The Golden Key (124 page)

She also must learn a better Ghillasian accent. He spoke to her in equal measure in Ghillasian and in his own language, but he could not reproduce her original charming accent. The real princess had been a quick study in languages, perhaps because she also had a good ear for music.

That, too. She must hear music so she could recognize concertos, learn to sing a few appropriate songs. She must learn to dance. She must know wine. No one would credit a Ghillasian princess who, no matter how traumatized, could not distinguish between her reds and her whites.

And though she would of necessity arrive dressed humbly, in order to lend a certain rough verisimilitude to her story, she must also know cloth and clothing, be attuned to the nuances of fashion. The real princess had loved to “dress up,” as she had in her naive fashion called it. She had been even more naive than the young Mechella, if that were possible, but Mechella had possessed a fine eye for color and a strong natural sense for cut and weave. The real
Alazais had not been so blessed.
This
Alazais would have the best of taste.

This would all take much longer than he had planned.

He let her watch as he penned a note—he must tutor her in her letters as well—which he would have sent to Arguena, to let her servants know there had been an unspecified delay. Then he made a list, which he had her copy, of everything they would need. In this, as in everything else, she was a quick study.

“Work on forming your letters,” he said to her, “until I return. Always remember that you must speak of your past to no one until I give you leave. You are always in danger. We must keep your identity secret.”

“I will speak of it to no one,” she agreed.

He left the tray of empty plates and cups by the door and went down the stairs slowly, examining the mural painted there. The painting moved by elaborate stages up the stairs and down again, following the trail of the steps of the proprietor who ran the wine shop and kept Sario supplied with food, drink, clean linen and clothing, the necessities of life, when he was in residence in his attic hideaway. The painting itself was bordered by wreaths of vines and flowers and plants; within this border, a man serves his master with fidelity and devoted affection; he raises his own family and passes this duty on to a son or nephew, who in his turn climbs and descends the stairs. Into this innocuous if startling stairway storybook Sario had painted—and repainted, when the painting needed to be renewed—his own blood and tears as well as oils and essences from the herbs and flowers represented: violet for Faithfulness, plum for Fidelity, vervain for Enchantment, and belladonna for Silence.

He had painted similar, if better disguised, spells into the trim that surrounded the doors and windows of the wine shop. Thus was the shop sealed. So had he found refuge here for three hundred years, in the old market district of the city, which had not changed much over the centuries. He had renewed the painting as the old Arriano and would renew it again just before he discarded this body. Coming into the back room of the shop he startled the proprietor, a robust man in his forties who was, at this moment, examining a printed tract.

“I beg your pardon, Maesso.” The proprietor jumped to his feet and crumpled the stiff paper in his hands.

“Is that a broadside?” asked Sario, curious to know what had caused Oliviano to color such a deep stain of purple. “Something subversive, I trust?”

“Nothing at all, Maesso.”

“Let me see it.”
It
was indeed a printed broadside, crude letters and poor ink quality, bemoaning the Grand Duke’s resistance to convening the Corteis and protesting the recent executions. “Dangerous sentiments.” Sario handed the page back to Oliviano. “I trust you will burn this?”

“Yes, Maesso. I will do it now.”

Sario detested these new polite honorifics, Maesso and Maessa, which were now the fashion in the merchant and guild quarters of the city; they were a bastardization of the old guild title of Master. But he had learned to change with the times. “I need some things, Maesso Oliviano. As you know, my sister has sent me her niece from Ghillas—” It was a bald-faced lie, and they both knew it, but it served to smooth over awkward questions. “—and I need a woman to come in, for ten or twenty days, to tutor her in the gentler arts. You know the city well. She must be a woman of gentle birth, born in Ghillas or the daughter of Ghillasians, one who can speak the language with a pure accent, one who can embroider, who can play the lute and teach my niece a few songs, a few dance steps.”

The proprietor had by this time recovered from Sario’s discovery of the broadside. He was a canny merchant; his father had been content to run the wineshop quietly during Dioniso’s life. Oliviano had, with Arriano’s permission, expanded his business even as Meya Suerta itself had expanded.

“It will take a few days.”

“See that it is done quickly, and I will see that your eldest daughter is provided with a good dowry.”

“You are too generous!”

“I think not. This woman must, in addition, board with you and your wife while she teaches my niece.”

“Eiha.” Oliviano mused over this request. His father would have responded without questioning; Oliviano, about forty now, did not defer to the “young” Sario as he had to Arriano. “We can find room.” Disconcertingly, he winked at Sario. “You mean to marry the girl to a young man of good family? She is certainly pretty enough.”

Sario’s hackles went up. He did not like to be spoken to this familiarly. “That is my business, not yours. Do as I ask and you and your family will be rewarded.”

“As you wish, Maesso.” The proprietor bowed.

Satisfied, Sario climbed the stairs back to the attic, where he found Alazais carefully copying her letters. She had a beautiful
hand, and it disturbed him just a little bit to see those fingers, which yesterday had been ignorant of forming letters, copying his precise writing so perfectly.

Maessa Louissa was a woman with diffident manners, a thin face, a perfect Ghillasian accent, and a gown that was as faded as it was finely made, perhaps ten years out of fashion but precise in every detail. She was the only daughter of Isobella, a lady-in-waiting who had come from Lillone with Grand Duchess Mairie and then fallen out of favor for falling in love—without her mistress’ permission!—with a handsome captain of the Shagarra Regiment. Dismissed from ducal service, abandoned by her lover, Isobella had raised Louissa in straitened circumstances and educated her so she might teach compordotta and various of the gentle arts to young women of Meya Suerta who wished to better themselves.

Louissa had never seen a portrait of Princess Alazais of Ghillas nor, Sario supposed, was she curious enough to ferret out the secret or even suppose there was one. She was poor, unmarriageable, and desperate to earn a good wage so she might keep herself and her mother, who had a weak heart.

Indeed, after the second day, she poured out her troubles to Alazais, who listened with a sympathetic manner which Sario approved of even while he sketched various studies of Maessa Louissa’s face in order to block out the sound of her soft but persistently irritating voice.

So she taught Alazais for the rest of the month of Imago and into the month of Penitenssia, at whose end the year ended. What year was it? Eiha! It was hard to keep track.

Alazais learned to accompany herself on the lute, simple tunes. Her voice was clear and unaffected. She learned a number of the simpler court dances, during which Sario deigned to partner her while Louissa beat out time and hummed the melody in her reedy soprano.

And Alazais embroidered.

“I have never had a pupil take to this art so swiftly!” Louissa exclaimed one morning, displaying a square of linen covered with a delicate green ivy-wreath pattern. She looked as proud as if it had been her own daughter—the daughter she would, of course, never have.

Sario merely nodded, but he, too, was proud. He had painted into Alazais the potential to do these things. She was a magnificent piece of work. When Louissa went back to her pupil, he went back
to his sketching, licking a finger and placing a touch of his saliva onto the pencil. He had done several perfect renditions of Louissa. He need only wait until he was through with her to make sure she would never speak of the work she had done here.

  SEVENTY  

Eleyna
surveyed the sitting room with dismay. Beyond lay two additional rooms, bedchambers furnished with old beds built of wooden frames and rope supports, flea-ridden cotton ticking, and yellowing sheets.

“It’s an outrageous price for rooms such as these!”

“It is?” Rohario asked.

“Did you bargain?”

“Bargain?”

“You didn’t bargain with the innkeeper?”

He toured the room, inspecting the table with two chairs, the cracked windowpanes, the sofa upholstered with a brocaded fabric whose original color was bleached to an undistinguished yellow-white from exposure to sunlight, its pattern disguised by a generous helping of old wine stains.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he said, circling back to her. He looked less disgusted than astonished. “Do people live like this?”

“Like you,’ Don Rohario,” she said stiffly, “I grew up in a palasso. But Grandmother made sure we knew something of life outside. Every girl who grows up in Palasso Grijalva learns to act as a steward for the Grijalva clan. Grandmother even took us to the mercado to bargain, and once—” She laughed, remembering the scandal. “—when I was just sixteen and Beatriz thirteen, Grandmother took us to a taverna to watch tilemaking apprentices dance and sing on Madurrassia. It was a scandal mostly because the new journeymen could ask for a kiss from any unmarried girl, and we were asked for quite a few. Even Grandmother was asked for a few kisses, for her husband was dead by then and she always wore her widow’s shawl, even after the mourning period was over.”

As this comment faded, it led not to a reply but to silence.

Eleyna went to the greasy window and rubbed at it with a corner of her lace shawl, trying to see onto the courtyard below. The innkeeper had expanded his inn to include the residential apartments in the building built up against his own, an old palasso whose exterior boasted clay-red tiles and whose interior was as
faded and worn as a servant girl’s three-times-handed-down fancy dress.

She gave up on the window and twined the fringed end of her own “widow’s shawl” through her fingers. The black lace was bordered with embroidered hyacinths. If she was to lift those embroidered purplish-blue flowers to her face and inhale, would she be able to smell them? Would the scent ease her grief, as it was said to do?

Except she had no grief for her dead husband. She only wore the shawl to protect herself.

“Of course,” said Rohario suddenly, as if it had taken him this long to understand her last words. “Each year at Madurrassia a different guild is invited to Palasso Verrada to celebrate the elevation of the apprentices to journeymen. They come to the throne room, where my father recites the blessing and oversees their elevation. They were always dressed rather shabbily, I thought, but they were never dressed as poorly as the people I’ve seen in Meya Suerta these last two days.”