The Golden Key Read Free

bench like a supplicant, a servant, leaving him to accept or deny preeminence. She turned her face upto him, into a shaft of midday sunlight that illuminated expression in quiet chiaroscuro as it illuminated the wood-speckled paper attached to a board, the agile, beautiful hands. With a quick, unthinking motion she tossed unkempt black hair out of her eyes; saw him then, registered his presence, marked identity—and answered, dredging awareness back from the vast geography of her other world, confined by the bindings of her inner eye.
    “Wait—” Clipped, impatient, imperative, as if
he
were the servant now.
    They were all of them servants, Grijalvas: gifted and Gifted alike.
    “—wait—” she repeated—softer now, pleading, asking understanding, forgiveness, all underscored by impatience—and sketched frantically upon the paper.
    He understood. There was compassion in him for her, unalloyed comprehension. But impatience also, his own for other reasons, and more than a little resentment that she should expect him to wait; she was not and could not be Gifted, not as
he
was Gifted.
    Therefore he could answer: “There is no time, ‘Vedra. Not if we are to see it.”
    Silence, save for the scratching of her charcoal upon the inferior paper.
    “’Vedra—”
    “I must get this down …” And unspoken: —
while it is alive, while it is fresh, while I see it
—
    He understood, but could not coddle it. “We must go.”
    “A moment, just a moment longer—momentita, grazzo—” She worked quickly, with an unadorned economy of movement he admired. Many of the young girls labored over their work, as did many boys, digging and digging for small truths that would strengthen their work, but Saavedra understood better what she wanted to do. Her truths, as his, were immense, if unacknowledged by either of them as anything other than ordinary, because to each of them such truths were. They breathed them every moment.
    As did he, she saw those truths, that light, the images completed by her mind in all the complexities, exploring none so much as freeing them with a minimum of strokes, a swift stooping of her gift.
    Luza do’Orro, the Golden Light, the true-talent of the mind.
    He watched. For once he felt like moualimo to student, teacher to estuda. It was not he laboring beneath the unrelenting eye of another, but she beneath
his
eye, doing nothing for him but for herself instead, only for herself; she understood that freedom, that desirefor expression apart from the requisites of their family, the demands of the moualimos.
    “No,” he said suddenly, and swooped down upon her. His own vision, his own Luza do’Orro, could not be denied. Even for such dictates as courtesy.
Even for her.
“No, not like that … here—do you see?” They none of them were without pockets or charcoal; he took a burned stick from his tunic and sat down beside her, pulling the board and paper away into his own lap. “Look you—see?”
    A moment only, a single corrected line: Baltran do’Verrada, Tira Virte’s Duke, whom they had seen only today in the Galerria.
    Saavedra sat back, staring at the image.
    “Do you see?” Urgency drove him; he must explain before the light of his vision died. Quickly he scrubbed away what he could of the offending line, blew it free of residue. The portrait now, though still rough and over-hasty, was indeed more accurate. He displayed it. “The addition here gives life to the left side of his face … he is crooked, you know. No face is pure in balance.” He filled in a shadow. “And there is his cheekbone—like
so
… do you see?”
    Saavedra was silent.
    It struck him like a wave: he had erred. He had hurt her. “’Vedra, forgive me—” Matra ei Filho, when someone did that to
him
— “Oh, ‘Vedra, I’m sorry! I am!” He was. “But I couldn’t help myself.”
    She put her charcoal into her tunic pocket. “I know.”
    “’Vedra—”
    “I
know
, Sario. You never can help yourself.”