The Golden Key

by Melanie Rawn

  Saavedra doubted the Tza’ab warrior had been so close as was depicted, or surely he would have been killed by do’Verrada forces. But such was the way of art: one re-created truth, remade history, in honor of the subject.

  At the behest of the patron who ordered it painted?

  “Tza’ab,” Sario said, looking at the green-clad warrior. “Perhaps a kinsman of ours. As Verro was.” He turned directly to her. “Tomaz is dead.”

  The shift in topic, the baldness of the statement, shook her. “Dead? But—”

  “They destroyed his talent, his Gift, by painting him blind, by painting him crippled in the Peintraddo … Chieva do’Sangua, the ‘discipline of the damned’—but now he is dead.”

  “Matra ei Filho! Sario—”

  “Dead,” he repeated. “Now he need not suffer.”

  It had been ghastly, what they had seen, but Tomaz had not at any time appeared in danger of dying. Only of suffering. As they intended him to suffer. And he had suffered, she was certain, though she had sickened so soon thereafter that she had seen little beyond the physical results, and then only in a combination of shocked observation and a flash of insight, of too-vivid—and too accurate—imagination.

  “If they intended him to die, why not kill him immediately?” she asked.

  Perspiration gathered at his temples, across his upper lip. “They didn’t intend him to die.”

  “Sario—”

  His face lost the last remnants of color. He was white, so white he aspired to the starkness of Renayo do’Verrada’s face in the painting, the bloodlessness of shock and stark realization that nothing could be changed; that all was altered forever. “’Vedra—I did it!”

  It confounded her; he had gone ahead somewhere without her. “Did what?”

  It hissed in the galerria. “Killed him!”

  “Tomaz?”

  “’Vedra—oh, ‘Vedra—”

  “But—how?”

  He trembled. She had never seen him so frightened. Even in the closet, in the secret chamber above the Crechetta, where terrible things were done. “You saw how they painted his eyes white in the Peintraddo—” he said, “—how they painted his hands all twisted—”

  “Bone-fever,” she murmured. “Yes. They painted out his eyes and made his hands over into those of an old man.”

  “It happened, Saavedra! You saw it! You saw what became of him!”

  She had. Oh, Matra, she had. And so quickly, so very quickly: one moment whole, vital; exuberantly, defiantly Tomaz, and the next … “But they didn’t paint him dead.”

  “I killed him.”

  “Oh, Matra—oh, Sario—”

  “I did it, ‘Vedra.” His dark eyes had gone black, utterly black, so that he was, in his own way, blind as Tomaz had been, though with horror rather than with the milk-blindness that affected so many old ones. Black eyes, white face, and a tensile trembling that threatened, she feared, to shatter his very bones. “I made him die.”

  “How do you know?” It was all she could think to ask. She knew him, comprehended the terrible talent that drove him in his dreams, equally awake as asleep. “Sario—how can you know?”

  “I thought to burn the painting, but I had seen how what was painted was inflicted upon the body, and I didn’t want to hurt him—”

  “Sario—”

  “—so I didn’t burn it after all … I just put a knife in the canvas where I thought his heart would be.” His eyes were black, so black, infinitely black, like a fire burned out and doused with too much water. “But—I missed. I went to him, to see … and he was still alive. Wounded, but alive, because I was not precise enough … and so, and so—” He swallowed so heavily she saw his throat convulse. “I burned it after all. He told me that would work.”

  All she could say was his name. No question, no statement; only his name, in horror and disbelief. Of him. For him.

  “They don’t know yet. They haven’t found it yet. But they will.”

  She put her hands over her face, rubbing, scrubbing, stretching it this way and that, hiding from the world, the truth, his matter-of-fact retelling, even as she hid her own response from him. Fear for him. Of him.

  “’Vedra—what do I do?”

  It was appeal. From him. He was infinitely young again, a boy of eleven years, prodigiously talented, demonstrably Gifted, but a boy. Who had done a terrible thing.

  And now he pleaded with her to tell him what to do.

  She took her hands away at last. “No one knows.”

  “They haven’t found the painting yet—or what remains of it.”

  “And Tomaz?”

  Even his lips were white. “I haven’t looked.”

  “Looked where?”

  “Where he was. In the secret chamber. Where we were.”

  “He was there?”

  “They put him there.”

  “Are you certain he’s dead?”

  “He told me … he told me to destroy the painting. And he would—be released.” He bit deeply into his bottom lip. Beneath the surface, blood fled. “I’m afraid to look.”

  “Then you don’t know—”

  “He said it would kill him! He said he wanted it!”

  Her chest hurt. Her belly and head felt all hollow, insubstantial, emptied of contentment with all but the small complaints of insignificant lives. “Then—we have to find out. We have to know for certain.”

  “They’ll find out. They’ll find out—and do the same to me!”

  Saavedra stared at him. She had never before seen Sario afraid of anything. “If he is dead—if he’s dead, they will find out. And the painting …” She swallowed back the knot in her throat. Only one answer existed. She doubted Sario, so clever-witted, was unaware of it. He simply could not speak it aloud. The task was left to her. “Then we’ll have to make sure what they find is what we want them to find.”

  He looked drugged on poppy-juice: blackened eyes, whitened face, words slow to form. “’Vedra?”

  She drew in a breath. Matra, I beg your aid in this—grazzo, please, I beg you— “Where is the painting, Sario?”

  “In the Crechetta.”

  “Then we have to go there.”

  “And do what?”

  She looked at the painting before them. A copy of one of their family’s greatest works. “Burn it,” she said flatly. “Burn it down, all of it. Everything in the Crechetta.”

  “But—”

  “And then we must be found, so they know how it occurred— not why, but how—so that they may punish us for it, but never know—never know, Sario—why we did it.”

  “’Vedra—”

  “It’s the only way.”

  It was. She knew it. He knew it.

  They had been bound for so long, by so many intangibles. And now by this.

  “It’s the only way, Sario.”

  He touched trembling fingers to his lips, then to his heart beneath the shabby, stained summer tunic. “Matra ei Filho, aid us in this … oh, Blessed Matra, give us strength …”

  Saavedra wanted to laugh; at last he mouthed devotions, craved divine blessing, required intercession from someone other than his evanescent self-will—and her.

  But she didn’t laugh. She couldn’t. She could only stare blind-eyed at the painting and think of Tomaz Grijalva, his Gift destroyed by the desecration of his self-portrait, his life destroyed by Sario’s actions.

  And us? she wondered. What of ourselves do we destroy with this?

  The answer was implicit: innocence.

  So much destroyed in the space of ten days. Even as Nerro Lingua had destroyed most of a family; as a Tza’ab dart had destroyed Verro Grijalva.

  She looked at the painting. Sario had summed it up, the vast and naked truth of their ancestry. Grijalva. And Tza’ab.

  They were direct descendants of Verro Grijalva, as the genealogies proved. And, for all they knew, equally directly descended from the Kita’ab-quoting Rider of the Golden Wind depicted in the painting, servant of
a dead man.

  As they now served Tomaz.

  FOUR

  They did not see him, all the women. They were too taken up with his mother, the Duchess; too concerned with fitting the ceremonial robes properly, with tying up the laces of the loose gown beneath, with the drape of costly fabric, with the arrangement of her hair, with the coloring of her face.

  She was beautiful, her son supposed. They all said she was.

  But as for this, this thing, lying in the lace-swathed ducal cradle, he supposed nothing at all save that it—they called it a “she,” but he saw no evidence of humanity, let alone of gender—was little better than a lump of silk and lace and cloth-of-gold, aglitter with seed pearls and gemstones crusted on the array of ribbons sprouting like the waters of the fountain before the Cathedral Imagos Brilliantos.

  Usually she spouted complaints as unceasingly, though he admitted she was at this moment silent; asleep, she was unquestionably more tolerable than awake.

  He was hidden behind the massive cowled cradle, lost in an excess of sheer panoply. No one saw him. No one shooed him out.

  So many women clustered around his mother. “Your Grace, a moment longer—” one of them said; from long familiarity, her tone chided gently.

  “A moment longer, and I shall expire from the sheer weight of this nonsense. Alizia, take care! If you stab another pin in like that, you will surely break open my skull!”

  Alizia murmured apology, tending the hair more carefully, and the skull beneath.

  “Better—eiha, I would sooner avoid this altogether … I would sooner spend my time with little Cossimia at my breast instead of witnessing her held aloft like sweetmeats from the beast most recently killed—Teressita, what did I say of those laces? I am no longer so young as I once was, and my waist will not go so small …” And then the tone changed from fretful exasperation to grim recrimination. “What would he think of her if she bore four children? Would he find her so attractive when she is like to burst with the fruit of his seed? Would he praise her extravagantly for the narrowness of her waist after bearing four children?” And then the tone altered again. “Eiha, what does it matter? Men are men. Let him keep his Serrano delicacy … let him feast on her until his teeth rot! It is I who have given him a son, and it is I who shall be painted as the woman at his side—although I should insist that someone other than Zaragosa Serrano do it! Matra Dolcha, but men are blind. Does he not see that Serrano will paint me plain?”

  Alizia spoke first. “You are not plain, Your Grace!”

  “Nor am I the Lord Limner’s sister,” the Duchess snapped. “It serves him better to spend his meager talents on his sister’s image than on mine.”

  Teressita was matter-of-fact. “He will cast her off, Your Grace. You, he will never renounce.”

  “Not so long as I bear him children—Alejandro! Matra ei Filho!”

  He was seen. She had turned to look at the cradle, at the daughter who was to be formally named within the hour, and he was seen.

  “Alejandro—” She was there in a rustle of cloth, trailing streamers of ribbons and unpinned tendrils of hair. “Oh, Alejandro …” She smelled of powder and scent. He did not know what beauty was, but he could not conceive that any woman might be considered more beautiful than his mother. She was—his mother. “I am sorry you heard that. But you will know it yourself, one day, when you are Duke.” Her eyes, so large and dark, were sad. “Shall I tell you the truth, then? Shall you know it so soon?”

  Alizia said, “Your Grace, there is little time.”

  His mother did not even so much as glance back at them. “There is always time for my son. As for this—eiha, but he must know it one day.” She sighed, managing a smile for him as she knelt down amidst fantastical robes, fine linens, gem-crusted, gold-tipped ribbons; the murmured regret of all her women. “It comes with our state, you see. A man marries a woman not for love, but for the agreements of the families, for the politics of the times …” Her hands were on his shoulders, gripping firmly. “But no matter what else may happen—no matter what else!—he will always be your father, and I will always be your mother.”

  In a tight little voice he asked, “Always?”

  “Always,” she declared. “Marria do’Fantome, the ‘shadow marriage,’ is undertaken in most unions, Alejandro, when practicality and politics guide the match instead of love.”

  It was the first time she had ever spoken to him as an adult. It made him proud. It made him stand up a little taller. “Why?” he asked. “Why must it be so?”

  “Because the Matra ei Filho blessed us in the womb, Alejandro, and conceived that we would be of the highest born. Your Patro rules, and one day you shall rule. We are not given the freedom of choice.”

  “But if we rule—?”

  Her smile matched her eyes: infinitely sad. “One must make sacrifices for family, for country. So will you, one day.”

  “You don’t love Patro?”

  The Duchess sighed. For a moment he thought she might cry, but instead she firmed her lips. “As much,” she said, “as I am permitted.”

  It made no sense. He was a child again, unschooled in the language, the emotions, of adulthood. “Patro doesn’t love you?”

  Her hands stilled upon his shoulders. “As much as he permits himself.” She touched his hair then, stroking untamed curls, gentling them with fingers. “But never, ever question if we love you. Of course we do. I swear that to you by the Matra ei Filho.” She kissed fingertips, then pressed them to her heart.

  He looked at the silk-and-lace bundle in the cradle. “And—her? Even so small and smelly?”

  His mother laughed. He rejoiced to see and hear it, though there was no explanation; his question was not, he considered, meant to amuse. “As she is small and smelly, so were you once. And yes, we love her also.”

  Alejandro looked away from his sister to the woman who had borne them both. “When I marry, I will marry whom I wish.”

  Amusement fled. The spark of her smile, the warmth of her eyes, faded. “So you may believe.”

  “I will.”

  Her fingers, cradling his face, were cool. She bent, pressed soft lips against his brow. “I hope it may be so.”

  How could it not? He would be Duke. The Duke of Tira Virte.

  “Pray for it,” his mother murmured, then rose, rustling, and turned to her women, pressing the flat of her hand against her belly. “Tighten the laces,” she said. “He must see me as I was, not as I am … and so must all the Courtfolk. So must the Lord Limner. I will not have them say of the Peintraddo Natalia done for my lovely little Doña that her mother the Duchess is fat!”

  Sario watched, mute, as Saavedra made the world right again; as right as it ever could be, for those who had witnessed atrocity.

  In the Crechetta there was little light save what they brought to it in a single clay candle-cup. It was an interior chamber, washed with an ocherous finish as opposed to white paint as was the Galerria, so that in the light Saavedra carried, small, insignificant cup of wax and flame, the room glowed amber and ivory, with the faintest sheen of tarnished gilt. Wavering shadows made the chamber stark, shaped of few appointments: the iron candle-stand, the plain wooden chair, the cloth-draped easel.

  And the self-portrait, the Peintraddo Chieva, of Tomaz Grijalva.

  It yet stood upon the easel. Saavedra drew in an audible breath and pulled the cloth back, freeing the image from its brocade shielding.

  Sario indeed had burned the painting, but poorly: a charred hole marred the center of the canvas, encompassing Tomaz’s breast, but no more. He had not destroyed the entire painting.

  “Matra Dolcha,” Saavedra murmured. “Oh, Sweet Mother—” Her fingers, holding cloth, trembled.

  “I couldn’t,” he said. “I thought someone might smell it … might come. I grew frightened, and put it out.”

  She moved, releasing brocade. Now she stood before the easel, studying the painting. He saw the tautness of the flesh stretched over the bo
nes of her face, the pallor, the stillness in her features, the bloodlessness of her lips as she pressed them together. A tangled mass of black curls fell behind her shoulders, though strands persistently escaped to shadow temples and brow. The quiet light was kind to her; he saw in that moment a promised purity of feature that men would long to paint.

  I will paint her—I … Of course he would. Who else? Who better?

  She murmured beneath her breath, touching fingers to lips, then to heart. Sario looked again at the painting to see as she saw: the masterwork of an artist both gifted and Gifted, the subtleties of brushwork, the expert blending of the colors, the smoothness of the paints so carefully tempered by hand—by his hand; the creation of the face, the torso, from nothing but sheer talent, from eye, from Luza do’Orro—and the ability to transform what was seen in a mirror to what bloomed upon the canvas.

  Tomaz Grijalva. The likeness was perfect.

  As was the ragged hole burned into the torso where a man’s heart lived.

  Another, looking upon it, cried out aloud of loss, of destruction, innocent of truth. Sario, looking upon it, would cry out silently of nothing but that they might be caught.

  “Sario …” Saavedra turned great and glittering eyes upon him. “This is the truth, what you have said—”

  He inhaled noisily. “Do you think I would lie?”

  “You have.”

  “Never to you!”

  No. Never to her. She shut her eyes a moment, wet dry lips, murmured again as if seeking strength.

  “You saw him,” he said. “You saw what became of him. He sat there, right there, in that chair—and they painted him crippled! They painted him blind! You saw it, ‘Vedra! For yourself; do your own eyes lie?”

  She clamped both hands over her mouth.

  “Yes,” he said, “it made you ill, what you saw. And you question me now?”

  “I have to.” It came out muffled, until she took her hands away. “I have to, Sario … because—because what we saw—”

  “—was magic,” he finished.