“Cécile is the political one,” Antoinette explained to me. Everyone was setting up in Lou’s studio, and she was sitting beside me, doing her own makeup. Although I wanted to help, I knew I’d probably cause some serious damage, so I settled with watching her pretty face up close. “She’s how Louis gets his odd jobs around the dorms, like when you met him. She’s always been sitting pretty at the top of whatever hierarchy of power her school or extracurriculars can give her…captain of this, student president of that. She can paint, obviously, though it isn’t her personal passion.”

“Instead we’re dealing with Colette and Camille.” I raised an eyebrow at the youngest Chapelle sister, who was spending a glacial age picking out perfect paint brushes, holding each of them up to the light. She couldn’t be older than eleven! She had her sisters’ wavy blonde hair and wide-set, gem-bright eyes, plus the family freckles. “But isn’t Camille the musical one?”

Rémi appeared behind us with a jaunty, “Gossiping, ladies?”

I jumped. Antoinette blew the blush off her palette into his face as revenge.

While shaking the powder out of his hair, Rémi explained, “‘Musical one’–you say that like the Chapelles haven’t been training her to be a multi-threat before she was even born. She’s a violin prodigy, top of her class, has early acceptance into the junior academy out east. She even raises bees. And yesterday, Lou snored his way through 10 AM maths.”

I sighed. “No wonder he feels outmatched.” He was fumbling his paints as Sylvain helped him set up an easel. “Maybe we shoulda given him longer to prepare?”

“Don’t let him fool you. He’s been starved for a chance to show them up, he just doesn’t know it yet. You ready, princess?”

Antoinette shot him a sardonic look; she only had blush on one cheek.

“Hurry it up.” He plucked the brush from her hand and dabbed her face–she deftly stole it and coloured his face right back. I dodged the flying powder with a giggle.

Done bugging me and Antoinette, Rémi sauntered over to Cécile and Étienne. They were setting up the little stage where Antoinette and Étienne, the models du jour, would be posed. Antoinette had insisted that they be lit by the open veranda window, and be sitting on the sofa amongst a mixture of fabrics with different patterns and colours. She said this was to prove who was the master of lighting and texture and something-something-something. To be honest, I think she was having fun playing dress-up.

In the game, painting sure went down–Marie was painted privately by Louis. Draw me like one of your french girls, but a billion times more chaste and adorable. No competition. No Antoinette. No other love interests. Not me, thinking about how elegant Antoinette would look–irresistible to all the guys in the room!

Sylvain had clearly gotten sick of Lou’s fidgeting. He’d entirely taken over setting up with his usual quiet scrutiny, leaving Louis to float around him like a moth who was working up the confidence to fly at a lamp.

Antoinette said, “We should save him,” so I waved Louis over. He slumped his way to us.

“How are you feeling?” I asked. “You look like you’re about to compete in the Olympics.”

“The what?”

“Never mind. So?”

He scratched the back of his neck, averting his gaze to Antoinette. She was drawing on her eyeliner, doing that cute thing where she bit the tip of her tongue to focus.

I added, giving him a little nudge, “This isn’t the painting you’re submitting to the auction or anything. It’s just a practice run. Don’t worry too much!”

“Unless someone wants to buy a painting of that.” Antoinette pointed her eyeliner kohl at Étienne, who Rémi was practically wrestling into what I was pretty damn sure was a kitsune stage mask.

Lou blurted, “You can’t make me win.”

“What?” I asked. “Why not?”

“You guys are my friends. They’re gonna know it’s a pity win and hold that against me. The Chapelles don’t do pity.”

Antoinette scoffed. “Am I known to have any pity, Louis?”

“No, but Étienne…”

I snorted. “Étienne would compliment the knifework of his own assassin.”

Antoinette laughed before saying to Louis, “I’ll decide the winner. I’ll treat you all as fairly as I’d treat strangers.”

“Okay, so if I lose, I’ll have really deserved to lose. That doesn’t make me feel any better.”

“You’re being silly.” Antoinette snapped shut her compact and turned to face him, her legs pressing against mine. “What’s actually bothering you?”

He didn’t answer right away, so I prompted, “You can tell us. What’s up?”

Louis sighed, turned his back to his sisters, and then it all spilled out in a whisper. “My sisters are nuts, and pretty mean, but I don’t hate them or anything. We used to be really close before…I dunno, before our parents got so intense about everything? And since there’s no sign that they’re gonna get less intense…” He shrugged. “I guess I don’t want to force us further apart if I can help it. Does that make sense?”

“Loads of sense, Louis.” How to encourage him without giving away that I knew how everything in his life shook out? “Do you think this might make it worse?”

“I mean, how could it not? We’ve never been literally pit against each other…I shouldn’t’ve started this.”

Antoinette began affixing the sparkly hairpiece (“Representing thrown shards of light will show true expertise,” she’d told me as we dug it out of the still-life junk closet, “plus it’s perfectly tacky”). “Well, one, you didn’t start it, Rémi and I did. Two, your parents did the pitting when they decided to not tell you about the auction. Think of it like–Chloé, can you help me with the tiara?”

I eagerly did, arranging her red locks around the tiara as she spoke.

“Think of it like this. You aren’t trying to best them or make fools of them. You aren’t cheating them. You’re telling them–and therefore your parents, the puppet masters–that you want to be judged on the merits of your skill, not depending on what they think of your skill, or what they think you should be involved in, or who they think you are. You’re putting yourself back into the equation.”

“...But my parents aren’t here.”

“No. So I suppose you must promise one more thing.” She pointed at him. “Whether you win or lose, you’ll have to tell them, unless you think your sisters will tattle on you?”

He smiled a little, scrubbing at his mouth. “Camille probably will.”

“Wonderful. Now, are you ready?”

He took a breath. I reluctantly let go of Antoinette’s silky hair and grabbed his shoulders, looking him in the eye, and said, “You’ll do great. I have faith in you.”

Even if Antoinette was the one with the big speech, by now I knew better than to underestimate my protagonist powers. My words finally got Lou to break into a relieved smile. He even seemed to mean it when he nodded.

I wiggled between Rémi and Sylvain on the bench as Antoinette and Étienne took their places. As Étienne fixed his jacket and cuffs, Antoinette spoke to the contestants: Camille, Louis, and Colette, all at the ready behind their easels. Cécile sat near us with a pocket watch in hand.

“You each have an hour to paint Étienne, me, or both of us. We’ve both had our portraits done countless times” –for real; when touring the castle, Étienne stared down at me from like every mantle– “so we know what’s standard and expected.” She pointedly leaned on the word. “Cécile, announce when we strike the minute–”

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

“Wait, wait!” Rémi scrambled off the bench. He was so urgent that I thought he’d call the whole thing off. Instead, he pulled a flask out of his jacket and thrust it at Lou.

“What is that?”

“Trust me.”

Louis glanced at me like he wanted me to tell him it was cool, but I just raised an eyebrow at him. He took the flask and took a sip. His face screwed up impressively as Rémi snatched it back and dove back onto our bench.

Cécile called the minute and they started to paint.

“Do not tell me that was a potion,” I whispered.

“No. Vodka. Poor kid.”

I snorted.

Sylvain settled back, crossing his legs leisurely. “A modern artist is as much his connections as his skills.” Even he had a tiny smirk on his face. He got Rémi roughly shaking his shoulder in that annoying bro-y way as repayment.

It was kinda amazing to see the three Chapelles work. Camille and Colette were experts, even if Camille had to stand on a stool to reach the top of her canvas. Right away, the sisters went for the bright red that signified Antoinette’s hair, and their every confident stroke informed such depth of colour, shape, and shade.

Rémi asked me quietly, “Did you put that stupid crown on her head?”

“She picked it out.”

“No way.”

“Yes way. She thought it was tacky.”

He whistled. “I swear, she loosens up more every day.”

“We always knew she could do that! Remember her at the trivia night? That definitely wasn’t some pretty and poised princess. She was intense.”

Sylvain said, “No, it’s new. She’s relaxed here. Antoinette intense and angry isn’t Antoinette relaxed, or even truly honest.”

I swallowed whatever dumb instant retort had come to my lips. Settled with those words for a second. Then Étienne sneezed.

A non-event, in any other situation. But right here, right now, Louis was concentrating so hard that he flinched, smearing paint across the canvas. Colette grit out a, “Bless you,” with such annoyance that made it clear that she’d totally forgotten it was a prince who’d broken her concentration–and realized it right after, judging by the bright blush that spread across her face. Antoinette giggled before resetting to the exact same perfect pose. And Rémi leapt up to fix the staging that was knocked out of order.

As Rémi made a big fuss of it, pretending Étienne’s collar had gotten ruined, I glanced at Sylvain. His expression was unreadable as usual. “Bored of us kids and our shenanigans?”

“Only thinking.”

“Hmm, how suspicious. What about?”

“Them and their strange, strange problems.” He sighed, sinking back into the bench a little. “It’s people like this who have to invent issues. They have money, property, the opportunity for endless investments, plus four immensely talented children. And what do they do? Pit them against each other.”

Hey man, I’ve been on tumblr since 2014. I know a little something about shallow analysis of class inequality.

“Étienne is set to rule an entire kingdom, so his parents apparently need to see him as little more than a tool. Antoinette told me what happened at that dinner, by the way.”

“Yeah…it was messy. I feel bad for him. Louis, too.”

Sylvain gave truly the deepest, most dramatic sigh I’d ever heard from any living being. He said, voice laced with annoyance like this was the worst fate he ever could’ve been given, “So do I.”

At this point, Rémi was just teasing Étienne, mussing up his hair and trying to get a rise out of him. Everyone had gone back to painting Antoinette, but from what I could see, it was only Louis who bothered to add in her little poorly-hidden smirk at the shenanigans going on right beside her.

Time ticked by, until finally, Cécile (who had been glued to her timepiece like it’d go backwards if she wasn’t looking) announced that the hour was up.

“Artists, put down your brushes!” I cried, zooming back to the half-circle of easels. Even I couldn’t stare at Antoinette for an hour straight, so I’d been watching the garden pavilion get decorated for Camille’s recital out the window.

Rémi and Sylvain took all the paintings and set them up, side by side, on the sofa where Étienne and Antoinette had been sitting. Antoinette paced before the finished paintings. All depicted her, of course. She was clearly the most arresting subject, plus the sisters had some social ground to make up with her.

“These are absolutely beautiful. Technical mastery, to be sure. It reminds me of the old masters. Can’t you see them over your mantle, Étienne?” Stopping before Camille’s painting, she pointed at the light refracting off the tiara and onto the complex folds of silk. She gave the artists a little smile over her shoulder. “However, maybe these new friends of mine have been a bad influence on me. I said I knew what was standard and expected…apparently I didn’t inject enough venom into those terms for you to get my point.”

Colette blanched.

“Camille, you’re less confident with your strokes, that’s the only difference; Colette, your blues are too muddy. However, those things go away with training. If they did, I wouldn’t be able to tell the paintings apart at all. Don’t misunderstand me. They’re exceptionally done and you should be proud that such beauty is hardly an hour’s work for you. But you were all competing, non?”

She headed over to Lou’s painting. His style was graphic, anachronistic, strong–the agile lines and angular edges brought out the wild waves in her hair and the strong line of her nose. He’d captured her looking aside at Étienne and Rémi, head tilting a bit, eyelashes strong black strokes on her cheek, lips in a sharp smirk. Her hair transformed into jagged blood-red roses that obscured the silks that his sisters had paid so much attention to. They grew with all the riot yet none of the ugliness of my magic.

“This looks like me, not the delicate, pink-cheeked waifs that all my father’s artists think they see.” She flicked a hand at the sisters’ portraits. “Do not soften me, ladies, or else you’ll feel like you must soften yourself.”

Louis had his hand at his mouth, chewing the inside of his cheek. Colette was playing the part of the perfect student, nodding emphatically at Antoinette’s every word.

Antoinette announced, “Camille, without a doubt, I can say that my father would buy yours.”

The little girl glowed with pride. Cécile patted her shoulder.

“But why would I? I have a thousand of the exact same.”

Yowch.

I wondered, then, if there was any serious competition between the sisters, or if this rivalry was drawn specifically around Louis.

Antoinette shrugged. “There’s no sense in me deciding who wins. There’s so much history between all of us; you could easily call my bias. And it’s not my charity auction. The royal appraisers would know who’s best suited to send in their artwork, not me.” She picked up Colette’s palette knife and gestured at them with it. “You all win. Or you all lose. What does it matter?”

Looking flustered, Cécile asked, “What was the point in this charade?”

“Come on, think of it for a minute. Why did you not tell Louis about the auction? Isn’t the answer the same?”

She was waving the palette knife around as she talked. “Alright, no more sharp edges for you,” Rémi said as he easily reached over Antoinette’s head and plucked it from her hand–he probably guessed the same as me. She was gonna rip the canvases or something to make a point.

Colette insisted, “I don’t understand. Someone has to win. Isn’t that why you made this silly thing up?”

Rémi tossed the palette knife across the half-circle, underhand. I didn’t get why–until Louis frantically fumbled it. Attention swiveled towards him. He stared at us, hands smeared with the paint (and a little dabbed on his shirt), looking like he’d finally got at that lamp and it’d been a lot more burny than he expected. Rémi was giving him a pointed look, eyebrow raised. Ah, so he’d meant to force him into the spotlight.

Colette turned right back to Antoinette, the obvious authority in the room. “Then why–”

“You can ask me,” Louis said. “I didn’t make it up, but I wanted to do it, right? So ask me.”

“Okay. Then I am asking you.”

“Because I…” He sighed through his nose. “I wanted you to see that I’m serious about this, too, and I can stand toe to toe with you guys. Even if I don’t always want to, and we care about different things, and…. Well, okay, I’m different, but that doesn’t mean I don’t get to be included at all. You can’t decide that for me.”

The twin sisters traded a glance. Sylvain made a soft, approving hum next to me–I didn’t think I’d ever see him give a shit about the first-world-problems that made up all the drama in the other love interests’ routes, but it sure seemed like Louis had touched his heart just a little bit!

Colette said, “We didn’t decide that. Maman and Papa did.”

“No…” It was Camille who said this in her small voice. “We should have told you anyways.”

“Yeah, you should’ve,” he said firmly.

Cécile strode forward. She held out her hand to Louis, and he gave her the palette knife. She smeared a stripe of half-dried paint across Antoinette’s face in both Camille and Colette’s works, and then turned resolutely towards Antoinette herself.

“They were hardly sketches,” she said. “A warm-up for better things in the future.”

“I sure hope so. I wouldn’t want all your skill and passion to go to waste.”

I didn’t exactly expect them all to break out in hugs and apologies, especially because the room also had a prince, two heirs, a weirdo peasant, and a scary stranger in it. However, I read a serious thoughtfulness in the way the twin sisters were looking at Louis. They were listening, even if they didn’t speak any more than that. We’d helped put down the first planks, but it’d take a much longer time for them to build the whole bridge.

Rémi broke the silence. “Hey, we can still use these.” He lifted Camille’s (or Colette’s…?) to show it to us, paint gash across the middle and all. “We could sell them to someone looking for anti-Aconitum propaganda.”

“Oh, shut up,” Antoinette said. Clearly not minding the joke. It shot a sudden shiver down my spine, though, reminding me of that CG art of her in prison. Ugh.

In the meantime, though…

Camille smiled shyly at us all. “Well, um, do you want to hear me play?”