Color Song (A Passion Blue Novel) Read Free Page B

depression filled her.
Or perhaps it will get worse.
    She fetched charcoal and lit the braziers as the other painters arrived: kind Perpetua, whom Humilità had promoted from journeyman to master just before she became ill; pretty Angela, formerly an apprentice and now a journeyman, who’d become Giulia’s fast friend; lovely, flighty Lucida, one of the wealthiest nuns at Santa Marta and a talented miniaturist. Elderly Benedicta, the workshop’s third master painter, was absent. She’d become frail over the past months and often was unable to work.
    When they were all gathered, Domenica gave a speech, acknowledging her now-permanent position as the workshop’s leader and praising Humilità. She stood stiffly at the center of the room, her hands hidden in her sleeves, her face showing no expression. She might have been speaking about a stranger.
    It was a long, grim day. Humilità’s absence haunted the workshop like an echo. The painters worked in silence—Perpetua at the drafting table; Angela at her easel; even Lucida, who normally delighted in defying Domenica’s prohibition of unnecessary conversation—one of the many new rules Domenica had imposed since she took over the running of the workshop. Giulia prepared paints, welcoming their familiar songs, which distracted her at least a little from her sadness.
    She’d learned a great deal since that blustery November morning when Passion blue first sang to her. Raw materials had no voice; it was only in the final stages of the preparation process—after she’d soaked or boiled or crushed them, after she’d strained them and dried them and ground them to fine powder on a marble slab—that their songs began to swell, rising as she added water and oil and other substances to bind them into paint.
    There was not a color now that she could not hear. Black, compounded from charred animal bones, thrummed like a drum. Vermilion, derived from the mineral cinnabar, sizzled. Crimson lake, extracted from red-dyed silk, warbled like a flute. The various ochres rasped and hummed, as arid as the earth they were dug from. She could judge the quality of the paints she made by ear now, even better than she could by eye. She’d begun to experiment with pigment combinations and paint layering in her practice paintings, creating harmoniesand counterpoints, achieving color effects that impressed even Benedicta, the workshop’s acknowledged master of color lore.
    The songs’ peak was brief. Almost as soon as the paints were mixed, their voices began to dwindle, sinking toward silence as they dried. Giulia knew of only one color that retained a ghost of its former music: Passion blue, whose icy chime breathed almost imperceptibly from paintings years or decades old, as faint as a forgotten dream.
    It was a long time since she had feared the voices of the colors. A long time since she had prayed each night to God to take the songs away. For they were beautiful, and their beauty called irresistibly to her artist’s soul. Even when she’d been most afraid, she had felt that seductive pull.
    There were days when she wondered whether she was sinning by surrendering to the songs, by embracing them in her art—whether the singing of the paints was the stain that magic had imprinted on her soul, ground into her substance like the charcoal dust that blackened her fingers. But there were other days when the songs pierced her to the heart, and her whole being soared with the wonder of perceiving this hidden truth about the world. On those days, the color song felt like a gift. On those days she could not believe that something so beautiful could come from any hand but that of God.
    What had changed her so? Anasurymboriel. She could think of no other explanation. The spirit must have left something inside her when she set it free, altered her in some inexplicable way. Or perhaps it had taken something with it, removed some barrier or inhibition to expose what had been there all along.
    She