The Golden Key

by Melanie Rawn

  As twilight spread over the courtyard below, painting the chamber with shadows, she heard the faint sound of singing, the sweet light voices of sanctas raised in the Hymn of Flowering, sung for girls celebrating their first blood.

  Like the blood of the Limners. Matra Dolcha, have mercy on Agustin. As every girl comes into her womanhood, so grant him a man’s life. … Such as it was, for a Limner who could never sire children and whose Gift would be cut short by early death.

  The key turned in the lock. The door cracked open.

  “No!” shouted Sario. “No! I forbid it!”

  Fainter, Grand Duke Renayo’s voice. “I… I think you ought to listen to Lord Limner Sario. Really I do. But in truth, Sario, you must admit… tradition … it’s normal for young women to go out … how can we refuse the pleadings of these venerable sanctas?”

  A determined push sent the door flying open. Of course! Grijalvas had no power over the Ecclesia. There stood Beatriz, armed with three wimpled sanctas who smelled of rosewater. Behind them stood Sario, livid, and the Grand Duke, confused and weak and pale. Guards accompanied them, but no one dared raise a hand against the three old sanctas, whose hands and faces were as wrinkled as their white robes were starched and clean.

  “Come, ninia,” said one. Another took her by the arm and led her out as if she were a half-wit. Eleyna, too stunned to react, barely managed to set one foot in front of the other. Sario was swearing. Beatriz was smiling prettily. So they led her through the suite, singing the hymn “The Mother’s Blood Gives Us Life” in voices still strong and true. A cart and horse and driver waited in the kitchen’s courtyard. Beatriz helped the sanctas up into the back.

  “The portrait—” cried Eleyna, coming to life as she realized she might actually escape.

  “It is here.”

  “Not the copy—”

  “What you want is here. Eleyna! Get in! We must go now.”

  Eleyna got in, but she could not get her bearings. They rattled out through an arched tunnel that led to a back gate. The Sanctas’ presence gave them passage through the Palasso gate, gave them safety running the gauntlet of barricades that had turned Meya Suerta’s streets into a maze of obstacles. Yet the mood tonight was wild and sweet, celebratory.

  “A new flowering for you, blessed sancta!” called a cluster of girls to the women in the cart as it passed. The sanctas signed a benediction. The cart trundled on. From every inn and most houses came the sound of singing and laughter.

  “Why are they all so happy?” asked Eleyna. Her freedom made her dizzy. She could only remember the whitewashed walls of Sario’s chamber, the endless portraits hung in the Galerria.

  “The Corteis will meet again,” said the eldest sancta. “They are happy for this sign of the Matra’s blessing upon them.”

  “Do you think it a blessing?” asked Beatriz curiously. “It is a great change.”

  “So says the Matra: that every thing Her hand touches flowers with Her grace.”

  “Even Sario Grijalva?” Eleyna murmured under her breath.

  Beatriz leaned close against her, whispering into her ear. “Were you lovers?”

  She shuddered. Were they not bound in a way more intimate than that of mere flesh? But she could not speak of this even to Beatriz. It was too shameful. “How came these sanctas to help us?” she asked instead. “They have always disliked the Grijalvas, and you—the Mistress!—are everything they speak against.”

  “I simply asked. Whatever they may think of me, Eleyna, they are compassionate.”

  They came at last to the torch-lit doors that opened into Palasso Grijalva. Servants ran out and at Beatriz’s direction took the huge portrait, bundled in cloth, and carried it inside. Beatriz thanked the sanctas sweetly and with evident sincerity. They blessed her and, still in the cart, rolled off into the night.

  Eleyna and Beatriz hurried down the tunnel and emerged into the central courtyard. Torches flowered here, a haze of light and smoke driving away darkness. A woman stood in the entrance of the great hall. She started and walked quickly forward.

  “Beatriz! Thank the Matra that you have come!” It was their mother. Eleyna braced herself. “Eleyna! Matra ei Filho, our prayers are answered. My poor darling has been asking after you.” Dionisa took Eleyna by the hand and led her forward. Dionisa looked wan and exhausted. Eleyna went meekly, shocked by the change in her mother’s disposition. Beatriz followed.

  Dionisa took them to a side room off the great hall. The ghastly smell of infected flesh permeated the little chamber. Without a word Dionisa handed handkerchiefs to her daughters. Eleyna covered her nose with the cloth. Beatriz did not bother to use hers; instead, she hurried forward to the bed.

  To Agustin.

  A sancta knelt at the bedside, praying. Eleyna needed only one look at him, at his blistered face and hands, his burned eyes closed in a fitful sleep, needed only one deep breath of the air of this sickroom, to hope that Agustin would die soon. Her handkerchief was already damp with tears.

  The sancta looked up as Beatriz knelt beside her. She nodded, then looked toward Eleyna. “You are the elder sister? He has asked for you, but I have just given him a sleeping draught. He will not wake for many hours, I pray.”

  “Is there any hope?” asked Eleyna in a hoarse voice.

  “Nazha. I am sorry.”

  “I will stay,” said Beatriz. “You know where you must go, Eleynita.”

  “Yes.” Numb, Eleyna left the room.

  Her mother followed her. “Is it true Sario murdered Andreo?” Dionisa asked the question tentatively, as if afraid to know.

  “Yes. I must go to the Viehos Fratos now.”

  To her horror, her mother acquiesced without a fight. She just let Eleyna go and returned to Agustin’s bedside.

  Eleyna climbed the stairs to the Atelierro. Monster. Monster. Monster. Each word echoed with the fall of a foot on a stair. I no less than him for letting him teach me even after I knew what he had done.

  At her uncle’s order, Damiano reluctantly let her in. The Limners stood around the portrait of Saavedra, staring, pointing, arguing. There were so few of them. They looked so weak, especially compared to Sario’s strength and his great skill. No wonder he despised them. No wonder he wanted only to restore the Grijalva family to its former glory.

  Eiha, moronna! Soon you will be murdering them at his behest!

  “You have seen the oscurra,” she said. They grumbled but did not stop her from approaching. “Here, the pattern begins. … Where is Cabral?”

  “He is not Gifted,” said Giaberto gravely.

  “I am not Gifted. He is eldest here. It was his memory of this portrait that made us all admit the truth, was it not?”

  So demoralized were they that Damiano was sent to fetch Cabral at once, with no further argument. When he left, the arguments broke out again. None of them wanted to admit to the horrible truth.

  “But you cannot move people into or out of paintings!” protested Zosio. “It is not possible. I would suppose he painted this in order to force her to leave Tira Virte.”

  “No.” Giaberto shook his head. “Eleyna is correct. If we read these oscurra, we see binding spells, not suggestion spells. Damiano searched for ten days through our old storerooms and found an inventory done in the time of Cossimio I. Unless we have multiple copies of this portrait displayed in the Galerria, she has certainly changed position within the painting.” Only Zosio grumbled. The others, with their stricken faces, had obviously already admitted the truth. Giaberto spoke plaintively. “But if she is truly alive in there, how to get her out?”

  “I have now studied this painting thoroughly,” said Eleyna. “The door looks familiar to me.”

  Damiano returned with Cabral as she spoke. The old man stared at the portrait for a long time, with evident feeling, one he did not share with the others. After a long while Cabral shook his head as a servant girl shakes down cobwebs with a broom. “Familiar, but distantly so. Like Eleyna I feel the door rests somewhe
re in this Palasso.”

  “We three will go look,” said Giaberto.

  They made their way into the oldest part of the house, ancient corridors whose plank floors were warped by time, whose corners no longer fit at proper angles. Some of these were servant quarters, some storerooms. But there was also a flight of stairs, dimly seen in the gloom, that led to a whitewashed corridor grayed now with dust and years.

  “Strange,” muttered Giaberto. “I thought I knew every part of this Palasso. I don’t recall this.”

  They missed it the first time they walked down the corridor, although how they could have missed it when it stood right there in the wall—only magic could cause such blindness. It was a door, an ordinary door and yet not ordinary at all: old polished mahoghany with a wrought-iron latch, painted with a border of faded sigils. Iron-studded and iron-bound.

  Cabral opened it, for it was not locked by any mechanical means. It was simply not there, unless one knew it must be and therefore saw it. Eleyna shivered to think that no one had known in over three hundred years—no, one man had known. Sario had known.

  In the chamber behind the door dust lay in swathes so thick her footsteps left a visible trail. Slowly they entered. More slowly Eleyna turned once round, gaping. Through the dust and grime she marked traces of old grandeur and all else the same as it was in the portrait: windows, a table, a candle and a lamp, a mirror set on an easel, its face so smothered in dust she could see no reflection at all. The setting lacked only the jewel-encrusted book and the woman.

  “Here she was painted,” said Giaberto in a low, awed voice. “Was this her room once? Must we clean this in order to free her?”

  Cabral ran a finger over the table and dust rose into the light.

  Eleyna sneezed. “Couldn’t you … paint the other side of the door and … spell it free of binding oscurra, so Saavedra could open it? Isn’t she already trying to?”

  “Matra Dolcha,” murmured Giaberto, turning to look at her. “Of course! It needs nothing more complicated than that, perhaps. You should have been Gifted, ninia meya.”

  She flinched away from him.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said quickly. “Forgive me, Eleyna.”

  “You meant no harm, Zio.” The harm had already been done, all those years he and the others had denied her.

  “Come, Eleynita.” Cabral took her arm. Together they returned to the Atelierro.

  As Premio Frato, Giaberto took command of the others. “I will take the risk onto myself,” he said, “for the rest of you must remain strong if I should fail.”

  Eleyna stared as he began his preparations. Never had she thought to witness this! He took a lancet, warmed it to a blue heat in a flame, and pierced his skin. He mixed paints with his own blood, and although she half expected it, no misty supernatural haze rose from the blooded paints, nor did they sizzle or burn or show any sign of their new state. Tears he took, and his own saliva, and a cloudy substance from a vial already prepared.

  There were many panels in the Atelierro. They chose an oak panel, set it against one wall, for it was too large to rest on an easel. From memory Giaberto sketched the door onto the ground, Eleyna and Cabral correcting him there, and there, and there. Then he painted—at the first attempt—an old mahogany door, iron-studded, iron-bound, with a border of sigils, set against a plain whitewashed wall. Twined into the border he painted the symbology she knew: hazelnut oil for Knowledge, leaf of the waterwillow for Freedom, rosemary for Remembrance.

  The middle night bells rang across the city, a long peal announcing Mirraflores, the month of flowering, of restoration, of fertility. Into the wet paint he set oscurra, lines as delicate as the tracings on a palm, as a bird’s feet tracking through damp marsh sand, as the striations on a petal: There is no binding here. There is freedom.

  The first hint of dawn stained the rooftops when he finished and stepped back.

  “Matra ei Filho!” swore Cabral.

  It was not precisely movement. It was a shifting, a flowing, a sudden sense of urgency.

  The door is open!

  The chamber in the great portrait was complete to every last detail. But it was empty, as if no person had ever resided there. Giaberto collapsed into a chair just as the latch turned in his painting.

  The door opened. A woman stepped carefully down an unseen step and walked into the room. She stared, blinking her eyes against unaccustomed light. Like an unspoken exclamation, she laid an open hand against her own bare throat, a breath caught, held, and at last released. She walked, gingerly, to the wall and ran unwrinkled fingers down the smooth grain of wood. She spun, slowly, ash-rose skirts belling out, and surveyed the entire chamber. At last she walked up to Eleyna and touched her, first her arm, then the fabric of her gown and the ribbon at the gown’s high waist. The woman’s skin was cool to the touch, but she was manifestly alive.

  “You are Eleyna,” she said. She had an odd, rich accent unlike anything Eleyna had ever heard. “I saw you painting, and you spoke to me. I am Saavedra. How long has it been?”

  EIGHTY-EIGHT

  Three hundred and sixty-three years.

  She sat in a chair in the Grijalva Atelierro—so changed! so much larger!—and regarded her audience: nine Gifted Limners; an old man; a young woman the same age as herself.

  No. Not the same age. Impossibility. Sario had made it so.

  The other was young, the other Grijalva woman. She was not. She had added it up, once told: Three hundred and eighty-three years old.

  Matra ei Filho. What had he done, what had he wrought with Gift, with Luza do’Orro, with unflagging ambition, ruthless execution of such undertakings as he believed were necessary?

  With Raimon’s approval.

  She closed her eyes. Sanguo Raimon was dead twice over: once, by plunging his Chieva into his Peintraddo; and again, killed by years, by decades, by centuries.

  Three hundred and eighty-three years old.

  By far the oldest Grijalva.

  Irony. And anger. That he could, that he would, do such to her.

  So much time. So little reflection of it, save in the mirror he had painted into the portrait. And even less reflected in her face, her body. The child was but three days older, despite its father’s death centuries before.

  Alejandro. Dead.

  They sent for food, and she ate ravenously, unable to deny the needs of her body newly freed from imprisonment, from the bindings of oscurra. And yet her thoughts, profligate in their haste, rebelled against such truths as were new to her: she was but three days older; the child was but three months within her womb.

  She ate, ignoring their fascination. They watched and whispered, all save the young woman, Eleyna, who sat at her side. Waiting.

  Alejandro. Dead.

  Saavedra set down her fork with a muted clatter of metal on metal. Her hands shook; she could not hold them still. Was it some rebellion of her body? Some decaying of flesh now freed from painted preservation?

  Pain engulfed. Matra Dolcha—

  No. Not decay. Grief.

  “Dead,” she said, and heard the tremor in her voice. “Alive yesterday. Dead today.”

  Eleyna’s voice was quiet. “Who?”

  “Alejandro.” She had loved to speak it. Now it hurt, knowing he could not hear it. “Alejandro Baltran Edoard Alessio do’Verrada, Duke of Tira Virte.”

  “Regretto,” Eleyna murmured.

  Grief might be mitigated by anger. She used it so. “But Sario is alive. And I will have my revenge.”

  “Sario?” It was the old man, Cabral. “Sario Grijalva? But of course he is dead. Ignaddio Grijalva painted a touching Morta of him. It hangs in the Picca.”

  She flinched. “’Naddi—?” But he too was dead. All of them, dead. “What is the Picca?”

  “It is a small galerria we Grijalvas use to exhibit paintings to the public.”

  “To the public? But—no one save Grijalvas are permitted into our home!”

  “Now,” the old man said kindl
y, “they are.”

  Eiha, but it hurt; they knew far more of her than she of them, and the world they inhabited was centuries beyond hers.

  “That isn’t important,” Eleyna said crisply, offering no offense despite her tone. Saavedra liked her at once and hoped to know her better. Indeed, the world had changed; Eleyna Grijalva, an unGifted woman, stood among the Viehos Fratos. “How can you believe that Sario Grijalva is still alive?” Eleyna asked.

  Despite the question, Saavedra sensed that the young woman already knew the answer. Knew more than she had yet admitted—perhaps even to herself. She rose from the table, pressing hands against actual wood instead of painted wood, and walked—Sweet Mother, to walk again!—to the huge panel set against the wall, and studied it. Examined the remains of her imprisonment.

  Genius, of course. She could see it in each line, every shadow. How could no one look upon the work and not know the hand that painted it?

  “Sario,” she said. “My Sario.” Even without her body in the portrait, the composition remained superb. “Here is the mirror,” she said, indicating it. “Here, set upon the easel. A conceit of his, I am certain, as it was a conceit to paint in the Folio. Such things are of arrogance, of certainty of self, and very like him.” She turned slightly, looked at the Limners, and saw they did not as yet understand. “Here,” she said clearly, indicating it again. “Because of the mirror I came to understand what had been done to me, and that the world beyond my frame continued, even if Saavedra Grijalva did not.” Grief tugged at her. “Not the Saavedra any of them knew.”

  Cabral’s aged face was frozen into a complex transformation from incomprehension into bitter, and horrified, understanding.

  “When I found I could move, I studied first the book—and then discovered the mirror. And in it I saw people. So many people, so many years … an ever-changing galerria of people, with faces and clothing far different from any I knew.” She found it easier now to speak of it; she was free, and her past was no one’s present. “There were times I could see nothing, trapped by darkness as if a cloth had been draped over the panel—but once I found the mirror I could see. Sometimes I even believed I could hear their voices speaking to me, though their accents were strange—as strange as yours are now to my ears.” She turned to Eleyna. “You I saw most recently, because you worked before the painting.”