Lalo stared at him as though he had been struck to the heart but had not yet
begun to feel the pain. He shook his head a little.
‘You read my heart as you see the lady’s soul…’ he said with a curious
dignity. ‘The gods alone know what I would give to be able to do what you ask of
me!’
The sorcerer smiled. His form seemed to shift, to expand, and in the blazing of
his eyes Lalo’s awareness was consumed. / will provide the vision and you will
provide the skill… the words echoed in Lalo’s mind, and then he knew no more.
The stillness of the hour just before dawn hushed the air when Lalo again became
conscious of his own identity. The girl Jarveena lay back in her chair,
apparently asleep. His back and shoulder ached furiously. He stretched out his
arm and flexed his fingers to relieve their cramping, and only then did his eyes
focus on the canvas before him. –
Did I do that? His first reaction was one he had known before, when hand and eye
had cooperated unusually well and he had emerged from an intensive bout of work
amazed at how close he had come to capturing the beauty he saw. But this – the
image of a face whose finely arched nose and perfect brows were framed by waves
of lustrous hair, of a slenderly curved body whose honey-coloured skin had the
sheen of the pearls on the floor and whose delicately up-tilted breasts were
tipped with buds of dusky rose – this was that Beauty, fully realized.
Lalo looked from the picture to the girl in the chair and wept, because he could
see only blurred hints of that beauty in her now, and he knew that the vision