The Golden Key (152 page)

More wild cheers. Bemused, Rohario wondered if his father might end up more popular after the institution of the Corteis than before. Truly it was a miracle that the Matra ei Filho had blessed Tira Virte with the wisdom to change without resorting to the violence that had destroyed other kingdoms.

“As for these Grijalvas who stand before you now, I am honor-bound by the Edict of Protection bestowed by Alessio the First and renewed by the first Benetto. It is time for that edict to pass out of my hands and into those of the Ecclesia.”

Renayo bowed his head humbly. So did many of the men in the gathering, clasping hats to breasts. The Grijalvas, slowly and perhaps with some reluctance, knelt before the Premio Sancto and the Premia Sancta. All of them bowed their heads, even the great Limners, whose arrogance was legend—
all
, except for the accused man. Rohario sought out Eleyna’s dark head, saw Cabral—
grandfather!
—kneeling with his white head bowed and his dignity intact.

At last Saavedra Grijalva raised her head and stared straight at Their Holinessès. She was proud yet also humbled by tragic experience, and she was as majestic as a queen in an elegant gown three hundred years out of date and yet as new-looking as if made last week.

“Matra Dolcha, ninia, we cannot forsake those who come to us for mercy,” said the Premia Sancta, taking her hand and lifting her up. “Rise. For you have sinned grievously, but it is the mercy of the Matra which gives us life and hope. So come you under Her gentle hands and be forgiven.”

Under the gentle hands, Rohario thought, of the great altarpiece painted by Sario Grijalva with his own blood. The altarpiece in which the Matra was a portrait of Saavedra herself. How could they
not
forgive her?

Renayo came forward and took Saavedra’s hand. “What you have suffered, bela meya, is beyond description. I will not allow you to suffer more.” He turned to the assembly. His voice penetrated into the depths of the cathedral. “Is it just that Duke Alejandro’s child be stained and cast out?”

“No!” they cried, a thousand voices in agreement. All but Azéma, who stood alone, a fragile reed fighting hopelessly against the rising tide.

“Can you swear, Saavedra Grijalva, on the book of Holy Verses that this is the true child of Alejandro do’Verrada?” The Premio Sancto held out an old leather-bound, gilt-encrusted volume of the Holy Verses.

Saavedra laid first her palms, then her forehead, on it. The great dark mass of her unbound hair hid the book from view, yet no one needed to see it clearly. It was enough that they felt, with her, that it was there. “I swear it.” She lifted her head so all might hear her words. “This child I bear within me is the child of Alejandro Baltran Edoard Alessio do’Verrada, he with whom I pledged love. This I swear on the Holy Verses of Matra ei Filho, may their blessings be upon me.”

“This child she bears would have been Duke of Tira Virte, had
he been a boy.” Renayo extended an arm toward the Grand Duchess. No, indeed, Rohario realized abruptly. He was extending it toward poor bewildered Edoard, who stared at Saavedra as though at a vision which portended good fortune or, perhaps, ill. “So in the spirit of this new Constitussion which you have presented to me as your Grand Duke, I hereby as is within my rights and powers betroth Saavedra Grijalva to my son, Edoard, and I grant legitimacy to the child born of this issue. If it is a boy, I name that child
Heir
after my son Edoard.”

By this time the assembly was too worn out by revelation to do more than raise a murmur that soon passed. Renayo clasped Saavedra’s hand in Edoard’s. Rohario saw, now, what the plan had been all along, concocted, as always, by the Duke and his Grijalva allies.
We agreed it is the only way.

Grand Duke Renayo had never been a man to let others control his destiny. The Grijalvas did whatever they needed to do, in order to survive.

Renayo surveyed the assembly and drew himself up, for he remained, lest they forget, their Duke. “As for the other accusation,” he said scornfully, “I will not dishonor my mother’s memory by answering it, but I swear—” He knelt before the Premio Sancto and the Premia Sancta and kissed their rings. “I swear on these rings,” he continued, rising to his feet and gesturing toward his son and his son’s betrothed, “that my Heir is the true child of the bloodline of the do’Verradas.”

  NINETY-ONE  

Eleyna
was holding Agustin’s linen-swathed hand when he died. He had awakened only twice in the last two days, once in agony and the second time so weak that the pain no longer seemed to bother him. So at last, and mercifully, he breathed his last the evening after the great meeting at the Cathedral.

“A shard of the Mirror returns to the Great Soul.” The sancta in attendance closed his blistered eyes.

Dionisa wept uncontrollably, though Beatriz attempted to comfort her. They interred him the next morning in the family tomb. By midday Beatriz had packed her few possessions, including two fat notebooks, and made her farewells.

“I must go,” she said to Eleyna. “If a Grijalva dedicates herself to the Sanctia, then the Ecclesia will see we are worthy of their protection and their forgiveness.”

“But your balls and your manor house and your fine gowns, Beatriz! What about them?”

Beatriz smiled sadly. “I will study plants, Eleynita, and find a better way to treat burns, so that some poor child will not have to suffer as Agustin did. At the Sanctia I will be allowed to garden. I will grow pea plants, and study the notes Grandmother made, and someday I will understand the Grijalva Gift.”

“Understand it?”

“Surely you don’t think it truly is a blessing drifted down from on high?”

“What do you mean?”

“There must be an explanation, Eleyna! Why it passes to some men and not others, and not to women at all, except in one case. Why it makes male Limners sterile but left Saavedra fertile. I intend to find out the answers to all these questions! We Grijalvas have only
used
the Gift. We have never tried to comprehend what it is and where it comes from. And why
we
, of all people, chi’patro descendents of Tza’ab bandits, developed it.”

In the end, Eleyna had to laugh sadly. “You always get your way, Beatriz. I can’t imagine how you manage it.”

Beatriz kissed her and left with the sanctas.

Eleyna stood in the courtyard and let the sun’s light stream down
over her. The rains had gone, leaving in their wake long days of sun and warmth. In another few months the great heat would settle over the land, but for now there was only the glory of perfect weather. The light was bright and clear. Painter’s Luza, by which light a limner might draw her subject with perfect clarity.

Inside Palasso Grijalva the mood was subdued. On the Feast of Astraventa, in thirty days, Saavedra would marry Edoard do’Verrada. Renayo had insisted on a proper wedding, with full state honors. He did not intend to slight Edoard’s new bride or, more importantly, the child she carried. Already Saavedra spent most of her time in the Palasso. She and Renayo got on very well together, or so everyone said. Pragmatists, both of them.

“Come, ninia, sit out here in the sun.” Giaberto emerged from the shadowed arcade, leading Alazais. The girl looked dazed, but she sank down onto a bench passively, her hands clutching a piece of unfinished embroidery. She was dressed plainly, in a simple high-waisted white gown worn over a white shift. She had evidently forgotten to put on her shoes; barefoot, she sat and smiled vaguely at Giaberto.

“Where is Sario?” she asked in her level voice. “I am the Princess Alazais. My father and mother were … killed by the mob.” She shuddered delicately, and Eleyna, in her turn, shuddered to see this creature.

For creature she was. That much Sario had admitted. Alazais was not a woman; she had been painted into life.

And yet she was in some peculiar fashion a woman, living, breathing, talking, asking again and again after her creator. No one understood how Sario could have managed a spell of this magnitude.

“It is abomination,” Saavedra had declared, and the others agreed. Sario Grijalva was an abomination. He must be punished, and in such a way that he could never again threaten the fragile peace the Grijalvas had painted among themselves, the do’Verradas, and the Ecclesia.

But Eleyna had not been permitted to attend that meeting of the Viehos Fratos. She was, again, excluded.

From out of a distant corridor she heard her mother weeping, ragged sobs that went on and on and on.

For Agustin.

Eleyna wiped tears from her cheek and went to confront the man who had painted a woman to life and killed an innocent boy. They held him in a plain-featured room deep in the warren of the Palasso. It was furnished with a cot and barred with a lock of iron.

“Maestra,” said the servant guarding the door. He bowed to her. They all treated her with respect, now that her role in freeing Renayo and in painting an almost perfect copy of
The First Mistress
had become known.

Maestra.
The female form of
Master.
She liked the sound of it.

“I must see Sario,” she said, and he let her in at once. The door was locked behind her.

Sario Grijalva stood in the center of the room, staring at blank wall. After a long pause, he turned. Seeing
her
, he started forward. “They won’t even give me chalk, a pencil. It is an agony, not to be able to draw!”

Agustin’s murderer. The greatest Limner the Grijalvas had ever known. It horrified her to see him beg like this.

“You know I can bring no such thing. Even chalk on wall might be used—”

“Eiha!” He jerked away from her and sank down onto the cot. “I cannot bear to live if I cannot paint.”

Matra Dolcha! This was not the man she remembered. This was not her arrogant moualimo. Since Saavedra’s arrival he had been like this, despondent and pathetic by turns. Something in him had broken. Eleyna stood there, not knowing what to say. She should hate him for killing Agustin, but, by the Blessed Matra, she could not. She could hate what he had done—hate the arrogance and cruelty that had fueled the action—but she could not hate
him.

He looked up suddenly. His face was scored with grief. He looked immeasurably old, eyes scarred with memory. “You are the only one who visits me. Does ‘Vedra ever speak of me?”

“We see little of her here. She is to marry Don Edoard.”

“No one told me.” He retreated into his own agony. His hands, still tied behind him, twitched like creatures that had a life of their own. “I have seen no one. No one! They all have forsaken me.”

“I have not.” She said it before she knew she meant to.

He jumped up and crossed to her. He looked crazed by that inner voice that drove him. “Yes. Yes, you have not, because you are like me.”

She recoiled from the words.

“Free me, estuda,” he murmured, glancing toward the locked door. “We will go away, you and I, and paint. We will do nothing but paint.”

Tears stung in her eyes, but perhaps only because she was ashamed that even now his words tempted her. To do nothing but paint. To think only of art. To be taught by, to aspire to become the equal of, the greatest Grijalva painter who had ever lived.

“
You are like me.
You know it is true.”

“I know it is true.” She wept not only for the shame but because it was impossible. “But I cannot do what you ask.”

For a long uncanny while he stared hard at her, and she met his gaze without flinching. She knew what he was. Then, with a twitch of his shoulder, he sank down onto the cot. All the intense passion drained out of him. He knew he was beaten and that she could not help him, though a part of her desperately wanted to.

Without looking up, he spoke. “You alone I can trust. You alone. Estuda meya, you must do exactly as I say. Will you?”

“What do you want me to do?” she asked cautiously, but he had already gone on, sure of her acquiescence or not caring, so desperate to unburden himself.

“There is a wine shop, and over that wine shop, an attic. The proprietor’s name is Oliviano. The deed is hidden behind a false panel of wall marked by a painted ivy wreath. My heir is named as the one who will speak these words to him: Al-Fansihirro.” He waited. She repeated them. Satisfied, he continued. “With this the shop becomes yours. Go up the stairs to the atelierro. You must resist the wards. Dilute the paintings with water and soap, only enough so that you can enter the atelierro. And there, you must find the book. You must burn the book. Do you understand? Burn it. It is all in my head, all the knowledge. I no longer need it, but no one else must know it.”