"No, no-" Stricken, Saavedra gestured the comment away. "Where did you find this? It isn't mine."

He shrugged narrow shoulders, staring again at the painting in unrestrained delight. "In the workroom."

"Which workroom?"

"The one where we put all the paintings packed to be shipped somewhere else." He was uninterested; such shipments were routine in a family of artists who painted so many copies. "I like how you have painted the hands so crippled, 'Vedra-and the lines of pain in his face-"

" 'Naddi!" She wanted to protest that the grotesqueness of the painting was not due such flattery, and yet she had to admit the artist's talent was more than talent. It was sheer genius.

"Who is it?" Ignaddio asked. "And why would he wish himself painted so?" Young he was, but already he understood that vanity often superseded truth.

"I don't know who it-" But she did. Abruptly, she did. "Filho do'canna." She collapsed to her knees even as 'Naddi laughed in gleeful delight to hear her swear. "Oh Matra, Blessed Matra-"

"Who is it, 'Vedra?"

She kissed fingertips, pressed them to her breast. "Nommo do'Matra ei Filho, let him not do this ... let him never do this-"

"Who is it? Who has done what? Who shouldn't do this?"

The series of questions posed in a child's unbroken treble at last breached her horror. A trembling hand-her own?-reached out to tug at cloth, to cover the painting. " 'Naddi-"

"Who painted it, 'Vedra?"

"No." Now the hand settled on his shoulder, clasped tightly. "No, 'Naddi ... no importada." She stood up unsteadily, guided him toward the open door. "Go, now. You have helped enough today ... go and play, if you wish."

He balked. "But I want to know-"

"No." You don't. No one should know. "Go on, 'Naddi."

"But-"

"Do'nado," she said firmly. "It was nothing at all, Ignaddio-just a poor jest painted by a moronno luna."

"But- "

She pushed him out, shut the door, leaned against it. A final plaintive question came from beyond the wood; when she ignored it long enough, Ignaddio went away.

Trembling, Saavedra straightened. Pushed herself from the door. Went to the bed. Tore away the cloth to display the ruined hands and tortured features of Zaragosa Serrano.

She had seen the painting before, in Sario's atelierro. She recalled questioning him about the border, the affectation that now was in everything he painted.

He put this where I was sure to see it. He wanted me to see it. He wanted me to know. Her belly cramped. Saavedra turned her back on the painting, slid down to the floor, scraped her spine against the bed. I have always been his confidante, always understood him, his need to express his Gift. And now he shows me this.

She sat there staring blindly, collapsed upon hard stone flags . . . aware of fear, of tears, of nausea-and an understanding at last of Sario's terrible Luza do'Orro.

TWENTY-TWO.

He spent himself as a man does who has not lain with a woman in too long: with a quick- struck and scouring immediacy that left him drained, not sated; that left him limp in body and spirit as wet linen. The woman beneath did not protest; she laughed softly, breathily, murmuring of a sword whose temper is tamed by a properly-fitted sheath . . . and he let her have it, let her flatter herself, let her believe she had kindled and quenched his best.

He moved then, shifting weight, aware of slick flesh adhered to his own-and knew instantly and with utter certainty that he had wasted himself, his seed; had thrown away that which could better be used for power.

It palled: fleshly contact, release, sheer physical need. He pushed away from her and rose, climbing free of tangled sheets and coverlet, unheeding of his nudity as he stood beside the bed.

Sweat dried on him as she turned, shifted, propped herself up on one elbow.

"Go," he said. "Now. Adezo."

It shocked her. "But-"

"You have had all of me you shall have . . . what is left is mine, and there are better ways to spend it." Astonishment now was anger. She tore back the bedclothes and climbed out, equally naked, equally uncaring. The epithet she used was framed in a mouth accustomed to such, and he laughed.

"Boys? Is that it?" She found and reached for smallclothes, yanked the shift over her head and tugged it across lush breasts and undulant hips. "Girl, followed by boy-as sweet vinho follows sour? Is that it?"

He said nothing. He watched her, marking the coursing of colors in her face: he had not studied scorn before, or humiliation, or such taut, restrained fury. All were tangible to him. I must recall this . . . use this . . .

She muttered again such vile commentary upon his person, his manhood, his poor and hasty industry that he grinned unrestrainedly, entertained by her vocabulary. Which infuriated her the more, and when at last she departed, she banged the door shut so forcefully he feared it might crack the lintel.

Gone. The smell of her remained, a cheap, thick perfume concocted of violets in an oil going rancid, and the undertang of lovemaking, of sweat, of spent-wasted!-seed. Yet naked, now dry, he stared at the bed and considered his emotions. That he was a man, he knew; that there was something worth more than the transient physical pleasure of copulation he was certain.

Transient pleasure . . . wholly unlike art that remained as alive, as permanently documented as that passing moment of physical bliss could not be, ever, as alive and real as art because art was of the body and the mind; and art, once completed, could never be extinguished by such trivial things as exhaustion, as infrequency, as the inability of a man under certain circumstances to raise the infamous sword.

Sario smiled. That sword is worthless. It ages, sickens, grows lax. But the blade of true creation cannot be broken. Ever.

Nor the one of power. He knew its name, its guises. And learned more each time he read of the Kita'ab, that was also Folio.

Meya Suerta, as most cities, began with small ambitions. But they had grown even as the city, and now the tattered hem of voluminous skirts covered much of the mellow land between the broken palisades of rising hills leading to the heights, and thick lowland marshes. Surrounded by orchards and vineyards, the walls and lesser dwellings of those who built beyond the city were buffered against depredations of the marshes, and yet the citizentry felt its incursions regardless.

Most particularly Grijalvas, in their very bones.

Raimon paused near the fieldstone wall, noting idly how its spine had collapsed in places. The undulant sweep of stacked stone followed the line of the hills, separating vineyard from vineyard, orchard from orchard, so that grapes and olives did not offend one another; so that the citrus remained inviolate.

He walked the crown of a quiet hill, aware of exquisite rose-golden light that made him long for paletto and easel; aware also of impatience and growing expectancy. The quick-scribbled message had said nothing beyond that it was urgent he come. It was not from a Limner-there was no invocation of the Golden Key-but was nonetheless from someone who knew him, who knew where his interests lay.

When she came, striding up from the city with lifted skirts clasped into fists, he was startled. He did not know why he expected a man, but he had; and now she was here, all grown out of awkward adolescence into inarguable beauty, a warm, exotic beauty formed of the best of Tza'ab features and the best of Tira Virteian, so that she was not one or the other but wholly of them both.

Raimon did not understand why he had not marked it before, why it had taken Alejandro do'Verrada's interest to make him truly see her. Perhaps it was that she was so much younger than he ... but no, youth meant nothing save promise to a man who died when not yet old. Perhaps it was that he had been distracted, dedicated to family goals and compordotta, to the Viehos Fratos, to Sario. Or perhaps he had been blind. Foolishly blind.

He smiled. He knew what lived within her spirit; it pleased him to see the exterior matched it.

She did not smile back. She reached the crown of the hill, dropped crumpled skirts, faced him poised so rigidly he feared she might shatter. "Do you know what he has done? Do you know what he is?"

Pleasure was extinguished. He opened his mouth to ask identification of whom she meant; closed it. He knew. Blessed Mother. . . does everyone know what I have done?

Fine cheeks were wind-glazed from the walk. "Can you stop him?"

That startled. "Stop him? Why? We have worked many years to place a Grijalva in his position."

She shook her head; thick ringlets, bound loosely back, massed across slim shoulders. "He isn't a Grijalva anymore. He's-he's . . ." She considered, gestured helplessness. "More. Less.

Other."

He turned away from her abruptly, staring across terraced vineyards and orchards toward the dark smudge of marsh beyond. From there, Davo claimed, came the pestilence that afflicted them; the bone-fever that twisted joints into painful immobility and helplessness. Is it the fever that kills us so young? Some poison in our blood?

"What will you do?" she asked. "What can you do?"

Is it the pigments we grind, tempered with bodily fluids to create the Peintraddos?

"You can't do nothing," she said. "You must do something."

He did not turn to her. "I have done something. I helped create him."

"You didn't!" Skirts rustled against breeze-stirred grass as she came deliberately around to face him. "You as much as anyone have counseled proper compordotta ... do you know the truth of it? Of him?"

"That he is capable of more than other Limners?-eiha ... I know."

"For how long?"

He looked into her face, into fierce but frightened eyes. "Since the beginning."

"I will not accept that." Delicate color tinged the flawless clarity of her skin. "No one has known 'from the beginning.' Or surely he would never have been admitted to the Viehos Fratos, surely you would have done more than invoked the Lesser Discipline." Color deepened. "I recall Tomaz. Do you recall Tomaz? How he died?"

Startling himself as much as her, he caught her arm. "How much do you know, Saavedra?

How much has Sario said of us?"

"Of you?" She shook her head. "He breaks no oaths, Il Sanguo-there are no secrets of the Limners I should not know, because we all of us are Grijalvas-"

She knows too much. He clamped her arm more firmly within his grasp. "That is not the question I asked, nor is it proper answer."

"Nor have you answered my questions," she countered sharply. "Nommo do'Matra, Sanguo Raimon . . . you say you helped create him. Do you know what you have done?"

"Lost control," he confessed, "if there was any I ever claimed." He released her arm abruptly, aware of the twinge in his knuckles. "I think there is more in his soul than even I believed possible."

Eloquent brows arched. "And yet you did not tell the others?"

Guilt scoured him into self-flagellation. "Better to ask, what did I tell the others."

Color fled her face. "That he was suitable. Oh, Blessed Mother-you suggested him! En verro-you supported him!" Wind plucked at ringlets. "He said there was only one he trusted, only one who believed in him."

"I believed him suitable, yes. And I believed it vital that he be given the opportunity to become Lord Limner."

"Why?"

That angered him. "Because one of us had to be!"

She flinched briefly from the sheer volume and vehemence of his shout, recovered ground. "Is it so very important that Grijalvas regain now what was lost?"

"Yes."

"No matter the price?"

He thrust between them one hand, displaying fingers that already began the transformation from powerful into powerless. "We know the price, Saavedra! It coils within our bones, waiting for the day when it may creep out into the light."

She checked, went on. "But if you knew he-"

Curtly, he overrode her. "How could I know what he might do? It was enough that he might not."

She shook her head. "I am a Grijalva. I was raised to believe as you believe, as Sario believes, that we should stand by the side of our Duke-"

"By the side," he emphasized. "Yes, of course." And then she understood. "Do you believe Sario might want more?"

"I do not. He will not."

"But if he did-"

"How much time," he asked deliberately, "will you have to paint when you have borne a child? As you raise that child? As you bear and raise another?"

Though she said nothing, her answer was implicit in the tautening of her face. Little time. No time.

Raimon nodded once. "Above all, he must paint."

"En verro." Her voice was rusty. "I know-I've known all that he was since boyhood. I saw the Luza do'Orro-I saw it always, though others denied it; though they distrusted and disliked him."

"Called him Neosso Irrado." He nodded again. "So they called me. It seems a prerequisite."

She understood at once. "Then if you-"

"There are those who are," he said, "and those who shape."

"As you shaped Sario."

He offered no response.

"Why?" she asked. "Was there no other but he? Would there be no other suitable Limner perhaps a decade later?"

"These are matters for the Viehos Fratos-"

She cut him off neatly. "Make them mine, grazzo. I shaped him as much as you."

Wind ruffled his hair, stripped it from his face so he could hide nothing from her. "Because I wanted to."

She recoiled. "That is your answer? Your justification for allowing this to happen?"

Bitterness warped his laughter. "When a man cannot become what he himself desires, he may shape another to assume his place."