the title read. There were five questions beneath. What’s your favorite part in The Letters of Sarana that Started the World? Can you picture in your head a scene that best captures your favorite part? What kind of colors best communicate the mood of your scene? What techniques will you use to properly showcase the glory of the Eternal Queen Sarana? How will you demonstrate the majesty of the Rajas through your painting?

Mayah took a deep breath. She could do this. She could pull this off. All she had to do was not go first. Let someone else describe a scene, let someone else talk about how he was going to showcase glory and all that, and Mayah would change the answers a little and share them again. She glanced sideways at the Rajas standing in a line to her right. Priva from her dorm was in the row, but Mayah didn’t know the others.

And they didn’t know her either. “Where’s Ca?” the prince on the other end of the row asked.

“Let’s shut up about it.”

It felt like the right thing to say, the castle thing to say. And at any rate, Mayah was tired of being the one always told to shut up. She glanced at Priva. “I’ll go first!” the princess sang out. “My favorite part in the Letters of Sarana is when she tells the mutineer leader that he’s cursed, that his descendants are going to be cursed forever, and that even their name is going to be the Cursed. I love that part! And I think the best scene for that is when the Eternal Queen Sarana is pointing at the Cursed, telling them to go over the shelterbelt and leave the bio-dome proper forever! Colors: blue, green, and yellow. Then I’m going to paint the Eternal Queen Sarana so tall and high and make the Cursed as small as bitty-bats! And I’m also going to paint the castles in the background to show how after the Cursed left, we Rajas made the bio-dome an even better place to live!”

“I think the castles were carved out before the Cursed left,” the prince next to Mayah said. “Only Stoneset Castle was built after, right?”

Priva scowled at him. “Yes, well, yes, that’s true. But it doesn’t matter! Before, after, whatever, when exactly the castles were carved out is not the point. The point is to…” She paused and scanned the page, then read aloud, “How will you demonstrate the majesty of the Rajas through your painting, see, right there, that’s the point.”

The prince shrugged. “I’ll go next. My favorite part is when the Eternal Queen Sarana finds out you can cut the hollow-trees without killing them. I want to paint a scene that shows the bio-dome being grown, how they had to cut the trees in the right places so they would grow into a dome. I’ll use brown and yellow. And maybe some black, like show some breathflower sap leaking down.”

“Ew!” Priva sniffed.

“And then I guess I’ll have the Eternal Queen Sarana standing in the middle of it all, showing how she made it happen, and I’ll have all her family members stand with her because they’re our ancestors.”

Mayah was learning a lot. She wanted to write everything she was hearing down, but that would make her look weird. So she repeated it to herself instead. The Cursed are the descendants of the mutineers. The Rajas are the descendants of the Eternal Queen Sarana and her family. She knew about the Eternal Queen Sarana, of course, and she had learned about the Crash Landing too. But she hadn’t memorized every single detail about them or anything, like these Rajas seemed to have. Mayah hadn’t realized it mattered so much!

“What about you?”

Oh, rock-god, the prince was looking at Mayah now. “My favorite scene,” she whispered, “is afterwards when the bio-dome is all built. I’m going to draw a map. I’ll use all the colors. I’ll paint the Eternal Queen Sarana and the castles, too, like Priva said.”

Mayah stopped, her cheeks burning. “Okay, then,” she heard someone in her row say. The prince at the other end of the row was snickering. Mayah shrank back into herself even further. It was a good idea, it was! She at least knew how to draw a map of the bio-dome. Tonight, though, Mayah would go and ask Sukren for a copy of this Letters book that everyone here seemed to know. Why hadn’t Sukren given her the book to read in the village, anyway? He’d made sure she knew how to read both Rajim and serf letters, and had had her tutored in art, music, geometry, natural science, arithmetic, and all the languages of the bio-dome. But he couldn’t have given her this one book?

Feeling upset, Mayah listened to the last two Rajas share their favorite scenes. I’m going to draw the starship all broken up after the Crash Landing! I liked the part when the followers of the Eternal Queen Sarana all promised to be serfs to help the queens power the bio-dome.

“After you’re done discussing,” the woman – no, Mayah had to call her by her title, regent – called out, “you can go to your easels and begin painting.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Mayah was glad to hear it. She was getting kind of tired of discussing. Maybe if she had read the book, it wouldn’t be so bad, but she hadn’t even heard of it before. Picking up one of the brushes on the paint-stands, Mayah dipped it into the water dish. She could hear her art tutor’s voice in her head. Draw an ellipse first, yes, very good! That’s the edge of the bio-dome, where the hollow-trees that make up the dome’s frame find root in the ground. Next draw a circle, right in the middle of the ellipse. Excellent. That’s the shelterbelt, our tree-wall that protects us from the Cursed. We live right here, inside the circle, yes, good work!

Okay, so first an ellipse, and then a circle in its middle. Mayah painted the lines then stepped back. No matter how many times she drew it, it always looked to her like a giant eye. The holy lake was next – the eye’s pupil. Then the castles. There were five castles, Mayah remembered Sukren telling her. See, that was the kind of thing Mayah had never paid attention to before! She knew the castles grew up around the holy lake, but she’d always painted however many she wanted, sometimes three, sometimes seven. Sometimes Mayah’d even forgotten to paint the castles. Her art tutor had always focused more on the greenhouse villages, and on the holy sites where serf mothers went to give birth. Mayah knew every single one of those! But then again, should she really be putting serf birth sites into a map like this?

It was hard, trying to figure out what to put into her map and what to leave out. It took all morning. When the regent told them it was lunchtime, Mayah gratefully followed Priva to the cafeteria. Making sure to stay quiet this time, she listened to the other princesses talk. “I heard Queen Pal and Queen Jroya went to a Leaf-Vein Houseparty last night,” Oshta was saying.

“Oooh,” Shanti sighed. “I wish I could go to a Houseparty too. But it’s against the rules to go anything hosted by a House until you’re a senior princess!”

Qat was smirking. “They don’t care.”

“How would you know?” Shanti shot back.

“Because I sneaked into one.”

All at once the four other princesses stopped eating to stare at Qat. But it wasn’t a you’re weird stare like Mayah had been getting. Mayah could tell the difference. They were looking at Qat like she’d done something amazing.

“How?” Oshta asked.

“Like I just said. I sneaked in.”

“What was it like?”

“Lots of music, lots of tasty things to eat and drink, and the senior princesses there were all nice to me. Nobody said anything about how I couldn’t be there because I’m a junior princess.”

Mayah’s eyes widened. That was a Houseparty? Right, that was what Sukren had called it! Maybe she should share her story, and then all the other girls would look at her the same way they were looking at Qat! She opened her mouth to say something, then stopped. If she brought it up now, it would seem like she was copying Qat. They wouldn’t believe her. Besides, Mayah didn’t know anything about Houseparties. What if she said something wrong about them? Then they really wouldn’t believe her. Mayah would first ask Sukren about the Houseparty she’d gone to, and then she’d share. And Qat would turn to her all impressed, and maybe Priva would sing out about how great Mayah was, and even Rihani who was as quiet as Mayah would say something…

Lost in her daydream, Mayah was almost left behind when the other princesses got up. She scrambled after them. This time she paid attention to where the lift was going, two levels up, then across the hallway into the studio. It was back to painting, it seemed. Is this what Rajas did all day? Paint? No, Mayah’d overheard Oshta say something at lunch about a dance class, and Qat had complained about a prince in their sculpture class. Mayah squirmed a little. She wasn’t very good at dancing. And the only sculpting she’d ever done was with some mud she and Ajante had scooped out of a harvested rice field.

Well, it was important, then, that Mayah did a good job on her painting. She focused on making sure the castles were really big and golden. Five castles, one in each quinter. Should she draw the borders between the quinters? Maybe not. They always made the bio-dome look like a pie and pies were yummy, not glorious.

Paint, paint, paint, oh, was that the regent up there telling them to stop? “It’s time for exercises,” she was saying. Mayah pouted. She wanted to keep on painting! But no, everybody was pushing their easels to the side to make room. The regent began playing a stringed instrument. “You are the daughters of the Eternal Queen Sarana, and you may give birth to a queen,” she kept saying in a soft sing-songy voice. Not that Mayah was paying much attention to the chant. She was too busy trying to copy the movements of the princesses in front of her. Finally, after what seemed like forever, it was back to painting, back to trying really hard to get the map just right…

“Breaktime,” the regent said from the front of the studio. “You can finish up next session.”

Mayah put down her paintbrush. Her map wasn’t half-bad. The castles were as big as she could make them – they looked like they took up much more space in the quinter than they actually did. And there wasn’t a single greenhouse village on the map. Although Mayah couldn’t help but paint in the plastos plants. Their shimmering purple was too pretty to leave out!

Turning to stretch, Mayah caught a glimpse of a painting in front of her. She froze. The painting looked completely different from Mayah’s. It was filled with real things, objects as you’d see them with your own eyes, while hers was soft and light-filled and disproportionate, more impressionistic than anything else. Frantically she looked from one painting to another. All of them were of the same style. Oh rock-god, why hadn’t she looked up until now? She’d thought to copy the other Rajas during the exercises, but not during the painting, the most important part?

Mayah turned her easel so nobody could see her canvas. The other Rajas were putting down their brushes and laughing and joking like they were all friends with each other. Mayah only wanted to cry.