The Golden Key (76 page)

The boy replied with another grimace.

“And at Dioniso’s suggestion,” his mother continued, “he’ll make some sketches as practice, and a memento of the occasion.”

“Delightful idea,” Lizia said. “I’d like to have one, if you don’t mind, Rafeyo.”

“Honored, Countess,” he bowed.

“Lizi,” said Arrigo, “I think everyone’s here, and even if they aren’t, I’m dying of thirst. Shall I bring you something to drink?”

Thus he escaped with Tazia to the refreshment tables. Plates of fruit were predictably untouched; plates of sweets had been just as predictably demolished. Seven gigantic crystal bowls held variously flavored lemonadas dyed improbable colors, and Tazia pointed hesitantly to a garish purple. Arrigo laughed while the servant grinned and dipped a cup for her.

“It’s only plum juice,” Arrigo said. “And not bad, really.”

“I foresee frightful experiments in kitchens all over Meya
Suerta. All these children will want something green to drink the way it was at the Palasso!” She sipped, nodded approval, and went on, “And no wine, not even for the adults. Very wise. I take it you remembered what happened to you at age fourteen during Mirraflores?”

He groaned.

“All Meya Suerta heard you up on the balcony, drunk as a brace of barons and singing at the top of your lungs!”

“How indelicate of you to remember so clearly what I swear I don’t remember at all! Have one of these cakes, the pastry cooks have a new recipe.”

“No, thank you—and we really must stop meeting like this, always at a table laden with sweets. Arrigo, you’re ruining my waistline!”

“You’re babbling,” he observed softly. “I’ve never heard you do that before, Tazia.”

“I could say the same of you,” she replied just as quietly, just as mindful of the nearby servant. “Arrigo—”

“Is it getting any better?”

“If you mean am I still beset with caustic countesses and baronesses with barbed tongues—not so much anymore. Thank you. If you mean—” She broke off and looked away.

“Tell me.” When she shook her head, he urged, “Tazia, tell me!”

“If—if you were asking if it’s getting any easier being without you, the answer is
no
” Raising her face to look him in the eye, she finished with a bright social smile. “You’re very kind to give Rafeyo such notice, I’m grateful. I should go look at his sketches. If you’ll excuse me?”

“No, I will not excuse you. I—”

A small gasp from the servant made Arrigo’s head turn. His wife was hurrying through the doorway of the music room, heading straight for him and Tazia with an expression of worry and fear on her pallid face.

“Arrigo—” Mechella didn’t even see Tazia. “There’s dreadful news,” she whispered. “You and Lizia must come at once.”

“What is it? Teressa? My parents?”

“No, no, they’re well. It’s—”

She saw Tazia. Her cheeks flushed and her whole body went rigid with loathing. Tazia met her gaze for a moment with something indefinable flickering in her eyes, then looked away.

Concerned and annoyed, Arrigo said, “People are watching,
Mechella. You’ve upset everyone. Why didn’t you send a servant? Tell me what’s wrong, so I can set their minds at rest.”

With a last hate-filled look for Tazia, she said, “There’s been a terrible earthquake in Casteya, in the foothills of the Montes Astrappas. Hundreds are dead, perhaps thousands—”

“And my father has sent for me to help him.”
At last!

“I don’t know, I haven’t spoken with him. I only heard by accident, on my way to the Galerria. Some servants were talking, one of them had taken the courier up to your father. I came as soon as I could, to tell you and Lizia—”

Arrigo swallowed anger. The servants had known before he did! His father was even now planning rescue efforts, commanding food and workers and medical help for the stricken area, while he, the Heir, the next Grand Duke of Tira Virte, stood in a room filled with children.

He glanced around for Lizia. The man whispering urgently in her ear was his father’s personal aide. There was no alteration in Lizia’s expression as she heard the news, only a twitch in one cheek, a brief clenching of one hand. Fiery as she could be, she knew how to conceal her thoughts and emotions in front of others. His gaze slid to Tazia—her face was as smooth as his sister’s—and then to Mechella.

“Go to your father,” Tazia murmured. “He’ll need you.”

Arrigo couldn’t help a bitter retort. “Will he?”

Mechella surprised him then. “Of course he will! I’ve already sent word that you’ll be there immediately. And—Arrigo, I hope I’ve done right in this—I ordered our carriages made ready. They’ll hold a lot of food and blankets and medicines, and they’re much faster than wagons.”

“Well done, Your Grace,” Tazia said, nodding approval. She might not have spoken for all the notice Mechella took of her.

“Everything should be ready by first light, Arrigo. We’ll leave—”

Lizia was making the announcement, serious but calm, alarming no one: minor temblor, minor damage, ho reason to cancel the entertainment, understand that we must leave you now, go on enjoying yourselves—

Arrigo stared at his wife. “‘We’?” he echoed incredulously. “‘Leave’?”

She looked him straight in the eye, not upward, as Tazia had to. “We must help in any way we can, and how can we know what’s needed unless we’re there?”

“Your Grace.” Tazia was frowning. “I’m aware that you don’t
know about such things, but one earthquake is almost invariably followed by another. In your condition you really mustn’t think of such a journey.”

Mechella rounded on her, blue eyes flashing. “How dare you tell me what I must and mustn’t do! These are our people, and we’re going!”

“Your Grace!” Tazia shrank back with the shock.

Before anyone could say anything else, Lizia’s heels clicked angrily toward them across the tiled floor. “What are you waiting for?” she snapped. “Arrigo, Patro wants us at once.”

He suspected that it was only Lizia, Countess do’Casteya, whose presence had been commanded. Nodding to Tazia, he took his wife’s arm and his sister’s, and together they left the music room. But he glanced back over his shoulder at Tazia—abandoned, alone, eyes wide with worry for his safety and hurt at Mechella’s rebuke. Arrigo suddenly found himself in the grip of powerful and conflicting emotions.

Tazia knew the risks of the journey to Mechella and the child, and the danger of further tremors, and she was afraid for them—for
him.
Mechella cared more for the people than for any danger to their unborn son. She didn’t know enough to be frightened. Eiha, but she was right. These
were
their people, and it was their duty to help. She understood that with the instincts of a Princess of Ghillas. Tazia did not. Yet it had been Tazia whose first words were that his father would need him, though Mechella had arranged the journey even before hurrying to tell him of the disaster, showing a presence of mind and a practicality he had not hitherto looked for in her. Still, her furious reply to Tazia’s justifiable concern was inexcusable.

What it came down to, he told himself as he assisted his pregnant wife up the stairs, was that Mechella had reacted as the royalty she was: duty first, personal concerns unimportant, her only thought their people’s need. But Tazia—

Tazia’s every thought was for him as a man, as Arrigo—for his very personal need to be of use, and for his safety. …

“Can’t spare you,” Cossimio growled at him across a conference table littered with maps and lists. “I want you here, taking over my other duties until this is resolved.”

“But—”

“No argument! I’ve had enough of that from the conselhos! Not enough this or that or the other damned thing to send to Casteya’s aid—we’ll just see about that! I’m the Grand Duke and when I want a thing done, Nommo Matra ei Filho, it
will
be done!”

Gizella said soothingly, “That’s why your father needs you here, Arrigo. He must go himself to the warehouses and granaries, otherwise—”

Arrigo couldn’t give up just yet. “I could be doing that on the way to Casteya. There are storehouses along the route, and things wouldn’t have to go as far.”

His father scowled mightily. “And I say you stay here. Lizia has to go, Casteya’s hers, but not you. You’ll take my regular duties, end of discussion.”

Arrigo intercepted a glance of sympathy from his sister. He refused to acknowledge it. Mechella stared in silence at her laced fingers in her lap, all the spirit gone out of her. She wasn’t willing to fight for what she knew to be their rightful duty as Don and Dona. Not that this surprised him; in the past year she must have learned how futile it was to argue with Grand Duke Cossimio II when his mind was made up.

The next morning she did not send for her maid to prepare her bath and dress her. Arrigo, enquiring of Otonna as to whether his wife intended to remain in bed all day—again—received nothing more than a shrug and a few words professing ignorance of Her Grace’s plans. So Arrigo was as surprised as anyone when a courier came in at noon with a message from Lizia: the caravan of carriages taking her and supplies to Casteya was also taking Mechella.

Cossimio shouted curses for half an hour until Gizella got him laughing over how they’d misjudged their shy, self-effacing ‘Chella. Reassured by Otonna as to her health, they were impressed by her determination and took it as evidence that she now thought of their people as her own. Cossimio decided to make a gesture of sending the courier back with messages attempting to dissuade her from the journey. But gesture he intended it to be, for Meya Suerta was applauding Mechella on every corner and zocalo, and drinking her name in every tavern. So the note did not contain a Grand Ducal Command that she would be compelled to obey—or which, disobeyed, would force him to chastise her.

Another note left the Palasso shortly thereafter. Late that night, still half-blind with fury, Arrigo slipped out a garden gate and went alone and unobserved to Tazia’s old caza. She met him in the empty hallway, a lamp in her hand. He sat with her on the staircase until nearly dawn, then returned to the Palasso resigned—if not to his wife’s spectacular display of disobedience, then at least to substituting for his father while Cossimio concentrated on the crisis.

“Show that you’re willing to listen and help when everyone else is not. The others are doing very noisy and obvious things, Arrigo.
The hard part was left to you. Your father has no time for the day-to-day business now. You do, and he trusts you to do it. The people will remember. They may take her to their hearts as kind folk welcome a stranger, but you’re part of their souls. You’ll be the one to keep Tira Virte functioning in this emergency. You’ll show that you care for
all
your people. Now, go home and get some sleep, Arrigo. You’ll need it.”

Mechella didn’t think of it as disobedience. After all, the Grand Duke said that
Arrigo
must stay in Meya Suerta. He hadn’t even said Mechella’s name.

As it happened, Arrigo was wrong about her royal instincts. Had Mechella examined what compelled her, she would have recognized it as the next step in a path mapped out by her own childhood. Deprived of her mother, she had played the maternal role by telling stories to servants’ children at Pallaiso Millia Luminnai. Her husband had given her a daughter of her own, but he had also given her a whole nation to care for, and until now she had spent her time learning its needs while scarcely aware that she
was
learning. This journey of hers would end—though she had no way of knowing it—with her involvement in every aspect of Tira Virteian life when she became its Grand Duchess. And Tira Virte would return her love a thousandfold.

All that she knew now was that she must go to Casteya and do what she could to help. She felt well enough for any journey. She worried about her baby, but Arrigo’s carriage was the newest and most comfortable in Tira Virte, and the ride was amazingly smooth. There were physicians in their party who could take care of her, and Lizia to keep a close watch on her for weariness, and she simply
couldn’t
stay in Meya Suerta when her people needed her.

She spent the long days of travel poring over hastily scrawled inventory sheets with Lizia, making plans based on news from Casteyan messengers sent to intercept them. She and Lizia thought themselves prepared for whatever might await them.

They were wrong.

Their arrival at the first mountain village flattened by earthquake brought bitter tears neither woman would shed. Where once there had been houses, shops, a smithy and a mill and a little stone Sanctia, there was nothing now but ruin. Roofs of tile had collapsed all the way down into basements; roofs of thatch had, on falling, turned the candlelit homes beneath into infernos. The first
sign of life Mechella and Lizia saw was a huddled gathering in the graveyard beside the wreck of the Sanctia. Rescuers had spent days digging through the rubble, hoping for survivors but locating only corpses. They had been digging graves, too, but wasted no time or effort on coffins; even in late autumn coolness there was danger of disease. The dead were buried without even a winding sheet, for every scrap of cloth was needed for bandages and every blanket for protection against the chill nights. There was no refuge from the cold, not even in the village Sanctia, which had burned to the ground. Arrigo’s steward had packed a spacious tent for Countess Lizia’s use, but when it was learned that there was not a scrap of shelter to be had in all the village, the two women agreed that it should be used for the injured. They would sleep as they had on the road, in their carriage.