by Melanie Rawn
“I will not marry Felippo Grijalva.”
She had sat beside his bier that day and finally understood she had been living in a dream for almost three years. Waking, she had stared with blank confusion at her black lace gloves and the old black gown twenty years out of date, cut to her figure, its tight stays constricting her. She had heard the condolences of her relatives as through a wall, muted by stone.
In the end, Leilias told her the truth: The Limners had stolen her blood and tears and used their Gift—their magic—to paint her into acquiescence.
“I was against it!” Leilias had railed. “Eiha, you can be sure I was against it. But Tazia’s blood bred true in that line, whatever her sisters claimed. They did it without anyone else knowing, Dionisa and Giaberto. And once it was done, eiha! ‘No harm done.’ That’s what the rest said. ‘Won’t hurt the girl to learn some humility.’ With Zevierin dead, Matra bless his fine soul, and my Justino dead as well, poor child, and Vitorrio still abroad, there was nothing I could do but appeal to their honor. That a son of mine would countenance this! You can be sure I told Revirdin what I thought of allowing them to spell his own daughter! But you are back with me now, mennina. I won’t let them touch you again.”
But Leilias was dead, killed in the last, belated burst of the Summer Fever that had carried off Felippo in its first flowering. Two months after his death, Eleyna had caught it and miscarried that poor deformed child, her final penance.
“They will not touch me again,” she swore into the pillow. The pillow did not, of course, reply, but the soft linen cover absorbed the last of her tears. She heard the door open and close softly and reared up, ready to confront the intruder.
It was Beatriz. She held a basket of oranges and grapes. “I thought you might be hungry.”
Eleyna flung herself down on the bed again. “I’m not.”
“You might be later. Mama has decided to lock you in the room. I rescued your sketchpad from the parlor.”
“Grazzo.” She was too exhausted by now to feel angry about this final insult. Locked in her room!
“Grandzio Cabral is outside, waiting to talk to you.”
“I don’t want to talk to him!”
Eleyna’s temper never had the slightest impact on Beatriz’s composure. “Of course you don’t, but you might as well greet him kindly, since you have no choice.”
At that, Eleyna began to chuckle. “Oh, Beatriz, how do you manage it? If I have no choice, I might as well show my true feelings. Don’t you have any?”
Beatriz smiled at her and went to the door. Normally no one but their father or brother was allowed into their private suite, but Cabral was not only their great-uncle but a man who could speak his mind to the Grand Duke himself. If he wished to speak to his great-niece in the privacy of her bedchamber, not one soul on the council was likely to argue.
Cabral, looking suitably somber, entered carrying a painting under one arm. Setting it on the easel propped up in one corner of the room, he lifted the protective cloth off to display Eleyna’s own painting, the Battle of Rio Sanguo.
In the foreground the future Duke Renayo held his dying father, Alesso, while to the left a captured Tza’ab warrior prostrated himself. Beyond the mob of retainers lay the battlefield itself, still littered with the dead, and the plains of Joharra stretched out into a distance made golden by the sun newly unveiled from the clouds.
“Very fine, which you know,” said Cabral with fine disregard for Eleyna’s tear-stained face and the crumpled bedding, evidence of her distress. “Most painters can’t resist copying Bartollin’s Battle, but you instead chose to echo the old Morta of Verro Grijalva done by Piedro Grijalva. An echo, no more, just enough to touch the eyes and set the heart to wondering. But it’s not in the modern style. I wonder if you have given too much brightness and detail to the background. It pulls attention away from the little triangle you have drawn—”
“They say I don’t use classical forms, Zio, but I do! You see it, don’t you? Renayo in the center with the other two figures below him, one on each side.”
“It is well composed,” said Cabral.
Eleyna forgot, for a moment, all her trials. Well composed. Those were words to treasure.
“A steward from the do’Casteya household has expressed interest in buying it for Count Maldonno’s Galerria.”
Count Maldonno—the Grand Duke’s cousin!—wanted to buy her painting! “And what did Andreo have to say to that!” she demanded triumphantly.
Cabral adjusted his sleeves. He still had beautiful hands, dark with age and the legacy of harsh paints, but strong. His mouth twisted into a grimace, an odd expression that Eleyna could not read. “‘It is not a style based on the classical form of statues. It is too wild. Too undisciplined.”’
Eleyna sighed. She had heard all this before.
“But,” said Cabral, pulling the cloth back over the painting, “it shows a fine use of color and composition, and it has life. You are becoming an excellent painter.”
“I am as good as anyone alive today!” Then she flushed. “But I am not Gifted. So I am worth nothing to them, especially because I am not a good copyist.”
“It is precisely because you are not a good copyist that you show the gifts you do, and they cannot forgive you for that. To them, art only matters if it serves the Gift and thus the family.” He sighed and sank down on the feather bed beside her, one hand tracing the Grijalva rosettes embroidered onto the bedspread, Beatriz’s work. “Once, I believed as they did. What will you do, Eleynita?”
Eleyna clasped her hands firmly in her lap and refused to look into his eyes. “What have you come to say to me?”
“Be Edoard’s Mistress now. Keep him happy for a few years. He has other duties. While he attends to them, you are free to paint, and to paint unobstructed by your parents and old uncle. When he marries, then you will gain an honorable retirement. He may dower you with a country house. You can live there with perfect propriety because you are a widow, and you can paint to your heart’s content. It is the easiest road to get where you want to go.”
“To be a whore?”
“We all are forced at times to make choices we don’t like.”
She jumped up, paced to the window, back to the door, and back to the bed again. “It’s a terrible choice. I can give myself over to him in return for what I can get from him. Or I can refuse, in which case Zio Giaberto will simply paint me into acquiescence.” She stared challengingly at him, willing him to look shocked.
He did not even look surprised. “It is better to choose the path with your eyes open.”
“The only way I’ll know they haven’t painted me into liking him is if I continue to dislike him! How can I be his Mistress if I look at his face and want to turn away? It would be better to make them paint me. At least then I wouldn’t feel anything.”
Cabral smoothed the sleeves of his jacket, the fussy movements of a man who had once, perhaps, been vain of his appearance. Or cared how he appeared to another person. “Women marry to the benefit of their families, not according to the dictates of their own hearts. Your grandmother Leilias, my dear sister, was an exception. She married where her heart led her, and even then she married knowing Zevierin would die before her. Grand Duke Renayo wants Alazais de Ghillas for Edoard, not because of her pretty face but because marriage to her would irrevocably give Edoard the thrones of both countries. Renayo has not forgotten that he was Enrei’s named heir, not Ivo. Edoard will not be allowed to remain unmarried long. A year or two at most.”
Eleyna walked to the window, looked down into the courtyard at the fountain of tiles. Water splashed over the rim of the upper bowl, sliding down yellow and blue patterns to spill at last into the bright yellow basin where the water collected, strewn with bubbles.
“Perhaps it would be easier for Eleyna,” said Beatriz quietly, “if Mama and Papa allowed me to attend her at Chasseriallo. Then she would have a companion.”
“You are an unmarried girl,” s
aid Cabral.
“I have an infant son in the crechetta.”
“That is true, and I think it an excellent idea, Beatriz. Don Edoard is not, alas, the most stimulating companion unless one likes horses and hounds to the exclusion of all else. However, you are not a suitable duennia.”
“Davo’s wife Mara, then,” said Beatriz instantly. As if she had already considered the question. “She can act as duennia. I can act as companion.”
“Why not?” said Eleyna recklessly, turning back from the window. “I would be glad of your company, Beatriz. I always am. Perhaps it won’t be so bad after all.” But her voice stumbled over the words.
“Then you agree?” asked Cabral.
She refused to bow her head. If she chose this path, then she would do so with her eyes open. “I do. I give my word. If I may be allowed to paint—”
“Between fittings, mennina meya,” said Cabral. “You will have to have gowns and walking dresses and riding clothes, that sort of thing. You will entertain, go to balls—”
Court life! It was too awful to contemplate. But contemplate it she must.
“I can stand in for you, at fittings,” said Beatriz quickly, as if to forestall an explosion. For Beatriz’s sake, Eleyna held her tongue.
Cabral rose and gave them each a kiss. “May I let the Casteyan steward know you have no objection to Count Maldonno buying the painting?” As a parting shot, it was effective. Her painting to hang in the do’Casteya collection! She could only nod dumbly. Cabral bundled up the painting and left.
Matra Dolcha! It had all happened so quickly. And imagine, Beatriz protecting her! Eleyna laughed suddenly. “You can’t be fitted in my place, though it’s kind of you to offer.”
“Do you want to stand for hours for all the fittings?”
“Of course not. You know I hate—”
“Then hush. We’re close enough in size that it won’t matter. Trust me, Eleyna. Say nothing. All will be well.”
With that assurance Eleyna had to be content.
SIXTY-ONE
Sario Grijalva stood beside one of the great arched windows that let sunlight pour into the Atelierro. The sun was warm and bright; it was another cloudless day in an uncomfortably dry winter. The other Viehos Fratos stood at the end of the long Atelierro, beside the stove, watching young Agustin Grijalva bite his lower lip just before he took a lancet and pricked his forefinger.
All these changes! Instead of each Limner being granted his own atelierro, as was traditional, they had ten years ago expanded the Atelierro where the unGifted limners worked. How it irritated him to have to profess approval when an old custom was tossed aside like a marred canvas, but too often his solitary voice raised in protest was ignored or—worse—marked as suspicious. Annoyed, Sario watched with his newly-young and gratifyingly sharp Limner eyes as red welled up from Agustin’s pale skin and was dripped into a tiny glass vial for storage.
The other men—only seven of them, one stooped with bone-fever though he was only thirty-eight—murmured appreciatively. Giaberto went so far as to pat young Agustin on the shoulder. It was a momentous occurrence when the Viehos Fratos acknowledged a new apprentice—even one who had not gone through the usual Confirmattio. Still, there would be years of apprenticeship before the boy painted his Peintraddo Chieva.
Too slight, thought Sario. He won’t live long. He’s fragile, too sensitive, too compliant.
Damn these sour pedants anyway! They had ruined the flower of Grijalva blood. The horrible stiff classicism he had deplored ten years ago as Arriano Grijalva had not, miraculously, vanished in the intervening period. As the new Sario, he had chosen the life of an Itinerrario so his years abroad would act as the excuse for the new more vital style of painting he intended to “bring back” with him—the painting that would revitalize and change what they now called the “Academy” style.
But he had returned to find the “Academy” style draped like an antique robe over everything else, smothering it in the stark detail of its rigid folds.
There were so few Gifted Limners left after the Summer Fever, itself so disastrously reminiscent of the Nerro Lingua that had nearly destroyed the Grijalvas—that was, perhaps, paradoxically, responsible for the Gift. Which was now stretched too thin. Once, admittance to the inner circle—to the rank of Aguo, Semmino, or Sanguo—was an honor reserved for the finest and most influential Grijalva Limners. No longer. They called Giaberto Premio Frato, but now the title meant only that Giaberto was Andreo’s likely successor. Already there was talk of allowing Agustin to attend meetings of the Viehos Fratos—before he had painted his Peintraddo Chieva. And influence was measured purely by relation within the family.
Vieho Frato Sario might be, but the others refused to acknowledge his genius. This Sario’s mother had died in the intervening years, Grazzo do’Matra, and his remaining relatives had proven weak. Cabral and Leilias’s faction ruled the Conselhos now, though Leilias—and her dangerous knowledge of a long-ago night—was dead.
He had no supporters, no adherents. The only painter for whom he had the slightest respect was a young woman who was now, he had just learned, being carted off to provide bedplay for the young Heir. They actually thought she was more useful to them as a Mistress than as a painter just because as a woman she could not be Gifted!
Chieva do’Orro! What had the Grijalva bloodline come to? Had they forgotten everything about painting; had they forgotten the secrets of the Tza’ab he had worked so hard to procure, of the Golden Key itself, in their pursuit of wealth and power? Had the Gift become more important than the art?
I will not let this happen. I cannot let this happen.
Sario was twenty-six now. Yet he would gladly cast off this body and take on a new host, one with more influential relatives, except there were no suitable candidates. At least ten promising boys—one of them known to be Gifted—had died in the great Fever two years ago. Those who survived had proven unGifted, except for this boy, Agustin, who claimed good family connections but poor health. He was of no use. And taking an older man was too dangerous an option.
Sario was tired of waiting.
“Eiha, Sario. The boy has talent, no?” Nicollo Grijalva sidled over to him.
“The sister is the better painter.”
Nicollo smiled patronizingly. “You’re only twenty-six. You have the luxury of these new romantic notions. Acceptable for the streets, perhaps, but not for court art.”
“The Grand Dukes have always dictated fashion, of course.” He allowed himself a sneer. “Do they dictate what is true and beautiful in art, now, as well?”
“It has always been so,” said Nicollo with a mocking bow. Eiha! Nicollo had treated Arriano with respect, when he had met him briefly eleven years ago, when Arriano was a respected and powerful Embajadorro and Nicollo merely a young Limner struggling for position. But Nicollo was the sort of man who, once given power, used it as a height from which to look down on the less fortunate.
“It has not always been so!” retorted Sario, then stopped. What was the point of arguing with these imbeciles? They knew nothing. Copyists!
Nicollo raised an eyebrow, a trick he used to cow his students. Sario fumed.
The others of the gathered Limners drifted away, leaving Agustin with his uncle in front of a full-length mirror. Giving Nicollo a curt nod, Sario walked over to watch the boy attempt his first tutored spell.
“I’ve done this before,” said the boy with a stab at bravaddio.
“Is that so?” asked Giaberto calmly. “In your rooms? Privately, I hope.”
“No. I did it under Eleyna’s supervision. I used colored chalks on a piece of silk, using a bit of my saliva and a touch of pine oil. I drew roses, and we put the silk under Beatriz’s pillow, to see what she would dream of.”
Shocked, Sario waited for Giaberto’s reaction. How had the young woman found out such secrets? But Giaberto remained calm. “Did she dream of roses?”
“No. She dreamed about pigs. She always dreams
about pigs. But she said they were rose-colored pigs.” Agustin giggled. Sario, attuned to the nuances of facial expression after long, long experience, saw that Giaberto was furious but hiding it.
“What really happened?” Sario asked suddenly.
Startled, Agustin played nervously with the pencil in his hand, rolling it over and over again through his fingers. “I did try the dream silk, roses one night, pigs another, Grandmother Leilias the third time, and a bell the fourth. Every morning Beatriz had dreamed of the things I painted on the silk.”
“And?” Sario asked.
Agustin fidgeted.
“Is there more?” Giaberto asked abruptly. Agustin began to bite at his nails. His uncle slapped his hand down. “Never do that, mennino! Your hands are your life!”
“Eleyna doesn’t know, but I painted a silk that showed her painting and put it under my mother’s pillow. I even took a little of my blood and mixed it with watercolors. I… I heard blood makes a spell more potent. I drew some things—keys—interlaced along the border. I thought Mother might dream about Eleyna painting instead of—”
“Matra ei Filho, you imbecile!” swore Giaberto.
Agustin visibly wilted.
“It’s a clever idea,” interposed Sario, liking the boy’s audacity. “But you must learn the secrets of magic before you employ them. You do have a great deal to learn.”
“I thought it would work. But it didn’t.”
Giaberto’s dour face cracked slightly. “Eiha! It’s true. I remember the first time I realized what power I held in my hands. I thought I could do anything!”
And you could have, if only you’d the skills and the ambition. But like the rest of your colleagues, you’ve grown small-minded.
“Then you’ll still teach me?” Agustin asked in a small voice.
“Of course,” said his uncle quickly. “A Gifted son of the Grijalvas is never abandoned by his fellow Limners, not as long as he abides by the Golden Key. Adezo! I have given thought to what you might try this afternoon. Go to the window. Davo always sweeps at this hour. When he comes to the fourth tier of the sidewalk, farthest from the portico, he stops to sit on the bench, there. You must draw him, in light charcoal, on the glass, using a bit of your saliva. Fix in your mind the idea that one of us here upstairs wants him. Needs him. Make him come to us. This is what is known as a suggestion spell. This is the most basic spell, and the safest for you, since saliva can be rubbed out with no effect on you. It is the spell you must first master before you can move on to others. Go on.”