The Golden Key (99 page)

“Arrigo, hear me out. Her name is Serenissa. She’s my younger sister’s child, born a year after Rafeyo and a Mennino do’Confirmattio, as he is. She’s not quite eighteen, very bright and witty—and she even reminds me of myself in looks, the way I was at her age.”

“You’re still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. But I won’t do it, Tazia. Not if the woman isn’t you. I promised you fidelity. That you didn’t ask is all the more reason for me to give it. I couldn’t make love to another woman, even one who looked like you.”

“Not even for a child who would be ours?” she whispered. “Mechella’s creature Leilias is wed to the Limner Zevierin—he’s sterile, but they want children. She’s at the Palasso even now, looking for a suitable father. Zevierin will treat her children as if he had sired them. He loves her that much. He wants her children that much.”

“Tazia—carrida dolcha meya—” Arrigo drew her back into his arms, holding fiercely. “You are not only the most beautiful but the most generous and loving woman I’ve ever known! If you truly want this—”

“More than anything but your love, Arrigo. I swear to you I’ll think of this child as ours, yours and mine. The crudest thing I ever had to endure was that I could never bear you a child. But this way—don’t you see—we could do what we’ve pretended so many times, make a baby of our own.”

He was quiet for a few minutes, the drowsy hum of the bees and the sound of his heart the only things she heard. Then: “If you adopted the baby, wouldn’t it take Garlo’s name?”

“Never! I’d never give him legal rights over a Grijalva! He—or she—would be a fosterling, and remain a Grijalva. Only you and I and the mother would know that the baby is also a do’Verrada.”

“Well, naturally it must be kept absolutely secret.”

“Naturally,” she agreed. All proof and documentation would be most secret indeed—until the time was right to reveal it. Her own adherents among the family would approve this. Mechella’s sons would never take a Grijalva Mistress, having grown up prejudiced against the tradition by their mother. Such a smear on the canvas of Grijalva power could not be tolerated. A bastard would ensure do’Verrada compliance no matter what the vagaries of Mechella’s sons. Tazia was sure she could explain it attractively enough to the important Grijalvas on her side so they would look the other way and break faith with an agreement dating back to Lord Limner Sario and Duke Alejandro. Even if she couldn’t convince them—and she would judge the telling most carefully before breathing a word—
she
would have the child in her possession.

“—the next Confirmattio,” Arrigo was saying, and Tazia tore her mind from delectable possibilities to find him much less stunned than before. “The child would be attributed to the boy whose place I take.”

Much
less stunned. It was insulting, how quickly he’d taken to the idea.

“The perfect solution,” she told him. “But could we be sure of trusting the boy?”

“Eiha, there is that. What of the girl? Can she be trusted?”

“I’m sure of it.” Tazia created laughter out of nothing. “Serenissa has always regretted that she was born too late to be your Mistress and too early to be Alessio’s.”

But Serenissa’s daughter—and Rafeyo would use every scrap of magic he possessed to ensure that it
was
a daughter—would be of an age to seduce Alessio in twenty or so years. She laughed more easily, contemplating Mechella’s face when she found out that her darling elder boy was sleeping with his own half sister.

Arrigo made the correct remark about being glad Tazia had been
the one chosen for him, then returned to the logistics of getting Serenissa pregnant. As if Tazia hadn’t already thought of everything—though it must appear to him that he’d worked it out on his own.

As she listened, guiding him subtly toward the conclusions she wished him to reach, she reflected that it really was rather touching, how it never even occurred to him that the lovely, fecund, dangerous Grijalva girl would have to die in childbed.

  FIFTY-FOUR  

Several
hours before the Sancterna celebrations were due to begin, Dioniso let himself into Rafeyo’s tiny atelierro and locked the door behind him. The room reeked of paint and solvents and stale urine from the unemptied chamberpot by the window. Well, naturally it hadn’t been tended; Rafeyo kept the door locked. A pathetically easy lock it was to pick, too.

Rafeyo was not present. His sketches were: dozens of them, tacked up on the walls and spread out on the worktable. Dioniso was impressed in spite of himself by the boy’s ability. On one wall were depictions of bygone Lord Limners in chronological order. It was, if nothing else, quite a fashion show. Starched neck-ruffs spread to outrageous widths before narrowing to white collars and then vanishing altogether; draped cloaks changed to long jackets, embroidered vests, and finally simple tunics; knee-britches (how he’d hated those!) were abandoned for trousers and boots. The only constants were the gray feathered cap and ceremonial collar of office. It had been such a long time since he’d felt that momentous golden weight across his shoulders, more satisfying than even the Chieva do’Orro at his breast.

Another wall showed several studies of Lord Limner Riobaro’s
Peintraddo Chieva.
As anticipated, the candlelight had been troublesome for Rafeyo; Matra, he’d had trouble with it himself when he’d painted it. But Rafeyo was getting the feel of it rather nicely, as far as one could tell in a pencil sketch. Dioniso gazed for a long moment at the handsome young man—how wonderful it would be to be that young again! Eiha, soon. He could remember having worn that face. Perhaps if it had truly been his, Saavedra would never even have glanced at Alejandro.

On the worktable was the preliminary small oil on scrap canvas of Rafeyo himself in Riobaro’s pose, gray drapery behind him and candle before him. Not yet filled out in detail, still it would suffice as a lure—
if
he had imbued it with magic. Dioniso bent to inspect it, squinting in late afternoon light through high attic windows. He cursed his slowly failing eyesight and his Grijalva pride that refused any palliative more conspicuous than a lens tucked in a
pocket. Yet he saw the sign in the sketch: a tiny scratch on the back of the left hand, as if a fingernail had scraped across dried paint.

Cabessa merditto!
he thought, shaking his head. The fool boy had even tested the magic. But his folly was proof of Dioniso’s wisdom. Teasing Rafeyo down certain paths—not that he’d needed much urging; hinting at this and that—cautiously, for he was quick-witted; revealing just enough to make him hunger for more—certain that he would experiment on his own. What a wondrous thing curiosity was. How perfectly it complemented ambition, and put luster on the Luza do’Orro. He of all people knew this. He had lived his life by it. No surprise to anyone when Rafeyo continued to do the same.

He allowed himself to anticipate the moment. Rafeyo: young, strong, and his. Other men knew what it was to possess a woman’s body for a few sweet minutes; he knew what it was to possess another’s flesh for a lifetime. To feel bone and muscle and skin and blood and sinew, and make it irrevocably his own. Only he had felt such things. He was unique. He was Sario.

He smiled, reliving cherished memories—indeed, he could almost taste the sticky-sweet poppy syrup on his tongue. A mild dosage timed to take effect shortly after the transfer, it caused slight drowsiness, vague disorientation. He’d learned it was useful to make sure the abandoned host was befuddled; reliance on shock alone could be risky. One could never be sure of the resilience of any given mind.

As always when he dipped into bright remembered pleasures, he called up the darker colors of danger as well. He knew everything that would happen, everything he would experience. It had been twenty-eight years since the last time—nearly twenty-nine, he realized with some startlement—but he remembered everything. Including the dangers.

Only two things truly imperiled him. The first occurred during the instant the body died with the freeing of its spirit. The risk lay not in damage to abandoned flesh; it came when the soul had not yet been directed to its new home. Liberated from familiar matter,
something
—soul, consciousness, mind; he preferred to call it “spirit”—cast about in growing panic. It inevitably sensed the nearness of the shell it had so recently animated, struggling against the dictates of the lingua oscurra, trying desperately to reinhabit its former home. Forbidden this shelter, it sought the familiar in a painting from which it also must be blocked. Turning the spirit from blood it recognized was ever an act of sheer will.

But in the next instant came even greater danger. Denied its own
flesh and even the whispering memory of it that was the painting, the spirit felt
hunger.
As many times as it had happened, as prepared for it as he had become, the reality forever awed him. Perhaps one day he would decide if it was wholly one thing, the spirit hungering to be incarnate—or wholly another, the empty body calling out to be filled. Whichever it might truly be, that moment was the crux: if he could not guide the spirit to the flesh waiting for it, it might escape him. Such required the strongest magic of all.

He had never yet failed. He would not fail with Rafeyo.

He was about to leave the atelierro when curiosity made him investigate the stacked canvases behind the door. If Rafeyo had gone against the decision of the Viehos Fratos—not to mention his own private strictures—and continued to paint those appalling landscapes, Dioniso would—

Landscape? Not technically. An architectural rendering, in Blooded paints that reeked from the canvas. Every malevolent symbol in the
Folio
and almost as many from the
Kita’ab
appeared in ribbon-wreathed lozenges around the edges, accompanied by runes so foul that even he was staggered.

His first thought was that Rafeyo was indeed a fool to have kept this at the Palasso. If anyone but Dioniso had discovered it—

Ah, but where else to hide it other than in damned near plain sight?

Dioniso was torn between fury and admiration. Clever boy! And twice clever to have cobbled together bits and pieces, hints and intimations, what he knew and what he could guess, from what Dioniso had taught him. He’d strewn insinuations freely, but never suspected the boy’s hatred would provide such fertile ground. It would never do to let Rafeyo know how he had startled his master. Matra, even the stars were in their proper places!

It required no guesswork to know what Rafeyo intended with this perfect portrait of Corasson on the night of Sancterria.

“You go on without me, Arrigo,” Tazia said. “I should put in an appearance at Baroness Lissina’s reception. I’ll join you later.” She stood on tiptoe to kiss him in the late afternoon shadow of a poplar tree. “I have a lovely spot all picked out, nestled in a hollow of the hill where we can watch the sun rise. My cook is packing a breakfast.”

“Sounds wonderful,” he smiled. “I’ll slip away from my parents during the Paraddio Luminosso.”

“Eiha, change your shoes to boots first, carrido. If you march all night in those soft things you’re wearing now, you’ll be blistered until Luna Qamho.”