The Golden Key

by Melanie Rawn

  “I am Eleyna Grijalva,” she whispered, embarrassed to speak out loud, yet there was no one to hear. The long hall was forlorn in its emptiness. Trapped, terrified, alone, and forgotten, Saavedra would surely be grateful for any least reassurance. Even if this was only in her mind, Eleyna felt compelled to speak.

  Are you painting me free?

  “No, alas, I cannot do so for I am a woman and not Gifted. But be assured I would if I could. Be assured I am doing this to help you.”

  I, too, am a painter.

  Sisters, then, Eleyna thought. Of the same blood, though separated by centuries. “Why did Sario imprison you?”

  Because he loves me, such as he can love anything beyond the vision that drives him.

  So Eleyna’s mind wandered, painting imagined conversations with a woman in a portrait. Was Sario the only one who was a little insane? Sometimes she doubted herself and her own mind. Still, she worked.

  What is in plain sight is best hidden.

  “Magniffico. I could almost believe I had painted it myself.”

  “Master Sario! You startled me.” Eleyna touched her lips, as if afraid he had caught incriminating words on them.

  But Sario noticed only the two paintings. “I am pleased with your progress, Eleyna. This would indeed fool all but a superbly trained eye. You have amply repaid my belief in your talent.”

  “Grazzo. It is an honor to work with you.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. He no longer made any pretense about being a humble younger member of the Viehos Fratos. He reminded her of Andonio Grijalva, who had been Lord Limner before Andreo. A man of austere habits and an iron hand, Andonio had ruled Palasso Grijalva, his brothers, and all the young students with utter confidence in his own superiority. Or so at least he had seemed to the ten-year-old Eleyna who had been brought to his attention and then made the mistake of disagreeing with him.

  But Sario was different. A monster, truly, for she no longer doubted that he had murdered Andreo or that he ruthlessly controlled Renayo through the portrait. But she could not begrudge him his arrogance. Not about art.

  “Why does she hold a golden key?” she asked.

  “Because she is Gifted, though she would never admit it.” His lips were set in a grim line. So astonished was she by this answer that she gaped at him. Women were not Gifted! Preoccupied, he went on. “Tomorrow, when you are finished, you will come to my atelierro. We must finish your portrait.”

  Finish her portrait? Made slave or free—

  He looked suddenly annoyed, reading her expression. “If you are not my partisan, Eleyna, then you are my enemy.” He spun and walked away down the Galerria, his footsteps echoing on the marble floor.

  She watched him go, then wrenched her gaze away. She must not think of him so often. Eiha! Where was Rohario now? Was he well? Was he thriving? To have his bright energy invest the Galerria would be a mercy. Everyone had become as quiet as Alazais. It was like living in a palasso of ghosts.

  She looked down the Galerria. Was this not a palasso of ghosts, of dead do’Verradas, their brides and barons, their favorites and enemies, their Mistresses and favored Limners, all displayed so their influence, their haunting, could never be forgotten or ignored? If Saavedra were alive and could be rescued, what stories would she tell?

  Almost finished, Sario had said, and indeed that was true. There remained a few details: the golden key, the particular shine on Saavedra’s fingernails…

  And there, suddenly, she saw it. The oscurra. Tiny letters and symbols cunningly woven into the highlights that gave shine to her nails. Once seen there she saw them everywhere, a pattern spreading out. In light, in shadow, in flame, in darkness, in the folds of her skirts, in the coils of her hair, in the border of the table, in the woodgrain of the door. Oscurra, everywhere, framed by a border that was no obvious border but rather the limits of the chamber. Even the door was spelled, bound with carven symbols she could not read, that she wished desperately she could read.

  “I’ve seen that door before,” she whispered, but it was a faint memory from when she was a child, exploring forgotten corridors.

  Behind the door he imprisoned me. Can you open the door?

  Oscurra, patterns marking the magic of the Grijalva Limners. A door, waiting to be opened. She finally truly believed.

  With a new sense of urgency, she put the final details onto the painting. It was almost dark when she finished, and she was too tired, far too tired, to do anything but go back to her room and sleep.

  EIGHTY-FIVE

  The Viehos Fratos gathered in the ancient chamber known as the Crechetta, buried in the oldest section of Palasso Grijalva. Its whitewashed walls gleamed in the light of candles held in old-fashioned iron stands at each corner of the room. It was cool and damp. The Limners stood—what few of them were left—and waited. A single easel rested in the center of the room, a shrouded painting upon it.

  Giaberto blew out all the candles until only one remained lit. Shadows twisted in eerie patterns across the room. Young Damiano, looking grim, brought out a lancet and heated it in the candle flame. He walked to each of the assembled Limners—nine now, besides Agustin, only nine—and took blood from them. The warm blade bit into Agustin’s arm and he stifled a yelp of pain. He was frightened, but he dared not show it.

  Damiano brought the vial of fresh blood to old Zosio, who with his arthritic hands could no longer paint but could still mix colors. As Zosio prepared the paletto with tincture of blood, Giaberto unveiled the painting. Agustin gasped, although he had known what it must be: Sario’s Peintraddo Chieva.

  “Chieva do’Sangua,” said Giaberto. “We will all feel pain, for we have blended our power in order to discipline one of our own who has violated the faith of the Chieva do’Orro. No man may wear the Golden Key who uses it for his own sake—” Here he bent his harsh gaze on Agustin, reminding the boy how angry the Viehos Fratos had been when they found out about Agustin’s experiment. And yet that experiment had borne fruit, had it not? “What we do, we do for the sake of the Grijalvas and Tira Virte.”

  Giaberto picked up a brush and began to paint. So is a traitor—the murderer of Andreo Grijalva—punished: milk-blindness clouds the eye; the hands are consumed by a virulent attack of bone-fever. Agustin’s hands curled in on themselves involuntarily. His fingers smarted and ached by turns. His vision hazed over, as if a white veil were being drawn across it.

  The pain slid off, like water down roof tiles. He blinked, staring. In the portrait, once-proud Sario now stared at the world with a film of white over his dark eyes; his young, strong hands wore the knitted agony of acute bone-fever.

  And yet … something was wrong. Agustin didn’t feel anything, and he knew he ought to.

  “It didn’t work,” he blurted out. “It’s painted there, but that’s all.” That’s all.

  The Viehos Fratos had disciplined one of their own—and it had not worked.

  “What has gone wrong?” rasped old Zosio.

  Giaberto wrung his hands as if they hurt. “The fault lies not in my brushstrokes or our blood,” he said in a hoarse voice. “The Chieva do’Sangua worked. This portrait must not be Blooded. But I watched him paint it! As did you, Zosio. Matra ei Filho, all of us here supervised this portrait’s painting except Damiano and Agustin. It was Blooded. It was tested. Here.” He touched with the tip of his brush a red pinprick on the back of the painted Sario’s left hand. “Here, the pin. It is the same painting.”

  “Could he have painted another portrait?” asked Agustin. Because he had been thinking a great deal about the Gift he now possessed, he went on rashly. “Could a second portrait protect him from this one?”

  Zosio snorted, began to speak, and fell silent. With a gesture bred of impatience and anger, Giaberto threw the canvas shroud back over the painting. Little hollows formed in the heavy cloth where it stuck to wet paint.

  “I have never heard or read of such a thing being done,” said Giaberto harshly. “Where would he have learned to d
o it? If he has done a second portrait, then where is it?”

  “But it could be done, couldn’t it?” demanded Agustin. They never answered his questions, not directly!

  “No,” said Zosio. “It could not be done, else we would have been taught how to guard ourselves against such a trick.”

  “But what else could have happened?” Their lack of imagination was infuriating. “Could he have painted an unBlooded copy and left it here, and hidden the original elsewhere?”

  Giaberto shook his head emphatically. “My nephew is right. This painting must be a copy. There is no other possible explanation.” He paused, in all ways now the leader of the Viehos Fratos. “Sario Grijalva has gone rogue. He can never again be trusted. We must destroy him at our first opportunity, or he will destroy us first. If he murdered Andreo, then there is no horrible deed he will not stoop to. We are no longer safe.”

  “But what can we do?” asked Agustin when the others, evidently stupified, did not speak.

  Giaberto unlocked the door that led out of the Crechetta and opened it. A flood of light illuminated the room, the pale candle, and the canvas shroud. “I don’t know,” he admitted.

  “What do you think, Grandzio?” Agustin asked later that day as he and Cabral sat by the yellow-tiled fountain in the back courtyard, taking some sun. Cabral spent more and more time on this bench, listening and watching the flow of the water as if it were telling him stories or painting him faces in the mist.

  “I remember a story Zevierin told me once,” Cabral said, fussing with his lace cuffs, a habitual gesture. “When he and Leilias first decided to marry, she suggested in jest that he paint her a man who could come out of the painting only long enough to get her with child and then vanish into the painting again.”

  “What does that have to do with Sario’s Peintraddo?”

  Cabral smiled. “Patience. I was thinking of Saavedra Grijalva. Her figure has moved within the painting. That we have established. Does this mean she is alive within the painting?”

  “How could that be?”

  “Long ago, in the time of Duke Alejandro, a Tza’ab army threatened to invade Joharra. So Sario Grijalva painted an army.”

  Agustin snorted. Not even he was this credulous. “Brought them to life?”

  Cabral responded to his disbelief with a chuckle.

  “Did he do it? Did it work?” Agustin almost bounced up and down on the bench.

  “How eager you are to hear, ninio.” Cabral’s gaze fixed on the flowing water of the fountain, as if seeing another scene there. “How unlike dearest ‘Chella—” He broke off and shook his head. “But that was a long time ago, alas. This is the story: Sario Grijalva painted an army. Thousands of soldiers appeared miraculously at sunrise across the distant dunes. The Tza’ab fled in terror. But the guerierros do’fantome? They were hollow, hands and faces, nothing else.”

  “What happened?”

  “Ninio meyo, you look positively rapt. I hope you are not enjoying this!” Cabral smiled, but there was a grim undertone to his voice. “Sario painted the dunes bare, and the army vanished, never to be seen again.”

  Agustin let out a satisfied sigh; that had certainly been a good story. But then, considering it, he turned serious. “What has this to do with Sario’s Peintraddol Or the portrait of Saavedra?”

  Cabral arranged his hands in his lap, fussily, as a woman arranges flowers. The seams and calluses and lesions on his old hands seemed themselves to tell a story, to reveal secrets, if only Agustin knew their language. “Do any of you truly know what the Gifted are capable of? What if Saavedra Grijalva didn’t disappear at all but was captured in a painting?”

  Imagine! Then Agustin shook his head. “It couldn’t be done. But—” He reconsidered. “What if it could be done?”

  “How could Sario escape the Chieva do’Sangua, although it was painted onto his Blooded Peintraddol Impossible, too, I think, and yet it happened. I think the Viehos Fratos would be better off discovering what Sario can and cannot do with his Gift, now that they know he is capable of anything. And perhaps they had better start thinking about why.”

  “Why?”

  “Why Sario? As a boy he had no special ambition or talent. Has he been harboring ambition all these years and hiding it from us? If so, then perhaps he is more dangerous than anyone here imagines. If so, if he can evade the Chieva do’Sangua, I hope Giaberto and the others are working very hard right now to find out where Sario learned such knowledge.”

  Water slid down the sides of the fountain, an endless, restless flow, like Agustin’s own curiosity, never coming to a halt. He worried at a fingernail with his teeth, caught himself, and wound the offending hand through his thick black hair. “Giaberto says that if a spell was used to murder Andreo, then it is not any spell written of in the Folio.”

  “Of course I have not read the Folio. I am sorry to hear such things are written down.”

  Agustin waited, but Cabral said nothing more. He was not Gifted, after all, and could not be expected to know the deepest secrets contained in the Folio and the knowledge passed by word and hand. Cabral could not be expected to truly understand the great burdens laid on the Gifted…. Agustin shook himself, disliking his own argument, mouthed from words he had heard the Viehos Fratos speak so many times. If he believed them, then he might as well believe that Eleyna could not ever be a great painter. And he knew that wasn’t true.

  Matra ei Filho! And where was Eleyna now? Eleyna was alone in Palasso Verrada with a murderer! There must be some way to protect her. There had been rash talk in the Atelierro of hiring an assassin! He felt so helpless, thinking of Sario who could, evidently, do whatever he pleased. Eiha. Poor Cabral, who must always sit and wait because he did not have the Gift.

  “Do you miss your old friends, Grandzio?” the boy asked, seeing Cabral as impossibly old suddenly. I’ll never reach that age. I’ll never outlive all my friends and family, as Cabral has.

  Cabral’s smile was as sweet as it was sad. “I miss my old friends, indeed, ninio meyo. You are very kind to sit here with me and give me comfort. But, in fact, I am waiting for a visitor.”

  “A visitor?” The Grijalvas rarely went out these days and more rarely received visitors. The Picca, normally flooded with buyers in the days before Mirraflores Moon, was empty, and the streets were quiet, under a curfew mandated by the Provisional Corteis.

  Old Davo appeared, escorting a man. Agustin stood up, he was so surprised. “Don Rohario!”

  “Master Agustin. Dolcha mattena. Do not stand, Zio, grazzo.” But although the young do’Verrada’s words were polite, his tone, indeed his entire posture, betrayed agitation. “I came as soon as I could,” he continued. Then he began to pace, first to the back stairs, then to the arcade that led on into the other portions of the compound, then to the fountain, once around it, pausing to watch the fall of water down the azulejos, then circling again.

  “Eleyna is well,” said Cabral.

  Rohario did not respond. He was, Agustin saw, not pacing as much as peering into every corner and nook as if to make sure no one else was within earshot. The courtyard remained empty; no servants swept the pavement or watered the plants. At a nod from Cabral, Davo left.

  “We are here alone, Rohario,” Cabral said, “and Agustin is trustworthy. What is it, ninio meyo?”

  Rohario jerked to a stop. “Ninio meyo” he muttered. He stared at Cabral in an odd, searching manner. Agustin had a sudden urgent idea that Rohario was about to say something reckless. “Are you my grandfather?”

  Agustin tapped an ear. Surely his hearing had failed.

  “Matra Dolcha,” murmured Cabral so softly that Agustin barely heard the words leave his lips. “So it has come. Where did you hear this?”

  Out spilled a confused account: Brendizias and bastards. Agustin was too shocked to make sense of the explanation.

  Cabral patted the stone bench. “Sit beside me, Rohario.”

  Rohario sat heavily, limply, more like a puppet than th
e whirlwind of energy he had been moments before. There was a short silence. The sun’s light spread like water over the paved brick of the courtyard. The fountain ran on. Cabral cleared his throat.

  Rohario shifted abruptly to look at the old man. “It’s true. I can see it in your face.”

  “It is true. But it is a very long story.”

  Rohario nodded, acknowledging this fact, not crying out against it. Agustin, stunned, admired his self-possession. And his courage. Rohario do’Verrada was chi’patro—not a true do’Verrada at all. Matra Dolcha! And if he were, then so was Grand Duke Renayo. Cabral was Renayo’s father? It did not bear thinking of!

  “I would like to hear the story,” said Rohario quietly.

  In the tranquil courtyard with the low rush of the fountain serenading him, Cabral told his grandson the truth.

  “It was nothing we intended,” he said at the end of his story. “Nothing we sought, ‘Chella and I. But I loved her from the moment I saw her—eiha, Rohario, ‘Chella had that quality, that Luza, that goes beyond beauty: she had a true and trusting heart. She gave it willingly and wholely to Arrigo and he threw it back in her face.” He seemed about to utter a curse but restrained himself. “You should not blame her for seeking at last—when Arrigo made it obvious he would have nothing more to do with her, when her pain became too great for her to bear alone—the simple but demoted love of a man like myself.” He sighed and wiped a single tear from one cheek. “That we made a child together—dear little Renayo—is the greatest gift the Mother could ever have given me.”

  Agustin could not look at Cabral and imagine this mild old man as the father of Grand Duke Renayo. The Grand Duke was the bastard son of a chi’patro Grijalva! Rohario looked dumbfounded but not, oddly enough, appalled. At last he reached into his coat and drew out an old piece of paper. Without a word he handed it to Cabral.

  Cabral opened it and examined both sides. “It’s very old,” he said. “Strange. This resembles the handwriting of Dioniso Grijalva. He was one of my teachers, known for having an eccentric hand. He died under … odd … circumstances.”