The Golden Key (22 page)

Damn Zaragosa; he would keep his place while she was sent from hers!

Alejandro stretched languorously, laughing deep in his throat. His voice had broken two years before into a fine baritone, very different, thank the Mother, from his father’s bass, or this would be more difficult than it already had been.

“What happens now?” he asked, loose of limb and lazy.

“Now? More, if you wish.” She hoped not. But she would not forbid him.

“More?” He grinned again, blindingly; he would win them all with that smile, and no effort expended. “You know better than I: have I any left to offer?”

Gitanna bared her teeth, though he saw it as a smile. “The do’Verrada bloodline runs to stamina.”

“So.” He was young, so young—a decade her junior—but not precisely a boy; and he had grown up in the house of a ruler. “And potency?”

He would speak of horses, then; eiha, and why not? There was truth in it enough. “The Duchess conceived four children. I would presume so.”

“Yet only two survived.” He hitched himself up on an elbow and propped his head against the heel of a broad palm.

“Potency has nothing to do with survival,” she countered, “unless one argues that without the potency there can be no seed to survive.”

“
Shall
we argue it, then?”

“If you wish, Don Alejandro.”

He grimaced. “I wish to be Alejandro, not the Duke’s Heir.”

“But you are.”

“In this?”

“In all things. Alejandro.”

The quick, flashing smile lit humor-crinkled eyes. “What becomes of me now?”

“Whatever you desire.”

“And if I desire you?”

“Then I am here.”

“For as long as I wish?”

Did he probe to learn, or because he knew? “I think you are to do whatever you wish to do. I am—yours.” For this day at least, and possibly the night, before she was sent away. Matra, but it stabbed deeply, so painfully.
I am no longer your father’s.

He stretched again, working kinks from a shoulder. “What becomes of you?”

Bitterness lashed out. “You ask too many questions!”

Into the startled silence that followed she heard his breathing cease, then begin again. She muttered a prayer in her head—how could she have been so foolish as to use that tone with
him
?—and prepared herself to endure the anger, the curses, the scorn.

“Eiha,” he said eventually, “it is the best way to learn answers.”

She stared at him, shocked speechless, and saw he was serious.

“Is it not?” The grin—and crooked tooth—flashed again. “But then that is another question, and I have offended once more.”

Sixteen, just. Sixteen, and no longer a virgin, and more cheerful of temperament, less sparing of his laughter, than one might expect in a ducal Heir whose behavior, so very often, was rigidly circumscribed by inflexible tradition.

Was this what Baltran was like when he was a boy
?

“Your brother,” he said, “is not a particularly gifted painter.”

“Matra ei Filho, he is
too
a gifted painter—” And then she broke off, because he was laughing at her. “Why?” she asked sharply.
Why provoke me
?

“To see if what I expected came to pass.” He levered himself off his arm and sat up, mindful of his nudity as he pulled a linen sheet across his depleted lap and settled against the headboard. The side of his knee brushed her lower leg, was drawn away, then crept back
again; he was not yet accustomed to the ordering of bodies after intimacy. “I am told everyone will tailor answers in accordance to what they believe I wish to hear.”

“And did you expect what came to pass?”

He had no nervous habits. He was settled now, at ease, and focused on what was said; unusual for Courtfolk, who sought truth in what
wasn’t
said. “If you had intended to tailor your words, you would not have answered as you did. But I had honesty of you, not Court speech.”

Gitanna shook her head. “Not in bed.”
Your father never wished it.

“Then perhaps I should spend more time in bed.”

“I have no doubt,” she said dryly, “that indeed you will.”

“Do’Verrada potency?”

“Stamina,” she retorted.
And unflagging interest!

Alejandro looked thoughtful. “I was told you had no wit.”

“No wit!
Who
told you that?”

“My mother.”

Gitanna sat immobile, tailoring her answer into noisy silence.

“So,” Alejandro remarked. “She lied.”

“Duchesses never lie.”

“Mothers do,” he said. “
My
mother does. She says she hates my father.” He let the back of his skull rest against the carved headboard. “And that, you see, is very definitively a lie.”

She had not expected, ever, to discuss the Duchess with her son, least of all after she of all women had bedded that son. “In her place,” Gitanna said, “to my son, I would lie also.”

“Because you are my father’s mistress.”

“Because she loves him.”

“As he loves you.”

Her response was immediate. “Baltran does not love me! Trust me, Alejandro—there may be bindings upon us, a thing of men and women, but there is no love in this. En verro.”

“Because you cannot wed?”

Now he was young after all, to ask such a thing when he meant no harm by it, only desired to learn. “Noblemen do not wed their mistresses.”

“If they loved them?”

“Politics,” she said crisply. “Surely, in this Court, you have heard of such.”

“Merditto!” he said vulgarly. “How could I not?”

“Eiha, how could you not?” Gitanna sighed and slid down against the headboard, snagging gauze on the scrollwork. “How could anyone in Palasso Verrada not be steeped in it?”

“Will he have you back?” he asked baldly.

Tears brimmed. “No.”

“Gitanna—”

So, he knew her name. “No,” she said again, turning her head away.

“Why not?”

Because this is his way of telling me it is ended.
“Because—because … no man cleaves to a single woman.”

“No man?”

Viciously, she said, “No man that I have heard of!”

“And if that man should wish to?”

Gitanna Serrano laughed. It was a brittle, desperate sound, and it caused him to stare, eyes wide and astonished. “What—will you keep yourself to
me
now that we have shared a bed?” She saw the startlement in his eyes. “There,” she said, “you see? En verro.”

After all his questions, his smiles, his laughter, the Heir to the duchy had no answer to offer.

  ELEVEN  

Sario
stood utterly still, rooted into cobbles like a grandfather olive tree, splayed and ancient trunks split into ornate candelabra. He had arrived, seemingly all at once and without any physical effort, in the midst of the Zocalo Grando in the center of the city—or what had been the center before vital growth spilled into sprawl. Overshadowed by the many-tiered marble fountain and the massive twin-towered Cathedral Imagos Brilliantos, he was buffeted by the press of the crowd on festival day—Fuega Vesperra, to celebrate conception (and, no doubt, to
cause
it)—deaf to the noise as he was blind to the light, wholly alone amidst the tight-packed throng milling like a frightened flock of sheep with no dog in attendance.

He supposed he had walked. Perhaps he had run. But he stood here now, very still, very stiff, very cold despite the day, and found the key on its chain clasped so tightly in the fist of one slender hand that the gold bit into his flesh.

Chieva do’Orro. What all Grijalvas longed for, were they born male: to be more than merely gifted but Gifted as well, and blessed, honored among the family to ascend to a higher level of talent, technique, training, and the blazing light of sheer genius.

“For what?” he murmured bitterly. “To burn more brightly than another, only to be blown out an hour later?”

If
it were true …
if
it were as Saavedra suggested. As she stumbled, all unwittingly, upon a hideous possibility even he, of the Viehos Fratos, had never heard in whispers, had never thought to ask. Had never so much as
imagined
, even to paint it.

He gripped the Chieva more tightly. “What if they don’t know? What if
none
of them knows?”

They spoke of the Nerro Lingua, the deadly plague that racked the city, the duchy, but had so diminished the Grijalvas that even now, over sixty years later, they struggled to survive. Meya Suerta, for all the city’s bounty, was not kind to the weak; a man needed size, as a family required numbers, to make a safe way in the world.

But they believe otherwise
… Sario could not discount the plague, for the records, though incomplete, provided documentation
that prior to the Nerro Lingua
all
Grijalva males lived longer. One need only go into the Galerria Grijalva and look upon the paintings to see the truth: the family had been vital, the family had been numerous, the family had been ranked among the highest, the strongest, the most richly favored in the ordering of the duchy.

“But now we die,” he murmured. “What Duke would appoint a Grijalva to a lifetime post if that lifetime as an adult spans but thirty years, and within
twenty
of them the body and skills diminish?”

Someone jostled him from behind, jarring his shoulder: a squat Meya Suertan clutching an oil-soaked cloth sleeve of festival food. One city-bred cheek bulged greasily. Sario caught the pungent aroma of garlic, olives, onions, simmered overnight in rosemary and oregano, washed down now with spring wine; heard the muffled imprecation—his stillness caused a hardship for others who preferred to move—but did not respond. Only when a second voice grumbled more pointedly another vulgar comment did he rouse, and then it was to anger.

Chi’patro
, the man had called him.

Sario could not argue, would not fight. In point of fact, it was truth: his parents had not been married. But that truth did not sting. That truth was not what the man referred to.

Being a bastard was one thing, and infinitely bearable within a family where such was not a stigma. But chi’patro was a wholly derogatory term applied only to Grijalvas, to insult Grijalvas
specifically
, whose once-honorable ancestry was widely and luridly known to be permanently tainted, as the sanctos and sanctas took care to remind everyone.

Tza’ab revenge. “Who is the father
?”

Sario clamped his mouth shut on a stinging rebuke. There were no grounds for it, not now, with what he acknowledged; had he and Saavedra not stood before Piedro’s
Death of Verro Grijalva
and looked upon both halves of their whole? Grijalva, and Tza’ab. Verro, dying in do’Verrada arms—and on the hilltop behind him a green-clad Tza’ab warrior, an Unbeliever, who had killed the greatest hero Tira Virte had ever known.

“He might have been Duke,” Sario muttered, watching the city man stride away. “
He
might have been Duke—and I might have been also.”

But he was not. He was Grijalva, and chi’patro. He was Tza’ab, and enemy.

And had, if he were
very
lucky, thirty more years to live.

Sario Grijalva lifted stinging eyes to gaze upon the bell towers of the great Cathedral. His fist yet was closed around his Chieva do’Orro. “Grazzo do’Matra,” he began, deliberately ironic, “I thank you so very deeply for such blessings as you offer to an impure chi’patro moronno.”