The Girl from Oto by Amy Maroney

Author:Amy Maroney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Artelan Press
Published: 2019-11-21T10:31:23+00:00

The sun slanted in through the narrow window, forming a long rectangle of golden light on the stone floor. The faint sound of birdsong echoed in the courtyard. Mira sighed. She pulled a brown leather smock out of her satchel and tugged it over her head, wishing she were outside. Instead, she dutifully took her place next to Sebastian and stared at her painting. She hated it. The colors were all wrong, the face had a demented expression and the proportions made no sense.

Sebastian laughed. “Do not despair. This is how all painters begin. Painting is difficult, Mira. You draw well, but that skill does not transfer seamlessly to a palette and a paintbrush, I assure you. It is simply a matter of practice.”

“I hope you are planning to stay here for many years, because that is how long it will take me to succeed,” Mira said.

She plunged her brushes in the jar of spirits, splattering the front of her apron.

“Gently, gently,” he said.

“How long did it take you to learn?”

“In the beginning, I feared I would never succeed. At the master’s atelier we all had different tasks. The least experienced among us—for a long time, that was me—would paint the skies. See those castles and mountains in the distance?” He pointed at the background of the painting Mira had copied. “Bermejo was skilled at painting those. I copied him as best I could, because his work was exquisite.”

He hefted a rectangular wooden panel in the air, examined it and laid it on the table, tracing his fingers over the line where the two thin slabs of oak were glued together.

“That Arnaud boy, the shepherd, is a fine woodworker.”

“Yes,” said Mira, brightening at the thought of him. “There is nothing he cannot build or carve. Or climb.”

Sebastian’s good eye rested on her for a moment. Then he picked up a small ceramic jar that was marked with a dab of white paint.

“Eggshells can be ground up to make a fine white pigment. There’s white lead, of course, which many of us prefer. But it is deadly poison. Old bones work—hens and other fowl are best—if you burn them and grind them down to dust. That’s not the best white, because it’s rather runny and thin, but it will do in a pinch.”

She scribbled notes on a piece of linen paper with a stub of vine charcoal.

He pointed to the charcoal in her hand. “That works for black, ground down.”

He went on describing the sources and methods for creating every color in the palette, and she wrote out his instructions, distracted by the throaty coo of a dove nesting outside the window.

Her mind wandered to Sebastian’s descriptions of his time in Compostela, where the earth came to an end and all the rivers poured into a great, writhing sea. Brother Arros’s stories of the sea still played over and over in her mind, and now she had even more fodder for her imagination. She saw foam-capped waves on glittering waters that

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