"That was your forest. Where you hunted." He came closer to the painting, gazing at the bleak, empty cold, the white and gray and brown and black. "This was your life," he clarified. I was too mortified, too stunned, to reply. He walked to the next painting I'd left against the wall. Darkness and dense brown, flickers of ruby red and orange squeezing out between them. "Your cottage at night." I tried to move, to tell him to stop looking at those ones and look at the others I'd laid out, but I couldn't--couldn't even breathe properly as he moved to the next painting. A tanned, sturdy male hand fisted in the hay, the pale pieces of it entwined among strands of brown coated with gold--my hair. My gut twisted. "The man you used to see--in your village." He cocked his head again as he studied the picture, and a low growl slipped out. "While you made love." He stepped back, looking at the row of pictures. "This is the only one with any brightness." Was that ... jealousy? "It was the only escape I had." Truth. I wouldn't apologize for Isaac. Not when Tamlin had just been in the Great Rite. I didn't hold that against him--but if he was going to be jealous of Isaac-- Tamlin must have realized it, too, for he loosed a long, controlled breath before moving to the next painting. Tall shadows of men, bright red dripping off their fists, off their wooden clubs, hovering and filling the edges of the painting as they towered over the curled figure on the floor, the blood leaking from him, the leg at a wrong angle. Tamlin swore. "You were there when they wrecked your father's leg." "Someone had to beg them to stop." Tamlin threw a too-knowing glance in my direction and turned to look at the rest of the paintings. There they were, all the wounds I'd slowly been leeching these few months. I blinked. A few months. Did my family believe that I would be forever away with this so-called dying aunt? At last, Tamlin looked at the painting of the glen and the starlight. He nodded in appreciation. But he pointed to the painting of the snow-veiled woods. "That one. I want that one."