Attracted to the dazzle, she and Aodhan both stopped to peer more closely at a number of the pieces. Beside most were cards that had a lettering she didn’t understand. “Can you read that?”
Aodhan stared at the letters, lines forming between his eyebrows. “I should be able to—we learned it in school. But it has been an age since I have used it.” He scanned the text again. “I’m fairly confident it says this ring is a borrowed item, not a permanent part of the Gallery. The owner has lent it to Lumia.”
Elena made a face. “I could understand that if this was a public museum,” she said. “But why give it to people who’ll just hide it away?”
“I believe there is a certain cachet in being able to say that a piece of art you own was deemed acceptable for Lumia’s archives.”
“Ah. Bragging rights. Got it.” She looked at a necklace that was ropes of lustrous white pearls placed on a blue velvet background, thought that Sara would’ve liked to see it. Her best friend liked pearls—and even though she now owned the real thing, she still wore the imitation pearl bracelet Elena had given her for her twenty-first birthday.
“Ready for the next level?”
She nodded at Aodhan’s question.
Metal sculptures, paintings of every kind, pencil and charcoal sketches, a collection of feathers that spanned every shade from pure white to gleaming obsidian—and included a feather of deepest magenta that she was certain came from the inner curve of Jessamy’s wings, the exhibits kept surprising them, delighting them.
“Do they have one of your feathers?” she asked Aodhan, having not spotted it in their quick walk-through.
“I don’t know. Perhaps—if someone picked one up and handed it in.”
And then, finally, they were at the bottom of the Gallery.
Not quite believing they’d made it, Elena looked around, but there was definitely no more staircase. Only a floor that was a sunburst of golden filigree over white marble, the design so spectacular that Elena released the zip on her dress so she could move more freely and went down on one knee to run her fingers over the artistry of it.
When she looked up, it was to see that Aodhan’s wings had turned golden, his feathers reflecting the room. Tapestries shimmering with golden threads, sculptures created of gold, paintings done in shades of gold, old-fashioned lamps with golden casings, a graceful carved settee upholstered in golden velvet and with a frame of golden wood, and ornately framed mirrors that reflected the gold to turn the entire space into a burst of sunshine.
“It’s happy,” Elena whispered. “Does that sound strange? This exhibit, the way it’s set up, it feels happy. Alive.”
“Art is meant to evoke emotion—but the emotion is not necessarily the same from person to person. Where you see joy, I see a delighted pride.” His wings brushing the floor as he deliberately lowered them, as if to experience every aspect of this room, Aodhan stared at a painting that was all thick, textured paint, the shades of gold within it endless.
Though the painting had no structure, it reminded Elena of the sea, a crashing wave of color under a sky glowing with the hopeful tones of sunrise.
“Come look at this, Ellie.”
Rising to join him, she lifted her fingers to touch the paint, found it as thick as it appeared. “You think there’s actual gold in this paint?”
“Yes.” Aodhan’s eyes, the shattered light of them, glowed with endless reflections as he turned from the painting to look up. “But that’s not what I wanted you to see.”
She followed his gaze, gasped. She’d noticed the chandeliers attached to the bottoms of each part of the staircase as well as the pathways that led to each exhibit, but the overall effect was only now apparent. All those chandeliers created a shower of shimmering light, scattering a dazzling rain over them and turning this room into even more of a dream.
“Okay,” she whispered, “the Luminata might hoard art, but they sure know how to show it off, too.”
Leaving Aodhan to his contemplation of an intricate tapestry that had caught his eye, she wandered around trying to take in as much as possible. It was unlikely she’d have a chance to return—because, open as it was to all Luminata, she couldn’t see the older members of the sect hiding any secrets here. And even this beauty couldn’t compare to Elena’s need to unearth the truth about the woman with hair of near-white who had looked so much like her that the Luminata found the resemblance eerie.
It feels like a ghost is haunting Lumia.
Skin pebbling, she decided she and Aodhan should head to the library next. Though what had Gian and Ibrahim called it? The Repository of Knowledge, that was it. That, too, was a public space, but with so many millennia of knowledge there, it was possible there were secrets that had fallen through the cracks, small clues she might be able to string together to form a coherent picture.