The Cursed Kingdom

THIRTY-THREE

~ PICTURE IMPERFECT ~

I focused my attention on staying as still as possible, staring at the center of the light wood easel until my eyes burned, and cursed when I felt my finger twitch painfully since it hadn't moved in so long.

Ever since the second day following our marriage and mating, Henrik and I had come down to a small room on the first floor to have our portrait painted, the artist having advised Henrik its natural lighting and quietness was superb to get the task done as perfectly as possible. What the space was used for before its abandonment was something I couldn't quite place. But I guessed it perhaps was once a drawing room of some sort since it was located so oddly close to the dining room.

The long chair placed in its center that we sat in was swallowed up by various animals hides while surrounded by large arrangements of blue and yellow flowers that were even taller than me, whose water had been enchanted to keep them alive much longer. Henrik and I were positioned in a simple, traditional pose with us seated at angles towards each other and our fingers woven together in the thin groove where our knees touched. In my lap, my right hand rested on top of a thick leather book with no title and Henrik's left grasped the handle of a long sword sheathed in a black holster attached to his belt.

The first time I'd seen it on him, I'd been shocked that Henrik owned a weapon at all. I don't know why. Perhaps it was because I always viewed Henrik as invulnerable with his own bodily abilities that him ever relying on a blade to protect himself seemed ridiculous.

The weapon and my lack of a veil were the only differences than what we'd worn at our wedding, the skirt of my white dress covering both our feet so I didn't have to wear those horrible heels, which I was pretty sure had been thrown out already since I hadn't seen them since I took them off.

Although I'd found the whole arrangement quite comfortable on the first day except for the grueling hours it took to prepare my hair and makeup, it became practically unbearable after the first week, my rear and back aching from being in the same position for three hours each day. It only became more difficult afterwards.

Now on the fourteenth and last day, the painter only needed to add a few, smaller details before our portrait was to be hung up later that evening for the grand reveal. It'd been only an hour since we'd begun, the room reeking of two weeks of paint, and already a familiar crick in my lower spine was sprouting from me rolling my shoulders so far back to reflect people's version of perfect posture. It took everything inside me to not twist my upper body around to crack it or reach up and scratch the itch in the space between the bottom of my crown and my hairline.

I must leave for a brief period of time tomorrow to tend to an urgent matter in Aristea. Henrik's voice rang in my head after a few moments of silence filled with the occasional mutters from the painter, his voice noticeably clearer than how it sounded the first day after we mated.

With each passing sunrise, the mate bond between us grew stronger and much harder to ignore, making it so that we spent almost every moment together, whether it be us reading silently next to each other on the couch or having a boisterous conversation. Henrik communicating with me through my mind didn't bother me at all anymore, especially since we used that tactic a lot to pass time while we had our portrait painted. Now, I could even discern emotions in his tone, whereas before I had to rely on if he laughed or growled and where he placed his pauses.

After doing my own internal explorations in my times of boredom, I discovered that my mind resembled a house of a sort with multiple doorways, some leading to memories of different categories while others led to fears, pleasures, and even dreams. So I placed smaller barriers between the things I didn't wish for Henrik to see while keeping the main bridge between us open, allowing him to still hear my thoughts and sense the few emotions that I let him. Henrik had his own walls up as well, thick and sturdy as what I presumed steel to feel like in a subconscious, which I respected just as much as he did to mine, never daring to go near those passageways that led to things we weren't quite ready to share with each other yet.