Gareth and Lorre have settled into their magical work: healing, traveling, caring for the kingdoms. Despite all the ballads about the Hero Prince and the former Grand Sorcerer, they’re happy going unnoticed, not drawing attention.
They might even drop into a new library or a museum, being ordinary visitors for an afternoon. After all, Gareth likes stories and history, and Lorre’s always curious about the world.
But this museum holds painful artifacts of Lorre’s past ... and the ancient life he’s tried to forget.
Considering the current exhibition, the canvas, the wall in front of him, Gareth hoped the painted antique duchess and her prince had also had a marvelous wedding-party, and a life full of love. Everyone should have the love, at least, formal wedding or not. He firmly believed that too.
He moved on to the next bit of history, tucked into a small glass display case. This item carried on the wedding theme, though this time it held a prospective betrothal-portrait set in a locket, the sort of courting jewelry sent out to potential spouses among wealthy aristocratic families, in centuries past. The miniature portrait wasn’t large, but clearly luxurious; someone had spared no expense regarding materials.
Gareth looked at the young man in the portrait. And then he looked again. More closely. Much.
He read the small informative label, neatly printed. The informative label was not terribly informative; the historians appeared not to know much about this small piece.
Lorre had drifted in the direction of a tall hundred-year-old portrait of a pearl-draped countess and her equally pearl-draped lapdog, with the air of someone professionally interested in the esoteric book under her hand; but he noticed that Gareth hadn’t followed, and came back. His gaze went to the locket and the miniature, and then to Gareth’s face, and then away, at some point beyond Gareth’s shoulder: a distance, a horizon, an archway into another room, perhaps one that no longer existed.
Gareth put an arm round him, drew him close. Tension remained in those slim magician’s shoulders, but after a second Lorre relaxed and let himself be held. The Mountain Marches plaid ribbon in his hair, and the hair itself, fluttered in no tangible breeze.
Gareth hugged his other half more. “It’s you, isn’t it?”
Lorre glanced at himself again: through glass, through time, into stretched vellum and painted eyes and the cage of the ornate locket. “How’d you know? It doesn’t look like me.”
It did, in a way -- that same wary arrogant isolation, so alone and so powerful -- but Gareth only told him, “Your eyes,” which was true. “The color. The feel of it. You looking at the world.”
“Me.” Lorre lifted a hand, seemed to remember about glass covers and museum rules, let the hand drop without touching the case. “It isn’t, exactly. But you know that.”
The young man in the portrait -- a boy, really, perhaps ten or twelve -- gazed back at them, unspeaking, not smiling, across three centuries. Painted Lorre had sharp cheekbones and curling blond locks of hair and straight blond eyebrows; he wore a golden necklace, and one of sapphires, and his visible shirt and robe were dyed deep expensive purple and blue, with glittering bullion in the folds and sleeves. He was beautiful—Lorre had said once, early on, that he’d been a pretty child to start with, and Gareth understood now how true that was—but more human, younger, not yet so deliberately unearthly and dazzling. The nose was somewhat different, and the jawline.
“Yes,” Lorre said, about the differences, “I told you I made myself into what -- what the neighboring baron would find lovely. After I left my father’s house. I knew I was young enough to need some sort of patron, and I wanted power.”
Gareth heard the unsaid words, in the center. He knew most of that story, by now.
