"Here we are, Maesso," said the old driver. "Begging your pardon, my lord, but we've been sitting here and you haven't moved. I'd be grateful if you'd get down. My granddaughter has a feast tonight, and I'm not willing to be late so that you can stare at nothings in the air. Matra Dolcha, these Limners. I've heard it said before they're all half-mad, but I never believed it until now."

Sario shook himself and looked around. They had indeed come to Pa-lasso Grijalva, which lay quiet, as dark as if it had been abandoned, emptied, given to the passing years. Shaking now, he sprang down and ran through the tunnel that led to the courtyard.

He wrenched open the doors that led up to the Atelierro and took the steps two at a time.

Threw open the doors at the top.

Matra ei Filho! There they stood in the light that flooded the great chamber, nine buffoons and old Cabral, looking as if the cat had come in and caught the mice at the cream. There was, of course, no sign of Saavedra. They had tricked him.

But there, behind them, he saw the back of a huge panel. He knew it instantly, although he could not see the image. He could feel it, his work, his sigils, his blood and tears and seed and spittle melded with oak and oils and pigments, sealed with the oscurra he had learned from the old Tza'ab, the secrets of the Al-Fansihirro.

He walked across the plank floor. And was stopped.

Stopped dead. His feet could not move.

An instant later he knew it for what it was: a spell painted onto the floor. Moronno that he was, he had walked straight into their trap, right across the floor into the circle of oscurra that now ringed, and weighted, his feet. He had not believed them cunning enough to do it. Or perhaps this, too, had been Eleyna's idea. Enraged, he lifted the paper and displayed it to them. "Who has done this?" he shouted.

"Which of you? Why did you steal my painting?"

"I have done this." She stepped out from behind them: masses of coiled ringlets, clear gray eyes. " 'I will do as they tell me,' " she said, echoing words he had long since forgotten, words that now accused him, in her voice.

Blessed Matra, her long-silenced voice.

She quoted him again. " I will give them a Peintraddo Chieva, but it will not be the real one.

That, I will keep. That, I will lock away. And only you, and only I, shall know the truth of it.' "

Her face was the same, but her manner was harder, angrier. "I know you, Sario. I know it is you."

" 'Vedra." Her name, on his lips. Like strokes made by a hand long barred from painting, the form came with difficulty. But it was her. Glorious Saavedra. "I was only waiting for you until the time was right. Then I meant to release you." He did not move to touch her, not yet. "It is too early. Who has done this? It was for me to do!"

"Not too early. Too late. By many years too late, Sario." He did not comprehend her anger.

Saavedra was never angry with him. "By what right did you tear me away from Alejandro? By what right did you paint me into a prison from which you had no intention of releasing me?"

"That isn't true!"

"I have lost my life!" she cried.

"Lost your life? I saved you from death! From becoming a gaping, empty-eyed skull, from becoming dust like all the others. Like Alejandro!"

"You did not save me," she said fiercely. "You robbed me. Robbed me of years, of those I knew and loved, of all the things in the world-in my time- that I treasured. All I have left of them is you-and the child."

He flinched. The child. The one thing he could never give her-he, who was no man in the eyes of the world, only and eternally a boy who painted. Was that why she had turned to Alejandro? " 'Vedra," he pleaded. "You don't understand-"

"I understand this, Sario: that you will pay the price for what you have done. I have prayed before the altar, I have asked the Matra's forgiveness, asked Alejandro's forgiveness, for what I must now do. But I will give my child-Alejandro's child-what is due him, and if that means I must sacrifice you, be certain I shall do it."

What had happened to his faithful, pliant Saavedra? She who had always known and accepted his Gift and his destiny? She had always loved him best. Except she had dared love Alejandro, who had nothing to recommend him except a handsome face-with its crooked, imperfect tooth!-and that restless animal energy that drew the eye-and his people-to him. Alejandro was nothing. Alejandro was only what Sario had made him. Once he made her understand that- "Tie his hands behind his back," Saavedra said to Cabral. She looked long at the assembled Limners, all but Sario. "You Viehos Fratos were always so enamored of your own power that you forgot-forget!-how fragile a thing it is."

"We have never forgotten," Giaberto protested. Never forgotten. The words hung in the air. Never forgotten, just as the first Sario, as Riobaro, as Oaquino and Guilbarro and all the others he had been, were never forgotten because their genius lived on in their paintings.

Blessed Matra! They meant to bind his hands.

Cabral advanced on him with a length of stout rope. Sario was strong, but Cabral with the aid of young Damiano was stronger. It was not just physical strength that overwhelmed him; it was the sight of Saavedra, alive, staring at him, her great beauty incandescent once more in her face.

But her face was turned against him, her gray eyes as hard as granite and her lips set and unforgiving.

It was Saavedra who bound his hands, though she set no hand on him. It was she who imprisoned him, though she moved no step from her place among the Viehos Fratos. From her place at their head, for any moronno could see at once that they deferred to her.

To the First Mistress! How Riobaro would have laughed at the irony. Perhaps all the Mistresses would have laughed: sweet Benissia; poor doomed Saalendra; exquisite Corasson; Rafeya; the incomparable Diega; Lina; confident Tazita; practical Lissina; that canna Tazia. They knew that a Mistress might have secrets that a Lord Limner could never know.

By whose power had the Grijalvas truly won their place? Through the Limners, or through their sisters and female cousins?

So he, the greatest Lord Limner, faced Saavedra, the first and most famous of the Grijalva Mistresses. How had they come to be at odds?

" 'Vedra," he began. He must only convince her. Once she understood what they could accomplish together- "Take him from my sight," she said coldly. "My Sario is dead to me. Dead; as is Alejandro, and Raimon and Ignaddio and all the others I knew. What stands here is only the remains of Sario."

Dead. Not that. Never that, spiritless meat and bone.

"I am Sario," he cried. "You know is it I, Saavedra. You know I am here, though I wear another man's body. The body is nothing, only flesh so that I might live another life, so that I may perfect-" He broke off.

They looked, oddly enough, horrified, as if something he had said had caused them all revulsion. They looked as Eleyna had looked, at the Palasso, staring at him as if he were a monster.

But tears glittered in Saavedra's eyes. She did understand, then.

"Is there no chamber where you may confine him safely?" she asked of the others. "There is much to do if we are to be prepared for the assembly two days hence."

" 'Vedra, don't abandon me now. I need you."

"En verro," she said. "As you always needed me."

At that instant he felt a burning along his skin, in his eyes and on his tongue. He had lived far too many years not to know his body's reactions intimately, not to know what each presaged.

"My paintings!" he cried, horrified. "Someone is destroying my paintings." Soaking them.

Ruining them! "You must stop this, 'Vedra!"

She came forward, but only to bend and brush water on the patterns painted onto the floor at his feet, to dissolve the oscurra. Her oscurra-the Gifted woman. So she had finally admitted it, accepted it-and used it against him!

She stood, stared at him, seemed to study him, seeking what he could not know. Only that she, of them all, would surely understand him. And forgive him. She always had.

" 'Vedra-" he whispered.

She turned her back on him.

The others led him away. There were too many, and he had never learned how to fight in any obvious brute physical fashion. Not in any of his lives. His hands were too important.

But none of that mattered. What mattered was that Saavedra had returned to him. She had returned, only to forsake him once and for all time.

When they shoved him into a small whitewashed chamber, empty of furniture or any adornment, and locked the door, he stood in the center of the room and wept.

NINETY.

Rohario entered the Cathedral Imagos Brilliantos by the side door through which he had left it in such haste six months before. That day, when Sancto Leo died in his arms, had changed his life forever. It had set him, and perhaps all of Tira Virte, on a new course whose direction could not now be altered.

He found his father waiting in the Premio Sancto's private rooms beyond the side chapel of the great cathedral nave. Renayo sat in a gilt chair, clearly tired. Il Cofforro's portrait of Premio Sancto Gregorrio IV gazed with vague fondness down on the Grand Duke. Rohario eyed the portrait with a new misgiving. He had learned so much from Cabral Grijalva. My grandfather.

Had Oaquino Grijalva spent his own blood and saliva in that painting? Had he spelled it so that the gentle solicitude that Rohario imagined beaming from Gregorrio's seamed face was not a true reflection of the man's kindly personality but only a magic set there by the painter's hand?

He dreaded looking on the great altarpiece, on the serene aspect of the Matra, for surely She, too, was a magicked rendering whose serenity enveloped Her worshipers not through their devotion but through a spell created by a mortal man's bloody hands.

And yet, if the altarpiece granted peace for a measure of time to those who gazed on it, where was the harm?

"Don Rohario." Renayo addressed him abruptly, and Rohario started and, bowing, came forward. "I have agreed to meet with you, as you requested."

"You look tired, Your Grace." "Your concern is charming, I'm sure. What do you want?"

Grand Duke Renayo did look tired, almost worn away, although surely these last two months trapped in Palasso Verrada with the imminent threat of riot hanging over the city would have been enough to exhaust the strongest man.

"I thank you for agreeing to meet with me, Your Grace. I know we did not part on good terms-"

"I said I never wanted to see you again and I am not sure I have changed my mind," snapped Renayo. "Get on with it!"

This flash of spirit encouraged Rohario, who had begun to wonder if his father, so subdued, was under some kind of spell. "I have said so many unlikely things to you, Your Grace, that I am hesitant to speak now, for fear you will not believe the strange and awkward tidings I bring." He had rehearsed this speech a hundred times. It sounded stiff.

Renayo sighed ostentatiously. "You are to be Premio Oratorrio of the Corteis, I suppose? It is the only position due your consequence."

"No." The suggestion threw him off his planned speech. A few of the wealthier landlords and merchants had indeed proposed electing Rohario as Premio Oratorrio, First Speaker of the Corteis; Rohario counted himself lucky that the proposal had been shouted down before he could himself refuse, in case the Provisional Assembly actually approved such a course and then interpreted his refusal as arrogance. "I will stand for election from Collara Asaddo and if elected will serve in the same capacity as any other representative."

"If you believe that, then you are a moronno. But I suppose you do not believe it and only say such things because they are expected of you. The farmers and artisans of your own estate will not refuse to elect you, I assume."

"I assume the same thing, Your Grace. All of the men standing for election have rank or property. You do not suppose we are allowing any sort of unpropertied ruffian to enter the Corteis? Respectable men have the wisdom to govern."

Renayo snorted, shifting impatiently in his chair. "Surely this is not all you have to say? To try once again to convince me to embrace this new enthusiasm? If I must accept it, I must, but only to spare Meya Suerta and our beautiful green earth the horrible conflicts that have wracked Ghillas and Taglis. And because I yet have hopes for Ghillas."

Rohario paced to the portrait, frowned at it, the beadwork of the headdress so cunningly portrayed that each bright bead reflected an unseen light, and walked back to stand before his father. "We are alone, Your Grace?"

"The Premio Sancto has assured me there is no one to overhear us. I must trust him, as we must all trust the Ecclesia and its representatives."

"Then what I say now I must assure you I say most reluctantly, and only because events force me to it." His father's wan face scared him. "You are tired, Your Grace. Might I get you wine?"

"I have been ill," said Renayo softly.

And so he looked, thin and wasted. Nevertheless, it was time to forge ahead. "Forgive me for speaking plainly, Patro. Leono do'Brendizia, who is cousin to the current Baron, intends to stand up in the assembly and accuse you of being a bastard who has not one drop of do'Verrada blood in him."

"I see."

"You see? Is that all you have to say? Matra Dolcha, Patro, you do not even look surprised.

Do you mean to tell me you have known all along?"

Now Renayo rose. "Perhaps I always suspected. We rarely saw Arrigo when I was a child, although we were sent to stay with him for part of the year." He poured himself wine from a crystal pitcher set on a side table.

"Certainly Cabral treated all of us as if we were his own children. Matra Dolcha, but we were all very happy at Corasson. The servants did not quite speak of it openly, for they were the most loyal staff I have ever encountered. As we all did, they, too, could not fail but to love my mother.

But when I became old enough and went out into the world, I saw other households and drew my own conclusions."

"And you said nothing of these conclusions?"

Renayo laughed harshly. "What was I to say? That I thought I was a bastard? I had no reason to believe I would ever sit on the throne of Tira Virte. And when the crown of Ghillas passed to Ivo and not to me, and then Alessio died unexpectedly, what was I to do? Arrigo had acknowledged me as his son. Was I to shame my mother publicly by refusing to take the throne because of ill-timed scruples? I think not. I did my duty to Tira Virte, and I continue to do so to this day."

Rohario swayed and, groping for a chair, sat down. "You never told me."

"Why should I have told you? You were vain and useless, your brother has as much common sense as a loon, and as for Benetto and Timarra-eiha! That was my bitterest disappointment, to see none of the great do'Verrada virtues reflected in my children."

"Certainly I have always been aware that we disappointed you and Mother," said Rohario peevishly, unable to help himself. "Did she know?"

Renayo took a draught of water. "She knew nothing but what it pleased her to know, blessed woman. Her single-mindedness was her greatest virtue. Mairie knew what she wanted and how to get it. I was not about to tell her that her handsome and rich do'Verrada husband was more likely a Grijalva bastard!"

"What do you mean to do?"

Renayo took his time, replacing the glass next to the pitcher, adjusting the black-lacquered tray so that its sides squared off against the table's edge, before he sat down again. "It is a dangerous thing, to accuse the Grand Duke of being chi'patro. Edoard must marry quickly and to our advantage. You I would have married to the Ghillasian girl, but. . . eiha, there is something strange about her. She wanders back and forth in her suite looking for Sario Grijalva. Eleyna says she fears there is a Limner spell-" Here he stopped short.

Eleyna! But this was not the moment to broach the subject of marriage.

Renayo sighed. "I have not revealed to you yet the secrets of the-" "-Grijalva Limners? Zio Cabral has told me that and more, Patro. That is why I am here now."

"Cabral admitted he is my father? Matra Dolcha!" Color glowed in his cheeks and his brusque resolve came back to him; he jumped up and paced, back and forth, in the small chamber. "It is true, then! Eiha! Just as well Mairie died before she could hear such bitter tidings. She would have hated knowing that her husband was one of their bastards!"

"You do not hate knowing it?" This man, this Renayo, was a stranger to him.

"Cabral is the kindest man I know. Arrigo did his duty by me, but he never showed me a moment's affection. Matra ei Filho, ninio, you must know that the Grand Dukes of Tira Virte are what we are today because of Grijalvas and their magic."

The words came out unbidden and unplanned. "I mean to marry Eleyna, Patro. What do you think of that?"

Renayo laughed sharply. "You are certainly my son, although I don't know where you got this bull-headed streak. I can't even fault you for loving a Grijalva, since it seems to run in the blood.

Eiha! Throw yourself away on her, although a prince born of the Ghillasian bloodline could do better! She's a taking thing, and brave enough, and a fine painter. Do you know that she copied the portrait of The First Mistress and hung it in place of the original, and no one noticed? Poor Andreo. Gift he may have had, but I don't think he was half the painter she is."

"These are changed words for you, Patro."

"Changed words for changed times, as you yourself have said to me many times in the past months. Eleyna also told me that Sario Grijalva held me in his thrall for two months. I do not at this moment look kindly on the Gifted Limners who have served and enriched my predecessors by performing such spells on other unsuspecting souls. Decisions have already been made, and plans laid. Drastic measures for drastic times. We agreed it is the only way."

"We?" Rohario demanded. "What do you mean to do?"