The Golden Key (146 page)

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 somewhere 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 kindly, “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.”

Eleyna nodded. “I copied you.”

“And there was Sario. Always Sario. His clothing changed, his companions … but he was always there. To visit. Perhaps to gloat.” Tears threatened; not of grief, not as they were for Alejandro, but for what had become of a boy who had promised so very much—and delivered far more. “I last saw him standing beside you.”