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business, and boys’; Saavedra felt lost in Sario’s murmurings. She wondered uncharitably if he shrouded so much in secrecy and half-spoken comments merely to tease her cruelly, to remind her that what he could know, she could not. He had done it to others. He had never done it to her.
    A windowless chamber, a single candle set on iron, a covered painting on an easel, one lone chair. Stark, minimalist, empty; oddly naked.
    And then men came into the room.
    She knew them all. Gifted, each one; Master Limners—Viehos Fratos, in the private tongue of Grijalvas—wearing the Chieva do’Orro on chains at their throats, or dangling nearly to hips after the fashion of sanctas and sanctos who wore on cords the sacred keys and locks of their respective orders. It signified their piety and devotion to, like gender with like gender, the Mother and Son.
    The keys of the Grijalvas meant something else altogether.
    Thin of breath, she again touched fingertips to lips, to heart.
    Those in the chamber mimicked her.
    For a moment Saavedra knew sheer panic; had they seen her? Did they mock her?—and then realized no, of course not, they merely prepared to undertake a ceremony that naturally would bedone in the names of the Mother and Son, for all things done in Tira Virte were in Their Blessed Names.
    Even blasphemy
?
    “Matra Dolcha,” she murmured breathlessly.
Where did such a thought come from
? “Sweet Mother, protect me—”
    “Bassda, ‘Vedra!”
    “Bassda yourself, cabessa merditta!” Much stronger insult, that; head of excrement instead of brain of pea: “Do you know what they are going to do?”
    Sario smiled. “I think so.”
    Matra Dolcha—blessed Matra ei Filho
—
    Sario’s exhalation hissed in the darkness. “Yes … eiha!—
yes
—”
    Saavedra shut her eyes.
    “They have brought someone in …
filho do’canna
—it’s Tomaz!”
    “Tomaz?” Saavedra’s eyes sprang open; she ignored the vulgar alley-argot. “What are they doing with Tomaz?”
    “Not ‘with’… to.”
    “To’?” She shifted closer to the crack, scraping her nose against the wall. “What do they mean to do?”
    Sario’s voice was thinned by fascination. “Chieva do’Sangua.”
    The Bloody Key.
It made no sense. The only Key she knew was golden, the Chieva do’Orro of the Grijalvas; and the keys and locks, separated by gender, by order and service, of the sanctos and sanctas. She had heard Chieva do’Sangua referred to only once prior to Sario’s mention earlier, in furtive whisperings between boys—punishment, they had said, happily horrified, sacred discipline of the damned. “What is that—eiha, Sario!—
what
—”
    Below, one of the Master Limners stepped quietly forward and stripped away the brocaded cloth covering the easel; and indeed, as Sario had said, the painting displayed was of Tomaz Grijalva, was truly a masterwork—she could judge its quality if not its detail even from her hidden place high over the chamber—but not as Tomaz was now: as he had been five years before at age fifteen. Two years after he had undergone Confirmattio and was declared Gifted.
    Sario had said he, too, would be required to paint a self-portrait. A
Peintraddo Chieva.
“Sario—”
    “Neosso Irrado,” he whispered. “Angry Youth—just like me.”
    “Tomaz has always been a braggart, Sario, full of loud and empty talk of such things as he knows nothing—no one thinks anything of it.”
    “Neosso Irrado.”
    “Then this is punishment for that?”
Sacred discipline of the damned
, those boys had said. “Why? What has he done? What will they do to him?”
    Sario scraped impatiently at a dusty lock of unruly brown hair that threatened his vision. “Bassda, ‘Vedra. Wait, watch, and you will see.”
    She waited. She watched. She saw.
    And vomited onto the floor.

  TWO  
    Sario , recoiling so quickly he smacked his head against the slanted ceiling, had never been so disgusted in his life. “Matra Dolcha,