The Golden Key (110 page)

“You are young yet, and still healthy, Your Grace,” said the Lord Limner calmly. “You will have other children.”

Rohario stiffened and turned away. There stood Ermaldo, surveying
him with his usual air of disdain. Was it common knowledge that Grand Duke Renayo despised his own children? Aching in every joint and muscle, Rohario limped back to his suite. Listlessly, he directed his servant to pack. There was no point in staying here.

  SIXTY  

Beatriz
always told her to come in the back way, through the servants’ quarters, but Eleyna hated subterfuge. She pushed her black curls out of her eyes with the back of a hand and marched up the front steps of the Grijalva compound. The two old men sitting side by side on a bench beside the shop door watched her dramatic arrival. One lowered his gaze; the other smiled. Eleyna didn’t know whether to be furious or relieved.

“Davo!” She addressed the man with lowered eyes, a servant who had for sixty years ground and mixed paint for the Grijalvas. “You must close and bar the shop for the day!”

“Sit down, mennina,” said the other man. He patted the bench. It was so old that the wood was as smooth as polished stone. “Where have you been?”

She had not expected to confront Grandzio Cabral. Expecting her mother, she was already primed for a great argument, and the words poured out. “I went to the hangings. The Shagarra Regiment rounded up twenty men accused as ringleaders of the Iluminarres riots and dragged them before the magistrate. The men weren’t allowed to plead their own case! And now—only ten days later!— twelve of those men were hanged. What kind of justice is that?”

“Swift justice, mennina,” said Cabral mildly. “Or are you thinking of giving away your bedchamber to a family of beggars now?”

“There will be trouble all through the city. This very afternoon!”

“Be trouble in the hall if you don’t pretend you’ve been here with me all afternoon, Maessa Eleynita,” retorted old Davo, coming to life as he always did when he thought Eleyna was threatened. She had won his heart long ago, begging
him
—not her Grijalva uncles—to teach her the mysteries of pigments and paints. He sat with his back to the open shutters. The scent of oils and solvents, the life’s blood of the Grijalvas, drifted out from the shop.

“You’re my only advocate, Davo.” She took his stained, gnarled hands in her own.

“You’re a good girl.”

“You ought not to be walking to such places unescorted, Eleynita,” said Cabral in that same mild voice.

“I’m a respectable widow. I’ll do what I want!”

“You want to watch men hanged?”

“Someone must witness! I sketched. Here.” She sat on the bench next to Cabral and rested her sketchpad on her dress, careless of the fine green silk. Opening the book, she paged slowly through it. “Look how restless the crowd is.” Individual faces, the cut of a coat or gown, tableaus of men watching and glimpses of children darting through the crowd: She had caught them all. “They built the gibbets by the marsh. The shop ought to be closed for the day, as a protest if nothing else. Those men weren’t allowed to speak on their own behalf.”

“That isn’t our decision to make, carrida meya.”

“To allow the men to speak? Or to close the shop?” She hesitated, then rushed on. “Don’t you ever mind it, Grandzio? Taking their orders, living under their thumbs? And you twice as old as any of them?”

“Of whom are you speaking?” She heard the reserve in his voice. He glanced at Davo, but Davo had served the family for so long it was impossible he not suspect.

It was not the politic thing to say, but Eleyna had never let that stop her. “The Viehos Fratos. The men who wear the sigil of the Golden Key.”

Cabral did not reply for a long while, but he gestured with one hand and old Davo got up obediently and retreated into the shop. Here, in the peaceful Grijalva compound, the executions seemed very far away, as indeed they were: They had taken place on the opposite side of town, as far as possible from Palasso Verrada. Here, at Palasso Grijalva, was like another world, one not torn by the press of bodies, by the angry whispers and exhalation of fear and hatred, by the awful jerk and sway of the executed men dangling from the noose. Here was quiet sun and a street slumbering in siesta. A cart piled high with lemons and limes trundled past. Two children rolled hoops at the intersection. From down the arched tunnel that led into the main courtyard, Eleyna heard the faint singing and laughter of the serving girls, washing clothes in the stable trough: “
My beloved awaits me at the fountain.
”

“Leilias spoke freely with you,” said Cabral at last, folding his hands neatly in his lap.

“You know she did! Grandmother believed in my gift!”

“As do I, mennina.”

Eleyna shut her eyes on sudden tears, bowed her head, and laid it on his hands. His skin bore calluses and lesions, the legacy of his years of grinding harsh pigments and tempering them into paints.
“Now that Grandmother is dead, you are the only one who believes in me.”

He stroked her hair gently. “The Itinerarrio, Sario, has been looking at your paintings. He is one of the Gifted, and he admires your work.”

She looked up, aware her cheeks were warm. “I haven’t met him yet. Since the Iluminarres riot, Mother has kept me in the matron’s courtyard, painting portraits of those awful lapdogs the court ladies keep. Matra ei Filho, now Grand Duchess Johannah wants a portrait done of her greyhounds. She saw the miniature I did of Countess do’Casteya’s pugs, and she wants me to do another of hers, only with the greyhounds in a pastoral scene, by a farmhouse. It makes me sick! Look at these! Look!” She pulled away from him and flipped through the pages of her sketchpad. “Children dressed in rags. Men who could barely walk for hunger, all come to the hanging—but for what? People spoke of Ghillas. There was a terrible rumor going around that seven days after the bread riots the common folk in Aute-Ghillas burned the palace there and put the king to the sword. Is it true?”

The rumor did not appear to surprise him. “How could I hope for such news to be true? Everyone knows that we Grijalvas serve the Grand Duke. If the Grand Duke is attacked by people who believe such rumors, then so will
we
be attacked.”

“That’s true, I suppose. Like a disease, jumping from one city to the next. It still wasn’t right to hang those men like that, though.”

“You had a customer in looking at your
Battle of Rio Sanguo.
”

“You’re trying to distract me. Nicollo told me I ought to burn it. But it isn’t a disgrace, though he may think it one.” She tilted her head to one side, catching a sudden fusillade of faint gunfire, a harsh melody borne on the breeze. “Matra!”

Cabral got up from the bench and took a few nimble steps down to the avenue, staring along the empty street. His hair was as pale as the zinc white they used in painting the coldest, purest whites, but he walked with the vigor of a man of forty. Almost eighty he might be, but he was stronger than Gifted painters half his age. Had he ever regretted his health, or wished he could trade it for the Gift? She never had the courage to ask.

Now he merely shook his head. “Nothing. Go into the hall, Eleynita. I’ll take care of things here.” He clucked reprovingly. “These are hard days.”

She kissed him on the cheek and hurried inside, her mood entirely changed. Who had come to look at her painting? Would it be bought? Perhaps chosen for display at Galerria Verrada?

“No!” Eleyna recognized Agustin’s voice. A moment later the boy came pelting out of the arcaded walkway that led to the gardens. He saw Eleyna and veered toward her. “I won’t go through the Confirmattio,” he muttered, hiding behind her. “It’s so degrading.”

“Agustin!”

“There are other ways to know. Why do I have to be tested, except so they can do to me what was done to them? I won’t do it!”

She sighed. There
they
came, their voices like the mutter of the crowd at the hangings: an uncle, three male cousins, and her mother. She braced herself.

Dionisa strode forward first, sweeping her old-fashioned bustled skirt past a tight turn where the arcade emptied into the courtyard. She advanced on her daughter and son with the confidence of a woman who has achieved the ultimate authority: mother to a Gifted son. She fixed her glare on Eleyna. “It isn’t enough that
you
act in this way, is it? You must infect
him
as well. Go at once to your chamber. I will speak with you later.”

“I won’t go,” said Eleyna softly.

“He’s as loyal as a dog to her,” muttered her uncle, Giaberto.

Agustin huddled closer behind her. Although he was now taller than she was, although he was now fifteen, he could only sustain short spurts of defiance. His artist’s soul was like a fine piece of porcelain: admire it, handle it gently, and it will transform a room with its beauty; drop it and it will shatter. Eleyna was not so delicate. As Dionisa ever reminded her, wishing her son had been born with fiery resolve and her daughter with the more demure sensibility.

“This is Conselho business,” objected Nicollo. “You may go, Eleyna.”

“Then Agustin will go with me. Come, Agustin.” But she trembled as she said it and not just with anger. It was not wise to push Viehos Fratos too far. They had powers that others did not. She had learned that the hard way, five years ago.

“I have had enough of this!” Nicollo was furious.

“Let her go,” said Dionisa, “and take the boy, for now. It is only a formality, after all. He has shown his skills already.” Always they shrouded the Gift in secrecy, even when speaking among themselves. “We will discuss what to do next.”

At moments like these, Eleyna admired her mother for the way Dionisa imposed her will upon her male relatives. Agustin was a rare thing; there had been few boys in this last generation who had passed the Confirmattio—she had heard Leilias comment on it
many times. Leilias had borne two Gifted sons herself, but no other Grijalva woman since had given birth to more than one. Dionisa knew the worth of what she had; the Viehos Fratos knew that she knew, and knew also that she would not sit back and let them take the boy without her guiding the hand that wielded the paintbrush.

Eleyna did not trust her mother. But having said she was going, she could hardly object now. She took Agustin by the hand and together they crossed through the great ballroom, into the south courtyard, and from there along an arcade smothered in oleander into the tiled courtyard around which the private suites were clustered.

Though it was cool, Agustin was sweating. He dipped a hand in the fountain, brushed his fingers along the cool tile, and wiped his brow. Their sister Beatriz came into the courtyard through the door that led into the library, and she crossed toward them.

“They don’t need to test me,” Augustin continued as Beatriz stopped beside him and gently brushed a stray curl out of his eyes, “if they already know that—” He broke off when their cousin Yberra came in from the arcade. Yberra came from that line of the family which had lost the ability to produce Gifted sons. Andreo was the last. Yberra might suspect there were secrets among the Viehos Fratos, but she remained ignorant of the Grijalvas’ true power.

“The hem of your gown is dirty,” said Agustin to Beatriz, changing the subject quickly. “You’ve tried to brush the dirt from your gown, where you were kneeling.”

“Beatriz!” Yberra pressed a hand to her bosom—and there was a lot of bosom there—and looked horrified. “You haven’t been
gardening
with the servants again, have you? I thought you were reading. Eiha! I’ve heard
news.
” This last word spoken dramatically. “I overheard Andreo telling Mama you ought to marry Fransisso.”

Eleyna shuddered.

“Of course I will do what my parents ask of me,” said Beatriz calmly.

“Of course you will,” said Yberra sweetly, shooting a stinging and triumphant glance toward Eleyna.

“I’m so sorry we must go now, Yberra.” Eleyna grabbed Agustin’s elbow and hauled him away.

Beatriz hurried after them. “Eleyna!” she said in a whisper as they climbed the stairs, first one flight to the corner, then turning to go up again, until they reached the third landing. Here Eleyna opened the door that led into the suite of rooms belonging to their mother and her first cousins—doomed by the fall of their aunt
Tazia, whom none of them had even liked, to be relegated to the least desirable corner of the compound.