The Golden Key (57 page)

No picture of Matteyo hung at Palasso Grijalva for the family to remember him by. A portrait existed, though no one would ever see it. He reminded himself that when next he visited his atelierro above the wineshop, he must paint another sprig of blue-flowered rosemary, for remembrance, near the section of the
Peintraddo Memorrio
dedicated to his loved, lost Matteyo.

He walked on past several generations, and stopped before a huge picture by the greatest Lord Limner who had ever served Tira Virte: Riobaro Grijalva. No fewer than eleven paintings here were Riobaro’s. As he regarded the
Marriage of Benetto I and Rosira della Marei
—she of the all-powerful banking family—the smile returned to his lips. Not because the portrait was a masterwork (it was), but because every minute of his life as Riobaro had been a masterwork.

Timirrin’s life had been quiet. He studied, taught, copied what he was told, and kept to himself for eighteen placid, uneventful years. The final five of them, however, he’d spent watching and marveling as Riobaro grew from talented fourteen-year-old to accomplished Limner of nearly twenty. Riobaro had been perfect from the day the Confirmattio had proved his sterility. After Timirrin’s existence as a nonentity, power was calling again. And
Riobaro
was
perfect: tall, long-limbed, heart-catchingly beautiful, with melting dark eyes and full lips and riotous black curls that didn’t begin to gray until his forty-fifth year. All his line were long-lived (for Gifteds) and he had excellent connections at Court, his mother’s half-brother being Lord Limner. Best of all, he was a passionate admirer of the work of Sario Grijalva. His style was as nearly identical to the revered Lord Limner’s as he could make it; even in childhood he had copied and recopied all the available paintings. Happily, he was born into a time when slavish imitation of long-dead Masters was approved. No one tried to dissuade him from his ambition to be the next Sario.

His wish was granted.

When Riobaro’s uncle died in 1115, Riobaro was the only possible candidate to replace him. The widowed Duchess Enricia liked and trusted him, and was pleased that her young son’s regency council now included a man who shared her own prime objective: the gold-filled coffers of the Principio della Diettro Mareia. They were determined to see Benetto married to the Principio’s heiress.

Trade treaties were negotiated that Riobaro went to Diettro Mareia himself to paint. He took with him drawings of Benetto and brought back similar drawings of Rosira. The pair were in love with none but each other practically from the cradle—and he hadn’t even had to use his magic to do it. Yet while everyone waited for the children to grow to marriageable age, Riobaro did use his art and his arts as necessary to cement ducal power in the provinces. Tira Virte thrived. And when Benetto reached his majority in 1122, becoming Grand Duke in fact as well as name, the Lord Limner made sure that the Grijalva selected as his Mistress was a close relation to himself. As marriage to Rosira della Marei neared, he also made sure that Riobaro’s cousin Diega Grijalva sent her lover on his way with a smile and many excellent memories—even as she clutched the deed to a manor house and a large tract of Casteyan forest that had been her lover’s parting gift.

Riobaro died, universally mourned, in the fifty-third year of his age and the twenty-fifth year of his service as Lord Limner. He had guided Tira Virte not only to greater prominence but to true greatness; his was a painterly gift seen once in five generations; he was beloved of all the do’Verradas and all his countrymen (with the exception of the provincial barons he’d brought to heel, but they kept their mutterings to themselves). Of all Lord Limners, Riobaro was the only one to have an official portrait within the Galerria Verrada.

Moving along to regard it now, the man who had been Riobaro let another sigh escape him for that perfect life. Too bad he hadn’t been able to follow through with another one just like it, but he’d reckoned without the sexual vigor of Domaos’ body and its helpless physical passion for Benecitta do’Verrada.

The daughter of Benetto and Rosira was a walking scandal from the day she first put one foot in front of the other. The terror of her servants, the despair of her mother, the torment of her younger brother, she was also the incomparable jewel of her father’s indulgent heart. Gazing up at her
Marriage
—a painting he had not done and in which no one ever noticed her husband—he reflected once again that with her, he’d never stood a chance.

Poised to begin another brilliant career as Lord Limner, he had been completely thunderstruck by Benecitta. Bold and beautiful, nineteen years old to his supposedly mature thirty, she had decided that if her brother had a Grijalva Mistress, it was only fair that she possess a Grijalva Lover. The man who would surely be named Lord Limner when Riobaro’s successor died was, to her mind, the perfect choice. Domaos—not as devastatingly handsome as Riobaro but not painful to the eyes, either—fell headlong into her trap and her bed. Knowing he ought to have known better, astounded that sex could have such powerful magic of its own, still he carried on a two-year affair with her in total secrecy. Not since Saavedra had a woman fascinated him so. The danger of discovery only added spice. Benecitta never knew of the crimes great and small he committed to ensure that secrecy, even while cursing himself for a reckless fool.

Then her father announced her betrothal to a fiercely proud baron whose attractions were measured in square miles of vineyards. Benecitta was perfectly willing for the marriage to take place—so long as Domaos was posted to her new home as resident Limner. Torn between passion and prudence, eventually he found courage enough to decline the honor. He couldn’t go on bespelling or killing people who saw what they shouldn’t—and Benecitta’s betrothed had sharper eyes than most. But it was Baron Fillipi do’Gebatta’s vast experience of women—far vaster than even three previous wives could account for—that proved Domaos’ undoing. The baron’s taste ran to virgins; he knew one when he bedded one; Benecitta definitely was not. The morning after the wedding, he stormed through Palasso Verrada to the Grand Ducal chambers and ripped the
Marriage
portrait into many, many pieces before it was even dry.

The union was annulled. Benecitta was packed off to the
strictest and most remote Sanctia in Tira Virte—“I hope she learns humility, for compordotta is obviously beyond her!” as her infuriated mother put it. Domaos lived in dread for days—while frantically painting a self-portrait—before the Grand Duke finally realized the extent of his daughter’s “friendship” with the Limner. Domaos was seized one midnight, taken in chains to the border, and forbidden to set foot in Tira Virte again.

Mere thought of those years made him shudder. It was one thing to travel from court to court, city to city, painting
Marriages, Births, Deeds
, and
Wills.
An Itinerarrio was an honored guest, a precious gift from Tira Virte, and well-paid besides. But an uncredentialed roving painter was shunned. Domaos eked out a marginal living in Ghillasian and Niapalese towns where anyone who could draw a straight line with a ruler became the local archivist—and who did not appreciate the arrival of a Grijalva Limner, disgraced though he was. Competition for every commission was intense, pay was despicable, Domaos was constantly watched while in the presence of young ladies (a rare occurrence; the scandal was common knowledge), and the work humiliated one who had twice reached the pinnacle of his profession.

In twenty-one years he gained not so much as a glimpse of another Grijalva. Because they were precious commodities, they did not travel without armed escort. He could not waylay one on the road. He was cut off not only from his country but from another life to replace this miserable one.

Finally, at the astounding age of fifty-three, with his health failing and his desperation growing, he wrote to Benetto’s son, now Grand Duke Benetto II. The reply came back with a delegation of two Grijalvas and a sancta well-schooled in medicine: Domaos could return home to die.

As for Benecitta—she had been forgiven years ago. Her father loved her too much
not
to forgive her, though at his Grand Duchess’s urgings he did leave their daughter incarcerated at the Sanctia for nine long years. But in 1162 Benetto was in an expansive mood—his Heir had just wed the colossally wealthy Verradia da’Taglisi—and so agreed at last to the pleadings of Count Dolmo do’Alva to free Benecitta. The count, no more proof against her allure than Domaos had been, had loved her since their youth. Theirs was the
Marriage
from which she flirted down at all and sundry, as captivating at thirty as she had been at nineteen.

Matra ei Filho
, he thought, shaking his head. The painting was nearly a century old, he hadn’t seen her since their final impassioned night together, and she’d been dead over forty years—yet
he could still feel the helpless coil of desire in his belly. Amazing woman.

No, he
had
seen her again. She’d visited Domaos at Palasso Grijalva as he lay dying—to tell him she forgave him, if you please. So much for humility.

Odd that he hadn’t recalled her visit until now. Then again, he’d been so feeble that he barely had strength to prepare his paints for the portrait that gave him Renzio Grijalva: a sixteen-year-old mediocrity in whose lanky, graceless, plain-faced body he’d spent a blissfully quiet twenty years.

But no more Renzios. His requirements were set, and this time he would give himself the leisure to make the perfect choice. It was time he became Lord Limner again—especially if the more recent pictures in the Galerria were any indication. Dreadful stuff, barely competent, cloyingly sentimental, the palettos made up of mint-greens and cherry-pinks so sweet his teeth ached. He must become Lord Limner before artistic standards sank beyond hope of recovery.

He walked on, bored by what he saw, irritated by the process he knew was to come. It was so annoying, the balancing of one need against another. The boy must be young enough to provide a goodly long time in the body, but old enough to be Confirmattio. He must be talented and far enough along in the training to evidence adult mastery, but not so individual in his style or set in his ways that the inevitable change to complete genius would be too great for credence. So many adjustments that must be made each time … so much brilliance that must be hidden, sometimes for years, until it was excusable by maturity … so many classes that must be endured again and again, taught by moualimos moronnos who barely knew purple from puce or a rose from a rhododendron … so much dissembling and deception and deference. Nommo Chieva do’Orro, it was hard sometimes, very hard!

And sometimes, for years at a stretch, he forgot why it was necessary.

For Saavedra, certainly. For the day when he would finally free her, and she would finally be his. Had she yet realized her mistake? Eiha, he could wait. Because there had come to be another reason, and on the occasions when he was most brutally honest with himself, he knew that reason to be far purer than even love.

He had painted five thousand canvases, ten thousand. There remained in him thousands more. His Gift must not be lost, not before
he had fulfilled it. He would
know
when he had created absolute and ultimate perfection, the one masterwork that would justify everything he had done in the name of—and through the medium of—his Limner Blood.

But not yet. Not just yet. Despite all the inconveniences of establishing a new life, despite the inevitable decline into age and the fear of not finding the right host—
that
painting still waited for him. It would be the culmination of his many lives, and his truest immortality.

Saavedra waited for him, too, inside a painting that in his youth he had thought was the finest he would ever do. How foolish he had been! Only look at what he’d painted in the last three hundred years! How she would marvel, and weep for sheer joy, when he showed her the final masterwork—and she would know at last that love was nothing compared to the splendor of his genius, his Gift.

The centuries had taught him that. He had come to know himself and to understand the jealousy that had caused it all. He’d forgotten what Alejandro looked like, but he could still see Saavedra’s face as she beheld his work, with that in her eyes which loved its beauty and loved him for its creation. He had mistaken the look she’d given Alejandro as something to rival her love for him. But it wasn’t the same. Not the same at all. Her feelings for Alejandro were mere carnal urgings, not the supreme transcendence only his art could engender in her. The do’Verrada Duke had held her body in his arms for a little while—but
he
held her deepest soul in his hands forever.

As he walked slowly past gilt-framed mediocrities and occasional competencies, he wondered when he should release her. Soon? During this life? The next, when he was young again? Eiha, no. Not until he had painted the perfection that would be his love-gift to her, finalizing his claim on her spirit.

But at least he could go to her now, and promise that one day he would be ready. Ignoring the page in his hand, he strode to the far end of the Galerria, intent on the place her portrait had always occupied. True, he had not seen it in over a hundred years—had not trusted himself to view her face. But he was older now; he understood everything; he owed it to her to tell her so, even if she could not hear him.

Gone.

She was gone!

In her place was an insipid picture of Renata do’Pracanza in her
old age, backgrounded by the sere pallor of the wasteland Alejandro had dug her out of to become his Duchess.

He spun on one heel, ready to shout down the coffered ceiling in fury. How
dared
they remove his painting?

In the next instant he calmed himself. It was surely in a workroom being cleaned, or getting a new frame, or had been taken to Palasso Grijalva to be studied as the masterpiece it was by awed young Limners who could never hope to equal it.

He promised himself to ask—discreetly—when he returned to the front desk. For now, he directed his gaze to the
Duke Alejandro.
It used to hang in his own chambers in Palasso Verrada. Night after night he’d considered stabbing that proud chest. Burning those long fingers that wore a luminous gray moonstone ring in memory of Saavedra’s eyes. Acid-scarring that handsome face, blackening that crooked front tooth, painting all the exposed skin with symptoms of sifilisso.