by Melanie Rawn
The Grijalvas kept their faces perfectly still. Mechella’s tiny smile indicated that she noted this before she composed herself again and continued.
“Of the nobility, those who are welcome will know it. Those who are not will have the decency to stay away. Which brings me to you. Each of you must decide without thinking of anyone but yourselves whether or not you wish to stay here with me.” Cabral surged to his feet; Mechella lifted a graceful hand. “No, don’t say anything yet, hear me out. I want you here. But I also want you to understand that Corasson will be a Shadow Court at best. There will be no real power or influence until Alessio is much older. To that end, I would appreciate any advice you can give me about tutors for him and for Teressa, and people to include in the households I’ll establish for them in a few years, and those who can advise me about political matters. I—”
“Stop it!” Leilias burst out. “You’re not reading a speech—”
“En verro, I am,” Mechella admitted. “I practiced it all day yesterday. It was the only way I could get through it. Let me finish, Leilias, and then you can take me to task for treating my friends like strangers.”
Zevierin shook his head. “If you’re going to insult us again, I’d rather not hear the rest. As if we wouldn’t stay here with you!”
“I knew you’d say that,” Mechella told him with a faint smile. “There’s not much more. I was about to say that I trust you to recommend people I need to educate my children and myself. I also want to know who among the nobles, conselhos, merchants, and Grijalvas I can count on as friends—and especially I want to know who my enemies are.” She paused and sighed. “I’ve been childish about many things. Instead of spending these last three years—Matra, nearly four!—learning the ways of Court, I thought my husband would guide and protect me. I was wrong,” she finished simply. “I need your help.”
Leilias slid from her chair to kneel at Mechella’s feet. “You have it. You know that. Whatever you need, whatever any of us can do—”
“Get up at once!” Mechella scolded fondly. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Zevierin, by marrying so much fire and passion!” They gaped at her; she laughed softly. “Did you think me sunk so deep in my own troubles that I’d be blind to my dearest friends? Even though you tried to hide it—for shame, trying to fool me! Do get up, Leilias, and let me hear from Zevierin and Cabral.”
“You know my answer,” Zevierin said.
“And mine,” Cabral grated, turned on his heel, and strode off.
“Eiha,” Mechella sighed. “Now I’ve offended him. You Grijalvas—more prideful than kings!”
By custom, foreign rulers were gifted with a painting commemorating their accession. Because the new King of Ghillas was Mechella’s brother, Dioniso proposed and the Viehos Fratos agreed on two pictures: one official, one personal. The former would be on display in some useful room—a council chamber, for instance—and the latter would probably end up somewhere in the new King’s private suite. Both paintings would be steeped in symbolism all educated persons understood, and in magic known only to Grand Dukes and Grijalvas.
Dioniso, having done a portrait of Enrei III as Crown Prince, was Mequel’s resource on the official painting. Pencil studies and verbal commentary on Enrei’s personality were accompanied by the advice that if a horse was not prominently featured, the young King would stash the painting away someplace where it could not influence him and would do Tira Virte no good at all.
Dioniso painted the personal portrait himself, using it to teach Rafeyo several more things in advance of his fellow estudos. He also intended it as a kind of seduction into portrait painting, for Rafeyo showed an alarming preference for landscapes and architecture. This would not do at all. A Lord Limner put people in his paintings, not barns and cornfields and castellos and water mills.
The new style of landscape painting did not please Dioniso in the slightest. Low horizons with vast swaths of sky had been reversed; now the lands sprawled in marshy greens or desert golds beneath thin slices of cobalt sky. People were no longer perfect miniatures; instead, distant figures were suggested by a few swipes of color meant to convey the impression of a camponessa’s full skirt, a man’s dark cloak, a broad-brimmed straw hat. Worst of all, mathematical balance had been abandoned in favor of randomly scattered shapes with little relation to each other. Grijalva art must be strict in form because it must be strict in function, and Dioniso’s every instinct screamed against loosening the rules with experiments that weakened the composition and therefore the magic.
Still, even the deplorable landscapes now in fashion were preferable to the execrable still-lifes. “Still” they definitively were—“life,” they certainly were not. Nature had never produced such fruits and flowers as some Grijalvas were now painting without blemish, perfectly symmetrical, and about as mouth-was tering as the cold glazed ceramic they looked like. Every Limner painted dozens of still-lifes as a necessary part of his training, to learn how to place the symbolic flowers and fruit, herbs and trees that anchored magic. But these pieces—meaningless exercises in trivia, every one of them, demonstrating nothing beyond the contrived architecture of a pile of fruit or the natural geometry of a flower.
As Premio Frato, Dioniso had influence. But he was too busy and his hands were too old to produce masterworks enough to turn his Limners from their useless meanderings in landscape and still-life. When Rafeyo became Lord Limner—a few years, no more, Mequel couldn’t last forever—he would work those young, strong fingers to the bone if necessary to save Grijalva art.
But before that time came, there was a portrait to do, and he used it to fascinate Rafeyo with the possibilities. The formal painting—Mequel’s first equestrian composition—contained all the usual elements. Cedars for Strength, yellow lilies for Peace, sage for Wisdom, and all the other indicators of kingly virtues. Dioniso had Rafeyo delve into more obscure symbolism from the Folio—Dioniso’s own copy, annotated with tantalizing notes from the Kita’ab. One in five hundred Limners knew the old Tza’ab symbology. Careful inquiry told Dioniso that Mequel was not among them.
The Envy of a brass hand-mirror; the Folly of the blue rose; the Arrogance of a crown studded with black diamonds—of which stones there were exactly two in the known world, one of them in distant fabled Zhinna and the other on the gouty finger of the Empress of Tza’ab Rih. These symbols and more were emphasized by an unvarnished pinewood frame reeking of Magical Energy. The effective range of the painting was considerable; one could smell the pine from every corner of Dioniso’s large atelierro in Palasso Grijalva.
The painting itself was a unique triple portrait: full-face in the center, right and left three-quarter profiles on either side. The unusual study was something Dioniso had been contemplating for a long time, and was a permissible experiment. Wherever it was hung, whichever way young Enrei faced, the magic would influence him. Left side Envy, Anger, and Pettiness; right side Folly, Arrogance, Stubbornness, and Inconstancy.
“Matra!” grinned Rafeyo. “If he paces back and forth, he’ll go mad with confusion! But what if he looks at it straight on?”
Dioniso only smiled.
One morning Rafeyo arrived in the atelierro to find a sheaf of mingled wheat and hawthorn painted upside down over Enrei’s handsome head. Tying these symbols of Wealth and Fertility was a white ribbon. The boy turned to the master, one finger pointing an accusation at the painting.
“You just gave him all the personal riches and all the children he could ever want!”
Dioniso laughed. “Look closer at the ribbon, and tell me what you see.”
Rafeyo squinted. “Edged in silver at the top, gold at the bottom … triple knot tying the sheaf together—but the highlights are all wrong.”
“Possibly because they’re not highlights,” he responded dryly. “They are runes, the lingua oscurra, barely discernible as such. I’ll translate—these don’t appear in the standard glossary. ‘Thrice casting/Bind lasting/Ribbon’s reach/Cancels each.’ Not
e that the ribbon frames Enrei’s head and drops below his shoulders.”
“Then—” Rafeyo frowned. “You mean it cancels all his riches and his children?”
“At the very least it will make both more difficult to come by.”
What Dioniso did not say was that by painting Enrei as close to sterile as he could without the essential materials to hand, he had done everything possible to make Mechella’s children her brother’s only legitimate heirs. The advantages to Tira Virte of a do’Verrada on the Ghillasian throne were many and manifold. But Rafeyo, loathing Mechella, would not see them. He was much too young and too ignorant of politics to look beyond his hatred of the woman who had tried to take his adored mother’s place.
The boy’s face had lit like a torch. “You’re not just a master—you’re a genius!”
En verro, he would miss this boy. …
“Jonino’s nephew is wasted doing the bookkeeping for the copper mines.” Leilias scrawled a notation onto the lengthening list of persons suitable for Mechella’s new household.
“Jonino?” Zevierin asked. “Oh—your stepfather. What will he think of a Grijalva in the family?”
“Moronno, he married one, didn’t he? Why shouldn’t I?” She chewed the end of her pen, grinning at him. “You’re nervous about meeting my parents, aren’t you?”
“Not in the least.”
“Liar. The nephew—what is his name? Eiha, never mind. Anyway, he plays the gamba, and his wife’s not half bad on the gittern, if I recall. So there’s our mathematics tutor and bookkeeper for the estate, plus two music teachers! Now, what’s left?”
“Languages and religion.” Zevierin tapped a fingernail on the desktop, staring out the window with a smile; he’d caught sight of Mechella and Cabral on their usual daily walk, and they were walking much closer together than usual. “I think I know where we can get both in one person. Do you remember old Davinio?”
“The groundskeeper at Palasso Grijalva? Never tell me he’s a linguist or an Ecclesial!”
“No, but his grandson turned out to be both. Sancto Leo is a fairly good friend of mine, in fact. We debate the damnation of the Grijalvas on occasion.”
Leilias drew back, aghast. “You’d bring a prating, self-righteous, Grijalva-hating sancto to Corasson?”
“You misunderstand.” He laughed at her. “I’m the one who takes the high moral position, while young Sancto Leo defends us despicable Grijalvas. Does a good job of it, too. I’ll introduce you when next we’re in Meya Suerta—for Penitenssia, I assume? Or is Mechella determined to stay here all winter?”
She was so determined, failing a direct order from Cossimio. She said as much to Cabral as they hiked back up to the house through the stubbled fields of the home farm. Iluminarres approached, when fires were lit in the shorn cropland to summon rain in preparation for renewed fertility. The wind was growing colder, the days shorter, but Corasson lay ahead of them up the hill. Home.
“I’m hoping Countess Lizia will stay a few weeks on her way south,” Mechella said. “And the Brendizias have promised to ride over for Imago, so we’ll have to plan something special.” She paused as they reached a fence. “Why are you smiling?”
“Because you are. Didn’t you know?”
“Sometimes it feels like it, but. …” She shrugged. “Help me up.”
He lifted her to the top rail. She swung around to face Corasson, giving him a swift view of wool stockings and stout shoes caked in rich earth. He climbed up beside her, thinking wryly of the delicate silks and sumptuous velurros of her Court clothes. Pulling from his jacket pocket the notepad and pencil no Grijalva ever lacked, he began to draw Corasson, backlit by the setting sun.
They sat quietly for a long while, the only sounds the scratch of his pencil, the whinnies of paddocked horses, and the chirps and whistles of passing birds. At length he cast a sidelong glance at her and grinned.
“Why do people who can’t draw always look at artists that way?”
“Was I looking?” she asked. “What way?”
“As if searching for something in our faces that shows why we can do what we do. Something in our eyes, the shape of our lips—or the way we comb our hair, for all I know! As if there’s some mysterious exterior physical feature that could explain interior talent.” He filled in a shadow on the sketch, then chuckled. “And they listen, too—even if we’re just talking about the weather or wondering what’s for dinner.”
“Chieva do’Orro,” Mechella responded. “That Golden Key all the Limners wear. That’s what we’re looking and listening for.”
“Eiha, but that secret doesn’t really exist. If anyone ever did find it, he certainly wouldn’t talk about it! I know I wouldn’t, if I were a Limner.”
“None of you would, not even Zevierin.” She picked at a splinter on the wooden fence rail. “Is Leilias really going to—how did she put it, go shopping?—for a man to father her children?”
“Yes. If she and Zevi want to be parents, that’s their only option.”
“It’s strange. But no stranger than anything else about you Grijalvas.” She smiled. “If I look deeply into your eyes, and listen to every word you say for the next fifty years, would I even begin to understand how it is that you can put a few lines on paper and have them look like Corasson?”
“I fear you’d be bored in less than a minute, Dona Mechella. Whatever it is that makes me an artist, I can neither show it to you nor explain it.”
“I could never be bored with you, Cabral.” She smiled, adding, “When would I find the time to be bored with anything? Mequel’s advice about working in spite of illness is just as appropriate for grief. If I fill up my life with other things, then I haven’t time to be sad.”
“Yet I see it—here, and here.” He dared to brush his fingertip across the air an inch from her mouth, her brow.
She said nothing for a long moment. Then, wistfully: “Can you paint me happy, limner?”
“Mechella … let me try. Please let me try.”
“Cabral.” She took the pencil and paper, let them drop to the ground. “I think,” she murmured, “that you shall not need these to do it.”
FIFTY-ONE
At the Grand Duke’s request, Mechella spent Penitenssia in Meya Suerta. Arrigo’s renewed Marria do’Fantome with Tazia was no longer an open secret; it was a public scandal. Cossimio was livid, Gizella heartsick. Lissina counseled patience. From Casteya, Lizia sent her brother a letter precisely six words long: Moronno! Have you lost your mind? Mequel, forty-five this winter and so stiff and sore that he rarely left his chambers, tried to ignore the whole disaster. The conselhos were silent. The gossips wallowed in every detail. And everyone—privately, nervously, reluctantly—began to choose sides.
For Mechella: the common folk of Tira Virte.
For Arrigo: the bulk of the aristocracy and most of the merchant class.
For Mechella: Cabral, Leilias, Zevierin, many of the Grijalvas related to them—and Lord Limner Mequel.
For Arrigo: Premio Frato Dioniso, the Viehos Fratos, and any Grijalva connected by blood to Tazia—even her sisters, who despised her.
Mechella’s fifteen-day visit for the winter holiday made the thinnest of gruel for the gossips’ nourishment. She and Arrigo shared their usual suite at Palasso Verrada, performed social and religious obligations, spoke pleasantly to all, and were much seen in public with their two young children. Her radiant looks were commented upon; his attentiveness was remarked. Cossimio dared to hope. Lissina warned against it. Tazia wisely caught a cold and confined herself to her husband’s fashionable caza in town. Garlo, still not on speaking terms with his wife, sent the Grand Duke a plausible if transparent excuse for staying at Castello Alva. In the absence of a command of the type given Mechella, Garlo was safe in refusing to lend the dignity of his presence to the proceedings in Meya Suerta. The year turned from 1266 to 1267, Mechella went home to Corasson, Tazia recovered from her indisposition, and Arrigo told his parents in person and his si
ster by letter to mind their own business.
Mechella did not appear in the capital again until the spring. When she made her entrance—unheralded, unexpected and unannounced—at the Grand Duchess’ Fuega Vesperra ball, a gasp escaped every throat. Even Arrigo, turning to see what the fuss was about, looked stunned. She seemed a slender column of starfire come down from the sky at Astraventa and only now gracing them with her brilliance. Her masses of golden hair were held in place by diamond-studded hairpins. Her gown was of glowing silvery gray: daringly low at the neck, shockingly narrow in the skirt, impertinently showing her lovely ankles. Most startling of all, her arms and shoulders were entirely bare of gloves, sleeves, or indeed anything at all but for a splendid diamond necklace and bracelets. The shawl draped from her bare elbows gave off subtle glimmers of gold from a sunburst pattern of rare beauty.
She greeted everyone with brilliant smiles and charming words, but her progress through the crowd was soon seen as a straight line to her husband. When she reached his side, she laid a languid hand on his arm and whispered in his ear. His complexion changed color. He gave her a look of astonishment. She smiled, tugging gently at his sleeve. He mumbled an excuse to the Count do’Palenssia and escorted his wife from the ballroom to a location unknown—while speculation ignited in everyone from Grand Duke Cossimio to the fifth-chair gamba player.
Tazia do’Alva, dancing at the time with Premio Frato Dioniso, was seen to lose her footing. Dioniso later made it known that he had been unforgivably clumsy and stepped on her hem. No one believed him.
What Mechella whispered to Arrigo was, “Come with me this instant or I’ll have Zevierin paint your portrait—with all the symptoms of sifilisso.” Where she led him was to a little antechamber on the second floor, equipped with a sofa, a table, an elaborate candle-branch, a cheery little fire in the hearth, and a lock.