Birthright

4

                 

Edith woke up to bright midmorning with a splitting headache that seemed out of proportion to what she'd had to drink the night before.  Night...that was a bit of a gloss on the facts.  There had been light to the east when they'd left the place.  Carmen had talked the entire way back, about nobles and officers and a million bright things that Edith couldn't quite follow.  Edith hadn't said anything about Indrion.  He hadn't told her to conceal his presence, but, somehow, talking about it felt like a breach of confidence.  Then again, she wouldn't have been able to get a word in edgewise.  It was clear that Carmen wasn't done with balls.

The blue dress lay crumpled on the floor, like the corpse of some deep-sea creature that had washed up on the beach during a storm.  It had taken her ten minutes and her pocketknife to get the damn thing off.  Edith picked the dress up, feeling guilty about having treated something so expensive so badly.  She looked at the back.  Not bad work for a knife in the dark – well, no damage the ruffles couldn't hide.  Edith draped the gown more respectfully across a chair.

There was a knock at the door, and Carmen came in, looking fresh and cool as ever.  "You busy?"

"Of course not," said Edith, feeling vaguely embarrassed that she hadn't even gotten round to brushing her hair.

"Good.  How would you feel about a trip to the Imperial Gallery?"

"The Gallery?  But – "

"It's the portraits I'm interested in.  They've got pictures of all the patricians there, don't they?"

"Going back about two hundred years, yes.  But – "

"I thought maybe I could find my family."

"It's not a bad idea," said Edith.  "But how are we going to get in?  The Gallery isn't open to the public."

Carmen smiled brightly.  "Lucky thing we're not the public, then.  If anyone tries to stop us you can just show them that token thing of yours." 

Edith had been past the Gallery before, but, for obvious reasons, she had never gone in.  It was a three-story building just off the Republican Plaza.  Back in the day, it had been a palace for a member of the Solanis family, who had been a noted collector of antiquities.  Of course, the palace and everything in it had gone to Siniavis Ranaxis after the war; she hadn't cared enough to do anything with it, but her son designated it a public building and instituted the portrait tradition.  The public access didn't last a generation.  However, the Sarinorian aristocracy had been rather pleased by the idea of the portraits, and that legacy, at least, had been maintained.

The guards at the front gate were far from young and not very interested in guarding.  All it took was a smile from Carmen, and they were walking through the gate into a long, colonnaded courtyard.  At the center of the courtyard was a larger-than-life statute of Urian Ranaxis, the second of that line, with an inscription on the pedestal that said, "So history may know us as we were."  This was supposedly the reason he gave for instituting the portrait tradition, after disapproving of an idealized statute of Siniavis.  The less sanitized version was that Urian, who was a soldier like his mother, had actually said "Be damned if I'll let them make the old bitch look like a god."  Whichever version was closer to the truth, the sculptor hadn't erred on the side of beauty; the statue showed a long-faced, heavy-browed man who wouldn't have been mistaken for a god in any light.

Edith would have liked to see the antiquities, but Carmen made a beeline for the third floor, where the portraits were.  They spent the morning looking at paintings and busts of stuffy rich people who had done nothing more than be born with the right name.  Edith was bored out of her skull, which still felt like someone had been jamming nails into it.  Carmen was nowhere in sight; Edith made her way to an unobtrusive door they'd passed earlier, in the hopes that it led to one of the balconies she'd seen from the outside.