The Golden Key (149 page)

“Yes.” She hesitated, then handed him a folded piece of paper.

“What is this? Can’t it wait?”

She dared look him straight in the eye. The true Luza do’Orro, this one!
She
, who had discovered a new spell, she who was not even Gifted. “You must read it now.”

He rolled his eyes. Eiha! As well to humor her for a moment. Women took strange notions into their heads on Mirraflores. It was expected of them. He took the paper and unfolded it hastily, impatient to continue their work.

And staggered.

It is the only way, Sario.

Her
writing.
Her
voice, echoing down through the years: “
Burn it. Burn it down, all of it. Everything in the Crechetta.
”

Here, on this paper, in fresh ink, those simple words that had bound them irrevocably.

It is the only way, Sario.

In
her
handwriting.

His hand shook as if with a palsy. He looked up, caught an expression on Eleyna’s face, the face of a child who has opened a door and seen a monster. But it passed. It all passed, sooner or later, one life into the next.

“Where did you get this?” he demanded, shaking the paper almost against her skin.

“At Palasso Grijalva.”

He crumpled the paper into a ball. “You betrayed me, to
them!
How could you? You are my estuda!”

She did not answer, just stared at him.

Saavedra’s handwriting. He knew it as intimately as he did his own. Everything about her, for she was so much a part of him that it was almost as if she were his own creation. He pushed past Eleyna and walked out the door. Walked out through the suite, through the sitting room where Alazais sat passively on the silk couch, embroidering. Her head moved, to look at him as a sunflower turns with the sun, but he did not have time for her inane comments. She was nothing, a trifle.

He ignored the stares as he strode through the Palasso to the Galerria. It was impossible, of course. He flung the doors open and almost ran down the long hall.

Stopped. There she was, in her place. Moronno! To think that Saavedra could have gotten free without him! No one knew. How could they know? How could they alter the great spell he had wrought?

And yet… This
was
her handwriting. He walked closer. Closer
still. Came to the brink, until he could practically step into the portrait.

He smelled the tang of drying paint.
Eleyna’s
copy!

What had they done with Saavedra?

Still clutching the note, he ran to the stables. “I need a carriage, a horse, a conveyence! Adezo!”

“Lord Limner Sario, it is inadvisable to travel outside the Palasso grounds—”

“Now! Moronno! If I must ride in a butcher’s cart, I will do so!”

In the end, it was a vegetable cart. Perhaps he looked an odd sight, a well-dressed man sitting next to the grizzled old driver, but none of that mattered. People stared and pointed, but they let them through, for the riot had died down days ago and today was Mirraflores, the day girls celebrated their passage into womanhood.

He smoothed out the crumpled paper, hearing old echoes in his head.

“
I carry a child!” she had cried, when he cut her, when he proved to her she was Gifted. Alejandro’s child, growing beneath her heart even as Sario painted her Alejandro’s fertile seed, that had taken root. Never would he countenance this. Saavedra was his! His alone!

Or had there been other reasons? It was so long ago. He could not remember them clearly, not anymore.

“Here we are, Maesso,” said the old driver. “Begging your pardon, my lord, but we’ve been sitting here and you haven’t moved. I’d be grateful if you’d get down. My granddaughter has a feast tonight, and I’m not willing to be late so that you can stare at nothings in the air. Matra Dolcha, these Limners. I’ve heard it said before they’re all half-mad, but I never believed it until now.”

Sario shook himself and looked around. They had indeed come to Palasso Grijalva, which lay quiet, as dark as if it had been abandoned, emptied, given to the passing years. Shaking now, he sprang down and ran through the tunnel that led to the courtyard.

He wrenched open the doors that led up to the Atelierro and took the steps two at a time. Threw open the doors at the top.

Matra ei Filho! There they stood in the light that flooded the great chamber, nine buffoons and old Cabral, looking as if the cat had come in and caught the mice at the cream. There was, of course, no sign of Saavedra. They had tricked him.

But there, behind them, he saw the back of a huge panel. He knew it instantly, although he could not see the image. He could
feel
it, his work, his sigils, his blood and tears and seed and spittle
melded with oak and oils and pigments, sealed with the oscurra he had learned from the old Tza’ab, the secrets of the Al-Fansihirro.

He walked across the plank floor. And was stopped.

Stopped dead. His feet could not move.

An instant later he knew it for what it was: a spell painted onto the floor. Moronno that he was, he had walked straight into their trap, right across the floor into the circle of oscurra that now ringed, and weighted, his feet. He had not believed them cunning enough to do it. Or perhaps this, too, had been Eleyna’s idea.

Enraged, he lifted the paper and displayed it to them. “Who has done this?” he shouted. “Which of you? Why did you steal my painting?”

“I have done this.” She stepped out from behind them: masses of coiled ringlets, clear gray eyes. “‘I will do as they tell me,”’ she said, echoing words he had long since forgotten, words that now accused him, in
her
voice.

Blessed Matra, her long-silenced voice.

She quoted him again. “‘I will give them a
Peintraddo Chieva
, but it will not be the real one. That, I will keep. That, I will lock away. And only you, and only I, shall know the truth of it.”’ Her face was the same, but her manner was harder, angrier. “
I know you
, Sario. I know it is you.”

“’Vedra.” Her name, on his lips. Like strokes made by a hand long barred from painting, the form came with difficulty. But it was her. Glorious Saavedra. “I was only waiting for you until the time was right. Then I meant to release you.” He did not move to touch her, not yet. “It is too early. Who has done this? It was for
me
to do!”

“Not too
early.
Too
late.
By many years too late, Sario.” He did not comprehend her anger. Saavedra was never angry with
him.
“By what right did you tear me away from Alejandro? By what right did you paint me into a prison from which you had no intention of releasing me?”

“That isn’t true!”

“I have lost my life!” she cried.

“Lost your
life
? I saved you from death! From becoming a gaping, empty-eyed skull, from becoming dust like all the others. Like
Alejandro!
”

“You did not save me,” she said fiercely. “You
robbed
me. Robbed me of years, of those I knew and loved, of all the things in the world—
in my time
—that I treasured. All I have left of them is you—and the child.”

He flinched.
The child.
The one thing he could never give her—he,
who was no man in the eyes of the world, only and eternally a boy who painted. Was that why she had turned to Alejandro? “’Vedra,” he pleaded. “You don’t understand—”

“I understand this, Sario: that you will pay the price for what you have done. I have prayed before the altar, I have asked the Matra’s forgiveness, asked Alejandro’s forgiveness, for what I must now do. But I will give my child—Alejandro’s child—what is due him, and if that means I must sacrifice you, be certain I shall do it.”

What had happened to his faithful, pliant Saavedra? She who had always known and accepted his Gift and his destiny? She had always loved him best. Except she had
dared
love Alejandro, who had nothing to recommend him except a handsome face—with its crooked, imperfect tooth!—and that restless animal energy that drew the eye—and his people—to him. Alejandro was
nothing.
Alejandro was only what Sario had made him. Once he made her understand that—

“Tie his hands behind his back,” Saavedra said to Cabral. She looked long at the assembled Limners, all but Sario. “You Viehos Fratos were always so enamored of your own power that you forgot—forget!—how fragile a thing it is.”

“We have never forgotten,” Giaberto protested.

Never forgotten. The words hung in the air. Never forgotten, just as the first Sario, as Riobaro, as Oaquino and Guilbarro and all the others he had been, were never forgotten because their genius lived on in their paintings.

Blessed Matra!
They meant to bind his hands.

Cabral advanced on him with a length of stout rope. Sario was strong, but Cabral with the aid of young Damiano was stronger. It was not just physical strength that overwhelmed him; it was the sight of Saavedra,
alive
, staring at him, her great beauty incandescent once more in her face. But her face was turned against him, her gray eyes as hard as granite and her lips set and unforgiving.

It was Saavedra who bound his hands, though she set no hand on him. It was she who imprisoned him, though she moved no step from her place among the Viehos Fratos. From her place at their head, for any moronno could see at once that they deferred to her.

To the First Mistress! How Riobaro would have laughed at the irony. Perhaps all the Mistresses would have laughed: sweet Benissia; poor doomed Saalendra; exquisite Corasson; Rafeya; the incomparable Diega; Lina; confident Tazita; practical Lissina; that canna Tazia. They knew that a Mistress might have secrets that a Lord Limner could never know.

By whose power had the Grijalvas truly won their place? Through the Limners, or through their sisters and female cousins?

So he, the greatest Lord Limner, faced Saavedra, the first and most famous of the Grijalva Mistresses. How had they come to be at odds?

“’Vedra,” he began. He must only convince her. Once she understood what they could accomplish together—

“Take him from my sight,” she said coldly. “My Sario is dead to me. Dead; as is Alejandro, and Raimon and Ignaddio and all the others I knew. What stands here is only the remains of Sario.”

Dead. Not that. Never that, spiritless meat and bone.

“I
am
Sario,” he cried. “You know is it I, Saavedra. You know I am here, though I wear another man’s body. The body is nothing, only flesh so that I might live another life, so that I may perfect—” He broke off.

They looked, oddly enough, horrified, as if something he had said had caused them all revulsion. They looked as Eleyna had looked, at the Palasso, staring at him as if he were a monster.

But tears glittered in Saavedra’s eyes. She
did
understand, then.

“Is there no chamber where you may confine him safely?” she asked of the others. “There is much to do if we are to be prepared for the assembly two days hence.”

“’Vedra, don’t abandon me now. I
need
you.”

“En verro,” she said. “As you always needed me.”

At that instant he felt a burning along his skin, in his eyes and on his tongue. He had lived far too many years not to know his body’s reactions intimately, not to know what each presaged.

“My paintings!” he cried, horrified. “Someone is destroying
my paintings.
” Soaking them. Ruining them! “You must stop this, ‘Vedra!”

She came forward, but only to bend and brush water on the patterns painted onto the floor at his feet, to dissolve the oscurra.
Her
oscurra—the Gifted woman. So she had finally admitted it, accepted it—and used it against
him!

She stood, stared at him, seemed to study him, seeking
what
he could not know. Only that she, of them all, would surely understand him. And forgive him. She always had.

“’Vedra—” he whispered.

She turned her back on him.

The others led him away. There were too many, and he had never learned how to fight in any obvious brute physical fashion. Not in any of his lives. His hands were too important.

But none of that mattered. What mattered was that Saavedra had
returned to him. She had returned, only to forsake him once and for all time.

When they shoved him into a small whitewashed chamber, empty of furniture or any adornment, and locked the door, he stood in the center of the room and wept.

  NINETY