The Golden Key (18 page)

Saavedra sat upright on the stone bench in the central courtyard of Palasso Grijalva, where the scent of citrus perfumed warm air: lemon, orange, grapefruit, and others, their deep emerald-hued leaves intermixed in subtle harmony with the smudgy silver-green of olive trees laden with bunched streamers of fruit. One pale, paint-stained hand clutched the drawing board on which the paper was fastened, braced against her thigh, as the other moved fluidly, easily, sketching in with sharpened charcoal the details of a face.

So much with so little effort, the gift of true and inescapable talent that burned within her, scorching her spirit until she let it go in sheer conflagration of creativity. The line bisecting the features was quickly but effectively rendered: the merest shadow here suggested the clean bridge of a nose, there the deeper shadow carried the bridge into the smooth upper curve of the socket, and below it the high arch of a cheekbone in three-quarter profile. Clear, well-made
contours, though young yet, soft-fleshed, not fully formed; it promised to be a handsome man, what now was pretty youth.

In the warmth of the day she wore little beyond what she must: a loose sleeveless linen tunic, dyed madder yellow once but now faded to wan saffron, bleached summer-weight skirts in place of childhood trousers, and sandals that offered little more than thin sole and strategically placed straps to ward flesh against sun-heated brick. The mass of black hair was bound back in a straggling scarlet ribbon, though shorter, finer ringlets tangled in disarray around her face. Heedless, she shoved wisps aside with the back of her wrist, then bent again to her board.

The sketch commanded all her attention. The mouth, smiling— she had never seen any other expression on his face—the slight amused upturn of the corners of his eyes; the fine lift of expressive eyebrows; the curve of a rebellious lock of dark hair that disdained the company of others pomaded into acquiescence beneath a gold-trimmed hat of blue velurro, bedecked with a curve of chevron-stippled feather that swept down across one shoulder.

More shadowing here, and there; the maturing chin that portended eventual adult stubbornness—she smiled at the knowledge—and beneath it the high, intricately embroidered and pleated collar of his fine-worked lawn shirt, laced in gold-tipped blue silk cord; the merest suggestion of shirred brocade summer-silk doublet with hasty shading here and there, the slight and subtle patterning within the wave of the fabric itself … quickly now, before the image left; and later the detail, the patience.

Shadow fell across her. Frowning, Saavedra shifted enough to put the board back into full sunlight.

“He has a crooked tooth,” Sario declared definitively.

Saavedra gritted her own. “I’m not doing teeth. His lips are closed.”

“You should do his teeth. A flaw should not be hidden.”

“No?” She lifted her face into his shadow and arched brows elaborately. “I thought the task of a limner was to
find
favor with his subject, lest he lose the commission.”

His mouth twisted in scornful disgust. “You are infatuated with him, like half the girls in Meya Suerta.”

“He has a crooked tooth,” she agreed serenely. And so he did. “But it does not detract.” And so it didn’t.

“Because he shows his blinding grin so frequently no one
sees
it. No woman, that is.”

Saavedra grinned. “Jealous of Don Alejandro? Eiha, Sario—if
you hope to be named Lord Limner, you had best find favor with the man who must appoint you!”

He scoffed with elaborate succinctness. “I think he will not turn his back on me because I admit freely he has a crooked
tooth.
”

“It’s only a little crooked,” she pointed out, “and how do you know? You have never met him. It might matter very greatly to him what ducal ‘flaws’ you care to depict.”

“Teeth are difficult,” Sario said. “Closed lips are easier. I only meant that if you wish to grow in your art, you should challenge yourself.”

She was not subtle in her laughter, nor in her mockery. “No, you didn’t! Eiha, Sario—you meant to remind me that Don Alejandro is not perfect. That he has a crooked tooth. That
your
teeth are infinitely and perfectly straight.”

Sario bared them in a wolfish grin. “They are.”

Saavedra hitched a shoulder in eloquent nonchalance. “Teeth are important,” she admitted equably, “but they are hardly the only thing an artist looks at.”

His voice, newly-broken, scraped. “Or a woman?”

She sighed, muttering dire comments within the confines of her skull. She had no compunction about saying them aloud, save he usually out-argued her merely by dint of tenacity, and she was not in the mood. Clearly he would not permit her to go back to her sketching. “Do I think he is handsome? Yes. Am I infatuated with him? Perhaps … though I am not certain a
man
truly knows what that means to accuse one of it, as his pride does not permit him to ever admit to such girlish folly as that—” She flashed him an arch smile. “—and certainly
you
would never allow yourself to lose so much control of your emotions!”

Stung, he scowled. “How do you know?”

Blithely she answered, “A woman would interfere with your ambitions, Sario. You would never permit that.”

Ruddy color bloomed in cheeks like a mottled sunburn, though he was too dark to burn; and in summer, his desert-bred flesh merely deepened and did not blister. “How do you
know
?”

She grinned. “I know you.”

One hand twitched, reached, then was pulled back to his side. Tautly he said, “But not everything, ‘Vedra.”

Abruptly troubled, she looked away hastily from the intensity of his fixed and eloquent gaze. “No,” she confessed, “not everything. You are a man, and Gifted—and one of the Viehos Fratos. I can never know everything.”

His tone was odd. “Do you want to?”

She looked back at him sharply. He was in that instant open to her, unshielded behind the arrogance that annoyed so many, behind the impatient ambition and cynicism that annoyed even
her.
He was in that instant the boy of five years before, eleven in place of sixteen, helpless to engineer what would save him from the discovery that he had killed a man, that he had known ahead of time how the Chieva do’Sangua worked, and its magic—and that he had used it unaided to destroy a masterwork and thus a Grijalva life, when there were so few to risk.

His voice was stripped of all save bitter honesty, and in it, this moment, resided a stark vulnerability he hid from everyone else. “I would tell you anything you asked.”

And in that instant she understood completely what she had not, until moments before, so much as imagined. They were no longer children, certainly not within a plague-racked and artificially insular society whose survival depended solely on the ability to produce more Grijalvas. Sixteen was young, but not too young; there were fathers not long out of boyhood. In no wise was he a child— he was sterile, not impotent—nor, since her courses had come, was she a girl considered too young for motherhood.

She looked again to her drawing board, gazing blindly at the image of Alejandro do’Verrada. And it struck her, in odd juxtaposition with her fragmenting thoughts, that her nails were rimed with bits of charcoal like blackened frost.

Why am I thinking of that at this moment
?

To avoid Sario’s intensity, the intent of his confession.

Matra Dolcha, aid me.
Carefully she said, “You are Gifted, Sario.”

The fine straight teeth flashed briefly in quick gritting. “And thus I am sterile,” he said clearly, “but not in the least unable.”

Hot-cheeked, she stared even more fixedly at the half-completed sketch of Tira Virte’s glorious young Heir. “I am meant to bear children.”

To most men, men who were not Limners, it would be taken as insult, an implication that he could not do the one thing that proved a man’s potency. But here it was the truest of all honors: a Grijalva who sired children did not bear the Gift.

“A waste,” he said in disgust; then, as she gasped in shock, “eiha, ‘Vedra—not a waste to bear them, but to
be limited
to that when you could offer so much more!” Vulnerability was vanquished by a habitual impatience; he suffered no one who could not share his vision. “Do you think I am blind? You have your own Gift, ‘Vedra—”

“No!” She stood up so quickly the drawing board nearly tumbled from her hands. Charcoal snapped; she tossed its fragments onto the bench. “Matra Dolcha, Sario—don’t you see? I am not Gifted. I can’t be. No matter how much you may wish it. No matter—” She gestured futility, then blurted bald conviction. “—no matter
how
much you wish to turn my attention from another.”

“You believe …” Like a hound, he hackled. Even his lips went white. “It isn’t that, ‘Vedra—”

“It is.” She smiled sadly. “We aren’t children any longer. You are one of the Viehos Fratos, and I am to bear children when it is decided who best I should suit. And so our childhood is left behind …” Very softly, she said, “And you resent what is lost with it.”

He shook his head. “I regret nothing. A child has no power.”

“No. No more than a woman.” Saavedra sighed. This was a conversation—an inept and cross-purposed conversation—she had never imagined having. “You—
want
me, perhaps, because—because you are of an age to fasten upon the woman who is closest to you.” She looked away quickly from his taut face and finished in a rush, “But it is no more than that. I promise you.”

“Do you?” His eyes glittered beneath uncut, untamed dark hair that shielded the fine, smooth brow. “How can you promise anything? You say you know me, but—” He broke off a moment, wincing, and lifted a hand to his left collarbone. “You may
believe
you know me, but—” Fingers pressed fine cloth against his flesh. The topic was altered abruptly by irritated surprise. “Am I
bitten
?”

And so the awkwardness was banished. Relieved, Saavedra set down the drawing board and began to untie the lacings of his crimped collar; one of the Viehos Fratos put aside the tunics and trousers of childhood to wear the clothing of a man, though Sario, as was habitual, had left off his doublet and wore only high-waisted hosen and creased lawn shirt. “Here, let me see—no, move your fingers.”

Affronted protest: “It
stings.
”

“Let me look, Sario.” She loosened the laces, pulled the collar apart so that a strip of hairless, dusky chest lay bare, and the gold chain across it that dipped lower into shirt folds. “Here—you see?” She turned back the crumpled shirt. “What is this? I’ve seen no bite like this! Not three bumps all in a perfect row.”

“Let me—” Fingertips explored the flesh, sliding beneath the chain. “Like a burn—” And then he froze into absolute stillness. Color drained from his face, and the rage that engulfed his dark
eyes startled her by its magnitude. “’Vedra—you have the painting. The self-portrait.”

“Of course, but—”

“Safe?”

“Where we left it, in my cell.” She frowned. “What is it?”

“Filho do’canna,” he hissed. “How
dare
they?”

“Sario—”

“Don’t you see?” He caught one of her arms, clamping down. “They fear me. And so they seek to
control
me, to remind me they hold my
Peintraddo Chieva.
”

“But they don’t,” she said. “
I
have it.”

“The real one, yes. But the one I gave them, the one I painted and presented as my masterwork …” Muscles rolled in a taut jaw; his would not boast the square, clean lines of Alejandro do’Verrada’s, but there was nothing girlish about him as he matured out of boyhood. “It is not truly a
Peintraddo Chieva
, but there is enough of me in it—there had to be!—that I would know if they sought to use it against me.” Dark eyes were dilated black despite the blaze of the day. “’Vedra—come with me. There is a thing you must do.”

“Sario—”

“Come with me … we must go to your cell.”

“But—”

He caught her hand and pulled her. “Adezo! They will expect me to come to them, to ask why—I must show them what they believe will be there.”

She went with him because she had no choice; and harkened back five years to the closet above the Crechetta, and the Chieva do’Sangua. Then he had pulled her, urgent and determined, and she had no more choice now.

Then, he was shorter than I, and slight.
He was taller now, though his was not the frame that would carry excess flesh or a warrior’s hard muscling. His bones and muscles were long, his expressive hands large; by the time he finished growing, he would claim an elegance lacking in the shorter, squarer Tira Virteians.
Tza’ab blood, they say
— And also, uneasily,
What will it do to me
?

Inside the corridor leading to her tiny quarters … There were no locks. He unlatched and flung open the narrow door to her small estuda’s cell, pushing her inside. “Candle,” he said curtly, shutting the door behind.

“I have one, of course. Sario—”

“Lighted?”

“Yes, but—”

“Bring it here.” Without leave he threw himself down on her narrow cot, stretching flat. One hand tore aside the collar of his shirt, baring the faintly curved line of bone beneath taut flesh and the furtive glitter of gold chain. “The marks are not enough, not as they are. You must do more.”

Saavedra fetched the burning candle to the bed. “What are you asking, Sario?”

“Hot wax,” he said briefly. “Three drops: here—here—and here.” Fingertips indicated the faintly reddened spots already present. “Now, ‘Vedra.”

“
Burn
you? Sario, for the love of the Mother—”

“Yes,” he hissed. “And for my survival. If they learn I am not burned, not as I should be, they will know the truth about the
Peintraddo
in their keeping. ‘Vedra—
now.
”

“Matra Dolcha,” she whispered. “You are mad.”

“But alive,” he said harshly, “and whole, which is what I will
not
be if they learn the truth.”

She clamped her jaws shut. She would do as he asked, but not without argument. “Why would they do such a thing? What have you done to provoke it?”