The Golden Key (111 page)

But they were handsome enough rooms, Eleyna reflected as they walked along the corridor. Large windows looked down over the courtyard, giving way to a whitewashed wall bordered by
azulejos
, the blue and white rosette tiles trimmed with green that were the symbol of Palasso Grijalva. So handsome that Dionisa had made no effort to throw Yberra’s sonless mother out of her better-placed rooms. Instead she had beautified her own, as if announcing her refusal to be stained by Tazia’s bad name.

They walked into the safety of the parlor. Eleyna tossed her sketchpad and her shawl onto a couch.

“You needn’t antagonize Yberra,” said Beatriz.

Eleyna shot her a glance but said nothing. Beatriz was so kind that it was impossible to be angry with her.

“I’m going back to the studio,” said Agustin. “Davo says he’s got a new batch of dye from the madders, and we’re going to blend rose madder for watercolors.”

“Don’t do anything foolish,” said Eleyna.

“Davo won’t let him,” said Beatriz.

Agustin’s fine mouth quivered into a smile. He was a boy made homely by years of delicate health. That he had survived the Summer Fever two years ago was a miracle granted by the Mother. His robust twin siblings had not been so lucky.

“I won’t,” he promised. He kissed his sisters and walked distractedly away into the hall. Eleyna wandered out to the balcony that overlooked the street. Beatriz followed her. They leaned on the wrought iron railing that was twined into the shapes of keys: ornate door keys, skeleton keys, tiny jewel-lock keys making a lacework at the corners.

Eleyna contemplated the broad avenida. “Look how few people are out. It’s too quiet, and not just because it’s siesta.” She heard no more musketfire.

“Mother will scheme until Agustin is named as the next Lord Limner,” said Beatriz gently, a soft reminder. Indeed, she appeared the gentlest of creatures in her lavender morning dress, white lace gloves held in one hand, black lace shawl draped becomingly over her dark hair.

Eleyna’s lace shawl was tangled at her shoulders, and now she fussed with it self-consciously, although Beatriz was the last person who would berate her for carelessness. “Agustin isn’t strong enough to be Lord Limner. He’ll refuse it.”

“Can he refuse Mother?”

“He can refuse her once. I can refuse for him, in his name, after that.”

“You can’t be his strength forever, Eleyna.”

Love and desperate anger made her voice shake. “Can’t I? I won’t marry again, and I’ll probably outlive him. He needs to be protected.”

A crash came from the parlor, followed by a curse. Beatriz started and hurried back into the parlor.

“Where is she?” demanded a male voice. “Where is that ungrateful daughter of mine?”

“Now, Patro,” began Beatriz in her soft voice.

Eleyna swept back through the curtains that screened off the balcony, stopping to close the glass doors behind her, carefully, latching them. “I am here, Patro.” She turned to face him.

Revirdin had lost his cane, perhaps on the edge of the carpet, and knocked over a slender side table, breaking a Zhinna vase. Now Beatriz settled him in a chair while he glared at Eleyna as if his mishap with the table was her fault. The carriage accident that had ruined him for painting had not improved his temper, and it had only gotten worse in the last seven years as his daughter’s gifts flowered.

“Do I hear that you continue to refuse the young Heir?” he demanded. “Eiha! When I think how long we argued with Andreo and the Viehos Fratos to let
you
be brought forward as the candidate, once it was known the Heir wished for a Grijalva Mistress. No, no, they said, you would prove intractable. But even I thought you would do your duty to your family. And if not that, then be swayed by the many presents he will shower on you. It is even likely he will give you land and a manor house—that’s traditional. Many a Grijalva Mistress has married into the nobility after her lover is wed. Have I raised a fool?”

“I don’t want presents! I don’t want a noble husband!”

“No more of that, filha! Your mother is coming. Give me my walking stick, Beatriz.”

She already had it in her hand. Now she gave it to her father, and Revirdin Grijalva rested the ebony cane across his legs, clutching it with his left—now his only—hand. His right arm ended just below the elbow. A black ribbon tied off his jacket sleeve so that it would not flap or get in his way when he moved about. He also had refused a move to rooms on the ground floor, where he would not have the painful climb up three flights of steps. Now he rose in courtesy, as was expected of a man greeting a woman, although the
gesture caused him to grimace even when he was expecting the pain.

Dionisa entered alone, having shed her escort of Limner brother and cousins and in-laws. “Sit down, Revirdin.” She kissed her husband on the cheek, coolly, and nodded to Beatriz, who promptly helped her father resume his seat. Dionisa turned her steely gaze on Eleyna. There were, as usual, no pleasantries. “You
will
be Don Edoard’s Mistress. You are good for nothing else.”

“I can paint.”

“You are barren.”

“I won’t do it!”

“Don Edoard has seen you and wants you, though Matra help him when he is subject to your temper.”

Revirdin snorted. “My mother always said that Arrigo, bless his departed soul, was in thrall to Tazia’s spiteful tongue.”

Dionisa spared her husband a glance, but no more than that, before she rapped the table hard with her knuckles for emphasis. “It is decided, Eleyna. We will no longer indulge you. I have already spoken to Giaberto. He wanted Lord Limner Andreo’s position; he’s as good as Andreo. But of course the Grand Duke would not allow him to become Lord Limner because he is Tazia’s nephew. It didn’t matter that her sisters repudiated her. Eiha! What’s past is past. Now Don Edoard has seen you and wants you. Everyone says the young man is headstrong, spoiled, and a bit stupid. You can have anything, all the power—”

“And be like Grandzia Tazia, whose sisters repudiated her?”

Dionisa’s expression turned from imperious anger to a mask of rage. “Beatriz, leave the room.”

“Yes, Mama.”

Eleyna did not try to call her sister back. She did not want to subject Beatriz to the diatribe she could see was coming.

But Dionisa’s voice did not rise. She spoke in a devestatingly normal tone. “We have received a private message from the Grand Duke that you are to be escorted to Chasseriallo in three days’ time. Know this: Giaberto and I are determined that if you will not agree to Edoard of your own will, then you will agree
despite
your will.”

Eleyna’s heart pounded in her ears as the full horror of her mother’s calm statement swept over her. Fear and anger choked the words in her throat. It grew so quiet in the parlor that when her father coughed, it sounded as sharp as the crack of a musket.

Eleyna had to bite down on her lower lip to stop herself from trembling. “You would do to me again what you did to me with Felippo?” She almost sobbed aloud. “How could you?”

“We will do what we must. A portrait is already half-finished—not Giaberto’s finest work, by any means, but sufficient to the task. In three days the Grand Duke will send servants to escort you to Chasseriallo. In what state of mind you go is your own choice. I will expect your answer tomorrow. If you agree and give me your word on your Grandmother Leilias’ honor, you are free to go untouched. Adezo. Go to your room. Your father and I have matters to discuss.”

Struck dumb with helpless fury, Eleyna could barely muster enough composure to walk out of the room. When she came to the bedchamber she shared with Beatriz, she collapsed on the bed, burying her face in the coverlet.

How could they?
How could they
?

Five years ago … Matra Dolcha! If they were willing to do it then, why not now? She had been sixteen, defiant, stubborn, determined to make her mark as a Grijalva—by painting, the art that flowed through her bloodlines. She had endured the Confirmattio—twice!—did not conceive although all of the boys involved later proved to be unGifted. Because of that and because she refused to obey her mother’s strictures about a Grijalva woman’s duty, her parents agreed to marry her to Felippo Grijalva.

At sixty, Felippo had already buried two wives, who had between them produced a Gifted son as well as five other children. Most importantly, he had fulfilled his duty as a competent but uninspired copyist for his more illustrious Gifted relatives, painting un-spelled copies of the spelled
Treaties
that were sent to foreign courts as binding records of these agreements. Chiefly, he had assisted in the delicate undertaking that led to the betrothal of Mairie de Ghillas to Renayo II rather than to her Ghillasian cousin, Ivo IV, who had stolen the Ghillasian throne out from under Renayo’s nose.

So the Conselhos, in their wisdom, had rewarded Felippo with a handsome and very young bride, one he had chosen himself.

The bride had refused.

The tears came fast now. Eleyna pressed her knuckles into her eyes, unwilling to relive the humiliation.

But she could not help remembering the day of his funeral, sitting in the widow’s chair beside his deathbed, one hand clasped to her bosom with genuine grief … only to find the besotted girl’s infatuation with which she regarded her elderly husband fading away, dissipating, as she stared at his face in the repose of death. Mourners filed past while she struggled to make sense of her thoughts.

Matra Dolcha! He repelled her! Old, lecherous, with the scabrous skin that came of handling paints for many years … yet she had doted on him, petted him, flattered him. Now the emotion slipped off her like water. She hadn’t liked him at all. She had refused him. She had refused her parents, her relatives, utterly refused.

“
I will not marry Felippo Grijalva.
”

She had sat beside his bier that day and finally understood she had been living in a dream for almost three years. Waking, she had stared with blank confusion at her black lace gloves and the old black gown twenty years out of date, cut to her figure, its tight stays constricting her. She had heard the condolences of her relatives as through a wall, muted by stone.

In the end, Leilias told her the truth: The Limners had stolen her blood and tears and used their Gift—their magic—to paint her into acquiescence.

“
I was against it!” Leilias had railed. “Eiha, you can be sure I was against it. But Tazia’s blood bred true in that line, whatever her sisters claimed. They did it without anyone else knowing, Dionisa and Giaberto. And once it was done, eiha! ‘No harm done.’ That’s what the rest said. ‘Won’t hurt the girl to learn some humility.’ With Zevierin dead, Matra bless his fine soul, and my Justino dead as well, poor child, and Vitorrio still abroad, there was nothing I could do but appeal to their honor. That a son of mine would countenance this! You can be sure I told Revirdin what I thought of allowing them to spell his own daughter! But you are back with me now, mennina. I won’t let them touch you again.
”

But Leilias was dead, killed in the last, belated burst of the Summer Fever that had carried off Felippo in its first flowering. Two months after his death, Eleyna had caught it and miscarried that poor deformed child, her final penance.

“They will not touch me again,” she swore into the pillow. The pillow did not, of course, reply, but the soft linen cover absorbed the last of her tears. She heard the door open and close softly and reared up, ready to confront the intruder.

It was Beatriz. She held a basket of oranges and grapes. “I thought you might be hungry.”

Eleyna flung herself down on the bed again. “I’m not.”

“You might be later. Mama has decided to lock you in the room. I rescued your sketchpad from the parlor.”

“Grazzo.” She was too exhausted by now to feel angry about this final insult. Locked in her room!

“Grandzio Cabral is outside, waiting to talk to you.”

“I don’t want to talk to him!”

Eleyna’s temper never had the slightest impact on Beatriz’s composure. “Of course you don’t, but you might as well greet him kindly, since you have no choice.”

At that, Eleyna began to chuckle. “Oh, Beatriz, how do you manage it? If I have no choice, I might as well show my true feelings. Don’t you have any?”

Beatriz smiled at her and went to the door. Normally no one but their father or brother was allowed into their private suite, but Cabral was not only their great-uncle but a man who could speak his mind to the Grand Duke himself. If he wished to speak to his great-niece in the privacy of her bedchamber, not one soul on the council was likely to argue.

Cabral, looking suitably somber, entered carrying a painting under one arm. Setting it on the easel propped up in one corner of the room, he lifted the protective cloth off to display Eleyna’s own painting, the
Battle of Rio Sanguo.

In the foreground the future Duke Renayo held his dying father, Alesso, while to the left a captured Tza’ab warrior prostrated himself. Beyond the mob of retainers lay the battlefield itself, still littered with the dead, and the plains of Joharra stretched out into a distance made golden by the sun newly unveiled from the clouds.

“Very fine, which you know,” said Cabral with fine disregard for Eleyna’s tear-stained face and the crumpled bedding, evidence of her distress. “Most painters can’t resist copying Bartollin’s
Battle
, but you instead chose to echo the old
Morta
of Verro Grijalva done by Piedro Grijalva. An echo, no more, just enough to touch the eyes and set the heart to wondering. But it’s not in the modern style. I wonder if you have given too much brightness and detail to the background. It pulls attention away from the little triangle you have drawn—”

“They say I don’t use classical forms, Zio, but I do! You see it, don’t you? Renayo in the center with the other two figures below him, one on each side.”

“It is well composed,” said Cabral.

Eleyna forgot, for a moment, all her trials.
Well composed.
Those were words to treasure.

“A steward from the do’Casteya household has expressed interest in buying it for Count Maldonno’s Galerria.”