Gods & Thieves ✔

41. Boastful and Meek

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Stepping into the house, we find ourselves in a tiny hallway, a staircase leading to the second floor on one side, a door to the kitchen on the other.

There's a pile of shoes on the floor here, and raincoats and jackets on the hooks on the wall. Everything is exactly as I remember, even the floorboards creak just as sweetly, greeting me with their broken love, and again I feel good at the thought that at least my house remembers me and waits for me.

Yet, as soon as the front door closes, I can't express my joy, because I find myself trapped between Loretto and the cake box, which is now in Cale's hands. There is barely enough space in for three people in this hallway, and I'm forced to shrink and hunch my shoulders, which makes my lungs cramp as if they were squeezed in claws.

Cale, despite my obvious agony of trying to take a new breath, is in no hurry to go further and invite us to the kitchen table. No, not at all. Despite the fact that the aroma of my mother's baked potatoes, which, as my brother knows, I love very much, stretches from the kitchen, Cale seems to have grown into the floor. Maybe he's not sure how to explain my sudden arrival, waiting for me to sneak ahead and do everything myself.

Or maybe Cale suspects Loretto after all. Because he doesn't take his eyes off my mentor.

But my mentor does not take faer eyes off a portrait.

A huge human-sized portrait that stands under our stairs suddenly absorbs all of Loretto's attention. As if spellbound, Tayen stares, hushed either with awe or with horror. Even faer lips open slightly in a discouraged 'o'--it's not often that Loretto allows faerself such frankness.

At first, it seems to me that in the dark, an ugly portrait, tarnished by time, causes banal disgust, but the next moment, my mind connects a chain of hypotheses together.

Montejo is the one who is in the painting. My distant ancestor, from whom, as I now know, more than four hundred years ago, the feuds between the travelling people and the local shamans began. This canvas has survived centuries and has been kept in our attic for gods know how long, until Cale found it and decided to put it here for everyone to see. He is our idol, said my brother, one day we will hang his portrait in the Great Temple again, which we will call our palace again. That's where we all, Montejo, belong.

The painting, of course, has cracked, the colors have dulled, but the conqueror of the southern lands, stands in his portrait just as menacingly and autocratically. Holding a sharp blade in his hand and leaning on a stone with his foot, he seems ready to rush into battle. He looks with his dark eyes piercingly--as though evaluates his enslaved lands and its inhabitants through the frame like through a window.

It feels like he's staring right at us. He's studying us, waiting for us to beg for mercy.

"Do you like it?" Cale asks, still watching Loretto.

Loretto doesn't. Tayen doesn't answer, just exhales slowly, still staring at Montejo, and then purses faer lips. And then I feel Tayen's hand surreptitiously reaching for mine. With a quick but restrained, thoughtless movement, Loretto intertwines faer cold fingers with mine, squeezing my palm almost to the point of a burning crunch of joints, as if I'm the last saving straw in a rotten swamp that sucks you into its fetid abyss.

I have to bite the tip of my tongue to keep myself from gasping and choking on the air that can't get into my squeezed lungs anyway.

"This is our ancestor, the greatest of them," Cale continues without a trace of embarrassment, definitely not having drawn the same conclusions as I did.