by Melanie Rawn
“Circumstances having to do with magic, Zio?” asked Rohario. His voice wavered only slightly.
“Most Grijalva secrets are linked to their magic.” Cabral turned the old document over, studying the words. “This side is clear enough, about the Marria do’Fantome, but the other looks like a recipe of nonsense words.” He handed it to Agustin.
The boy shook his head. “These are Tza’ab letters, such as I’ve seen in the Folio. The words here mean nothing to me.”
“Where did you find this?” Cabral asked Rohario.
“I found it in the basement vaults of the Palasso Justissa, stuck in an old book dated to 950, the reigns of Baltran the First and Alejandro.” Rohario cocked his head to one side and stared for a long time at the spray of water lifting from the fountain. “You are truly my grandfather?”
At first Cabral did not answer. They sat, all of them, so still that two butterflies settled on the ironwork back of the bench, then fluttered away, bright yellow wings a fleeting reminder of summer approaching. What would it be like, Agustin wondered, to reach such a great age that the endless daily concerns of life, the joys and tragedies, might finally be assimilated into serenity? He would never know.
Finally Cabral spoke with that serenity, crafted of age and acceptance. “I am truly the father of Renayo. I am your grandfather. I loved Mechella very much, Rohario. She would have remained true to Arrigo had he given her the slightest encouragement. Eiha. I will not complain now, although I know I should not have let my heart lead me onto such dangerous paths. But I cannot regret the happiness we shared.”
Rohario hid his face in his hands. His shoulders shook so that Agustin could not tell if he was laughing or weeping. Cabral laid a comforting hand on the young man’s arm. In this way, the fountain oblivious to the drama enacted before it, they sat for a long while in silence.
EIGHTY-SIX
The girl came in at dawn to stoke up the fire and open the drapes. Eleyna, half-awake, listened to her movements, heard the door open and close with a soft click. She rose and dressed in the same gown and lace shawl—her hyacinth-embroidered widow’s shawl—that she wore every time she spoke with Agustin. Filled the lantern with oil, lit the wick, placed it in the precise spot a hand’s width from the corner of the table. Then she brought out the parchment and centered it, sides neatly aligned with the table’s edge. Sitting, she squared her shoulders and tucked one stray corner of shawl into the ribbon tied around the high waist of her gown so it wouldn’t slip and spoil the spell.
Shadows lengthened. Light changed.
“Eleyna.” The whisper, a disembodied voice sounding so close that each time she had to stop herself from reaching out across the table to try and touch him.
“Agustin. I am here.”
“Beware. Yesterday the Viehos Fratos met to discipline Sario, but it didn’t work!”
She heard the urgency in his voice, the fear. “It didn’t work?”
“The Chieva do’Sangua did not work. Sario has protected himself—”
That suddenly, Sario burst out of her closet. She stared at him, astonished, then shook free of her amazement, began to stand.
Too late. Even that instant of shocked surprise was too much. He grabbed the lantern, wrenched open the glass shutter, and with palpable fury drenched the parchment with hot oil.
She grabbed for his wrist, got oil on her arm, but it was futile. The parchment shriveled and blackened, not quite catching flame. She ripped off her shawl and smothered the paper, but it did not matter. The damage was already done.
Surely it was only in her imagination that she heard Agustin scream.
Sario yanked her away from the table. “How could you betray me like this! I am teaching you! I chose you! Not even a Gifted boy. I saw your talent and chose to nurture it when no one else would. How could you!”
“Murderer! That was my Agustin!”
He slapped her. Furious, she slapped him back, hard enough that a red stain stood out on his skin.
“Canna!” he swore at her, spitting in his fury. He grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her after him, out into the corridor, down the long halls to Alazais’ suite. Only a few servants walked quietly through the halls at this early morning hour. They looked, but they said nothing. No one questioned Lord Limner Sario. Not anymore.
In shock she let herself be pulled along. Hot oil scorching a blooded painting. Matra Dolcha, have mercy on him. He is only a child, a delicate filho like Your own.
Alazais was awake, sitting on her silk couch. She looked up as they entered, did not respond to Eleyna’s terrified yelp but went serenely back to her embroidery. Sario dragged Eleyna farther back, into a chamber with only one door.
He shoved her inside, closed the door behind him, locked it and pocketed the key, and then stood, staring at her, eyes bright with angry recriminations. “Where did they learn to talk through paintings? Why was I not told?”
Truly a monster, because he did not care. “That was Agustin!” A sob was torn out of her. “Is he dead?”
“Burned, certainly. Dead, perhaps.” He shrugged. “You used me, Eleyna.” His tone was plaintive. “I have offered you everything I know and you repay me like this! And they—! That they would keep such a secret from me but tell an unGifted woman—!”
She could not help herself. She would not give the Viehos Fratos credit for what she and Agustin had devised. “It is not their secret,” she cried triumphantly, and by his startled expression saw she had stricken him. “Agustin and I discovered it. No one else. We did not need your Folio—”
“Bassda!” His expression, enraged, scared her into silence. “You? You! UnGifted and untrained. …” He touched his key, almost caressed it, and a strange distant look settled on his features. “That I should find the one, and he a woman.” Abruptly he controlled himself. He gestured to the small chamber. A cot stood in one corner. There was a chair and table, two easels, paints, a locked chest, and a number of canvasses stacked along the walls. “Here you will stay.”
“What do you mean to do to me?” She caught her breath, an eerie calm descending on her now, replacing rage and fear.
He moved to one of the easels and pulled off the cloth: her Peintraddo. The truth of her revealed: the Luza do’Orro in her eyes and face and a brush in her hand. Such beauty: it rested like the ashes of burned paper in her mouth. He touched tongue to finger, and that finger to her painted lips. “It is finished. I can do nothing to you, estuda meya. You are safe from the Grijalvas, but you are also safe from me, if that is what you feared. I kept my part of the bargain, though you have betrayed me.” This spoken querelously, like a boy whining over a childish injustice. “If I burn this painting to punish you, then I kill myself.”
“You killed Agustin,” she whispered. But perhaps Agustin was only burned. The parchment had not truly caught fire. Matra Dolcha, make it be true.
Sario was oblivious to her, caught in his own monstrous concerns. “Yesterday I felt a burning on my hands, a fever, but as if it were happening to another body, not my own. My vision clouded for a moment, then cleared. So I knew they were attempting the Chieva do’Sangua. And I knew then I was harboring a traitor. Which could only be you. But I did not expect—to speak to each other through the painting! I should have thought of it!” He stopped suddenly, cocked his head as if listening, then hurried out the door. She heard the key turn in the lock, then silence.
Matra ei Filho! What had happened to Agustin? Retreating, she collapsed onto the cot and lost herself to weeping. And, later, to a kind of blank staring.
Nothing. No one. Too heavy to move. Perhaps he had imprisoned her within a painting. Perhaps this weight of air was what it felt like, dragging her down. Not grief at all, but paint and oscurra, the spelled boundaries confining her, forever and ever.
EIGHTY-SEVEN
It was dark. How had it come to be twilight so soon? Where was she? Eleyna sat up. The canvas cot creaked under her weight. The chamber looked unfamiliar, dark shapes bulking
against the wall, easels like ungainly human figures, stick legs and enormous bellies, the angular shadows of the table and chair.
It all came back to her. She had to shut her eyes, the force of memory was so like a sudden blinding light turned full on her, who had been lost in darkness. She had slept while Agustin died, if he was not already dead. Matra ei Filho. Beloved Agustin. She caught a sob in her throat. Heard the key turn in the lock.
She stood as the door opened and Sario entered the room, holding a lamp. He carried a tray in his other hand: a dinner of lamb, bread, vegetables, and fish smothered in a garlic sauce so strong she smelled it from across the room. He brought a fine white wine to drown her sorrow.
She ate, because it would be stupid not to. The silence smothered her, like a thick layer of paint, applied to a canvas in order to hide the image beneath. When he left, taking lamp and tray with him, it was too dark to see, to do anything except grope back to the cot and lie down. Clearly he did not mean to leave her fire, in case she chose to revenge herself by burning one of his spelled paintings, or glass or fork or knife with which to cut into the paint and cause him pain. That night she would have done so, had she the means.
In the morning he returned with rolls and goat cheese and tea. Again he watched her. His scrutiny made her uneasy.
“I give you a choice,” he said finally, as if he could not keep silence against his better judgment. “I cannot bear to see your gift go to waste, you, who should have been Gifted. I will continue to teach you, if you wish still to learn from me.”
“Never! Not from you, not from the monster who murdered my brother!”
He sighed, so mild, so reasonable in the light of day. “I believe in your talent, Eleyna. Who else does? Who can teach you what you want to know?”
No one else, truly.
Sario brought out pencils and paper and went to the window. In the courtyard below the bloodflowers were in bud, a few already blooming. Six days until Mirraflores Eve. He began to sketch. Her feet worked of their own to move closer to him, so that her eyes might watch him draw.
This man had shattered her life and murdered her beloved brother.
She turned away and sat on the cot, hands thrust between her knees so they would not betray her. After a while, uttering no word of excuse, no word of reproach, he left, locking everything behind him.
But he came back in the afternoon. “I am the only one who will teach you, Eleyna,” he said. “All the secrets of the Limners.”
“You murdered Agustin,” she whispered. All the secrets. Matra Dolcha, protect her from this temptation.
He went back to the window and began to sketch again. She turned just enough to watch his back, the assured movements of his hands, the set of his posture as he drew. She rose, but not to look at him. He was a monster.
He knew so much.
She crept two steps closer. He worked on, pretending not to notice her. How did he shade the flower petals just so, to suggest their rich crimson color?
Matra ei Filho, was she not also a monster? For she knew at that instant she could not resist him, and she hated herself for it. But she asked for pencil and paper.
He spent the rest of that day with her. Evidently he had Renayo so deeply in his control that he no longer needed to monitor his activities every hour of the day. A servant brought luncheon. Sario left at dusk. He locked away all the tools and paint and left her without a lamp. But it was not quite dark.
She explored the room. On one easel her portrait still stood, oscurra twined into the brush her image held, twined into her black hair and the iris of her eyes. The simple beauty of the painting brought tears to her eyes, and more yet when she saw that he had woven cunningly into the border framing the Peintraddo a pattern of golden keys, each wrapped into the next. Monsters, both of them. She must not forget what he was! She forced herself to look away.
On the other easel rested the portrait of Renayo. Sketches of nobles and servants littered the floor in one corner, tossed there like refuse, and yet each was a testament to Sario’s genius. She listened at the keyhole but heard nothing. Then she examined the canvasses that leaned against the wall. Here, a half-finished portrait of Edoard. There, the portrait of Beatriz, mostly done but evidently abandoned. Some landscapes, a study of an old country house which Eleyna did not recognize, and one delicate and touching study in pale watercolors of the fountain of bells in a rain-washed courtyard.
In the most shadowed corner stood three larger canvasses, their faces hidden against the wall. Carefully she tipped them out.
Matra Dolcha! The first was a fine study of Andreo Grijalva. She recognized the oscurra hidden in every part of the portrait, though she could not read it. Sario had not yet taught her. But she could guess the intent.
Cypresses, for Death.
Behind Andreo was a portrait of Nicollo Grijalva. His was not as elaborately detailed with the scratchings of the hidden language, but there was a strange blood-red spot on his chest, as a pinprick, stuck in skin, would leave blood.
The last panel was the largest. Eleyna set the others to one side and moved this one away from the wall. It was almost dark. At first she could not quite decipher the shapes, because there was an odd blotch in the center of the painting.
It was a room, stark and poor, perhaps an attic since it had a steep ceiling and a bare plank floor. A few nondescript pieces of furniture, including a cot much like the one here, furnished it. The blotch was not a blotch at all but bare gray ground, shaped in a human form.
She leaned closer. The panel smelled oddly of myrtle. Speak With the Dead. Shaped in a woman’s form.
Heart racing, she stepped back hastily. Was this how he captured people and imprisoned them in paintings? By painting a room and leaving space to paint the body into the room? Is this where he intended to imprison her?
Moronna. The painting of Saavedra was over three hundred years old. This Sario could not have painted it. Like blue roses, it was impossible. And yet … two Sario Grijalvas had become Lord Limner, that one and this one. She had seen the self-portrait of the first Sario—handsome, dark-eyed, with Tza’ab brown skin. He looked nothing like this Sario, who was a typical if rather plain Grijalva, the chi’patro blood worn thin.
And yet … if this Sario had discovered that such a spell could be accomplished, why not try it for himself?
If only she had a lamp! She peered closer, and closer still. Was that a strand of gold caught along the hairline? Here was another. A woman with blonde hair. There were only two women with blonde hair in this entire palasso: Princess Alazais and her Ghillasian servant.
Ridiculous.
But she carefully replaced the paintings so Sario would not know for certain if she had moved them.
The next day, when he came for her lesson, she said nothing to him, asked him no questions except the expected ones. “How do you know so much, Master Sario?”
He smiled gently. “I have lived a long time.”
The soft words made her shiver, although the rainy season had all but ended and the courtyard outside was flooded with sunlight. Princesses brought to life from paintings. Young men who had lived for centuries. These fantasies seemed absurd in the fine light of a brilliant day.
But not even the sun could erase the chill in her heart.
Like Saavedra, she was a prisoner. The days passed uneventfully. Sario spent hours of every day with her. Matra Dolcha, but he was a fine painter. He knew so much.
He is a murderer, and I, because I did not turn him away, I am no better. Agustin, forgive me.
As Agustin would. So did she weep for him, and pray that he lived.
Mirraflores Eve dawned bright and with a sudden outpouring of flowers. Shrubs bloomed in splashes of foam and wine and sky. The bloodflower beds broke into a breathtaking array of crimson. Servant girls in perfectly groomed livery tossed petals onto the walkways, and Timarra do’Verrada spent the morning with Princess Alazais picking up the petals and mixing them with spices and ground-up leaves
to make scented sachets.
Sario arrived just after the midday bell rang.
“Interesting news,” he said cheerfully, as if he were a gentleman calling to bring the latest gossip. “This provisional assembly of the Corteis has approved a Constitussion, which they will present to Grand Duke Renayo in two or three days as a kind of flowering of their assembly, I presume, together with a notice that they intend to call elections for the Corteis.”
He had sketch paper tucked under one arm.
She pulled it free and smoothed it out on the table. “What is this?”
“Rohario do’Verrada. I finally got a look at him. He is now an influential member of the Corteis. If they indeed call elections to be held next month, he is likely to run for and win a seat.” He laughed. “A do’Verrada sitting in council with commoners!”
“What do you mean to do with him?” she demanded. Then, unable to help herself, she grabbed the pencil out of his hand and added a line to the sketch. “This isn’t right. This way, you see? He has a strength in him that you haven’t captured.”
There was a sudden silence. She looked up and was abruptly aware that she had corrected him.
He jerked the pencil out of her hand, leaned over the drawing … and did nothing. He studied the sketch.
Finally, he straightened. “I see.” His expression was unreadable. “Matra Dolcha,” he swore, speaking as if to himself, as if he had forgotten she was there, “that I should find the one and he be a woman, and unGifted! You would find this amusing, I think, corasson.”
She flushed to hear the endearment, realized an instant later that it was not addressed to her. To whom, then? Where had she heard that tone of his before?
“It is not yet time to free you, corasson.” Corasson … Saavedra.
Of course.
Sario glanced up, listened, then abruptly left the room but not so quickly that he forgot to lock the door behind him. Eleyna spent the rest of the day alone, a long day, troubled as she was by these thoughts of a woman trapped, alive, in a painting.