It was dangerous for him to stay, but it had been dangerous for him to come to her room at all, and there was no hiding from this anymore.
Their coupling had been brief and urgent, their bodies wedged against the door, her head buried in his neck, the pinch of her teeth as she bit the skin of his shoulder, stifling her cries. He’d been grateful for the centuries that had given him control.
He should have left then, but he didn’t want to. Better to say he couldn’t.
He had spent so long dreaming of freedom, he had forgotten other wants. The pleasure of warm skin, conversation, the glimmering of connection— tentative at first, then bright and steady, another ship glimpsed on a dark and endless sea.
“What does it mean to be a familiar?” she asked as they lay atop the covers of her bed, her knee hooked over his thigh, her head against his chest.
“To serve.”
“To give Víctor your luck and me your strength?”
“Those things are the same. If you win, it will benefit Víctor.” “Then why does only one make you strong in return?”
“Because Víctor has no magic himself. No De Paredes ever has. He has nothing to give back to me.”
“But I do.”
Gently he pulled one of her thick curls straight, feeling it slide and twist between his fingers as it rediscovered its shape, a living thing. “In
abundance.”
“Have you ever been drunk?”
He laughed. “Of course. You haven’t?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “A bit light-headed. It felt like this.” “When I was young—”
“Many, many years ago.”
This time he was the one to bite her.
“When I was young,” he began again, “I did everything to excess. There were nights when I would drink and laugh and sing, but there would be a moment when a kind of misery came over me. When I looked around at my friends making merry and I felt only lonely, and even angry that they could be so happy and light when I was drowning beside them.”
“And other nights?”
“Other nights it felt so good to be untethered from my mind that I only wanted to stay drunk, and I would drink more and more, to try to keep that feeling, to stay aloft.”
She shifted against him and his cock stirred against her leg. “Águeda once told me that the cure for drunkenness was to drink until you made yourself sick, until you hated the taste.”
“And what if you never weary of it?” he asked as she slid atop him. “What if you empty the bottle only to wish for another just like it?”
“Is there such a wine?”
“Yes, but it’s very rare,” he said. “Put your knee here.” “Sit astride?” she asked skeptically.
“Like that,” he managed, feeling the press of her damp flesh, the coils of her curls, wondering where his centuries-old control had gone.
“A rare wine,” she said on a sigh, as she guided him inside her.
“One few men get to taste.” He slid his hands up the strong muscles of her thighs, helping her find her balance, then her rhythm.
“Only the very lucky ones,” she said. Her words turned to moans and he was borne aloft again.
Santángel left before dawn so as not to be discovered. When he brushed kisses over her cheeks, her lips, her eyelids, she smiled.
“I see you’re glad I’m leaving,” he said.
“I’m trying to imagine a time when you don’t have to.”
He made no promises of “someday” but kissed her again and was gone. Luzia fell back asleep, then woke late. She had nothing to do today but fret about the final trial and Hualit’s offer.
In the mirror her cheeks were flushed, her skin damp. He’d left her with no bruises or love bites. He was no fool. But she could see him all over her.
Her hair was a grand tangle and she knew the brush would do no good, so she worked her fingers through it, again and again, first with water, then with oil, then at last the silver comb.
“I can help,” said Valentina when she arrived, and she worked for a while in silence, arranging Luzia’s braids in a coronet.
Luzia realized that Valentina must have been without a maid since
Concha had gone. Had Marius helped her to dress and undress these past
nights? She couldn’t quite imagine it, and she really didn’t want to, not with another happy evening fresh in her mind.
She knew she was unwise to let that happiness shape her worries for the future. Her focus had to be the torneo and all that might or might not follow. Santángel could speak of an eternity spent braiding her hair, but what did that mean when he was cursed to serve the De Paredes name and she might still become a servant to the king?
If she found a way to force Don Víctor to break the curse, then Santángel would be free to leave and she would never deny him the life he’d longed for. She knew what it was to be pinned in place like a moth. Would she dare to go with him? She might travel the world, visit Hualit in Salonika. They could sleep beneath their own roof in some foreign city. Would he want
that? Did she?
“Let’s walk in the gardens,” Valentina said. “I don’t know how many days of good weather we have left.”
Luzia was surprised at the invitation but she had no other way to waste these hours. Tomorrow they would see beyond the bend in the road. They
would know what lay before them: a world of palaces and power, or a more uncertain fate. If the king didn’t select Luzia as his champion, she wondered what choices might remain to her.
Luzia and Valentina made their way down to the terrace. She sensed that Valentina wanted to speak, but she said nothing, only fussed with the lace at her cuffs.
The Prince of Olives was walking in the gardens, trailed by Doña Beatriz, dressed in aubergine silk edged in green and gold, the colors of olive fields in the afternoon hours. She had gray in her hair and her eyebrows had been heavily plucked. They might have been mother and son.
Valentina’s sigh was wistful. “She has worn a different gown every time I’ve seen her.”
When Fortún glimpsed Luzia, he raised a hand in greeting. He bowed to his mistress and kissed her hand, and Doña Beatriz bloomed, her eyes bright, alive in his attention. Luzia knew there was a lesson here in the danger of letting someone else make you happy, but she was not in a mood to be taught.
“Is that what happened?” Valentina asked.
It took Luzia a moment to understand what she was asking. She followed Valentina’s gaze to the sketch resting on an easel in the shade of the apple
tree and drifted closer to get a better look.
Signor Rossi had abandoned his staid portraits of the torneo’s competitors in favor of a dramatic rendering of the previous night’s horrors, the study wrought in blurred clouds and slashing lines of charcoal. Gracia cowered beautifully, her hands clasped in prayer, while Luzia and Fortún Donadei seemed to float together, side by side, charging in on a divine wind from the right side of the scene, staring down what might have been a large storm cloud, but that, when you squinted, took the form of something more sinister.
“That is less frightening than what we faced,” Fortún said as he approached.
Doña Beatriz had been waylaid by Valentina. Was this strategy? Had Valentina asked Luzia to walk in the gardens to encourage a meeting with the Prince of Olives?
“When the trouble started, I don’t remember standing side by side with you,” Luzia said, too tired and anxious to play diplomat. “I saved Gracia. And myself. And the whole cursed house.”
“I was seeing to Doña Beatriz’s safety,” Fortún protested. “And your own?”
“I won’t apologize for that.”
“I didn’t ask you to. But this …” She gestured to the painting. “This is
fiction.” Luzia had been drawn in her convent gown, light gleaming around her braided head like a halo, beams of it cascading away from her. Rossi had not made her beautiful, not precisely, but she was all light and shadow, her eyes determined, her mouth set in a forbidding line. This was how she dreamed herself when she was shaping the refranes into song, a woman cut adrift from the earth, her garments billowing around her.
Fortún looked even more handsome in the sketch, holding up his bejeweled golden cross to ward off the evil descending upon them, the
hastily rendered gems like eyes.
There was a blur in the crowd, and Luzia realized that was where Teoda Halcón had been erased by Rossi’s thumb.
“I think he captured you well,” said Fortún, “and it needn’t be fiction.
This is as it should be. You and I, fighting together, two peasants of unremarkable blood welcomed to the king’s court and celebrated.”
“You’re seeing something that isn’t there. Gracia was almost killed, and someone is responsible.”
“The Holy Child.”
“Do you truly believe that?” She watched his face closely. It might serve Fortún Donadei to blame Teoda for what had happened. Or maybe Luzia was a fool for wanting to absolve Teoda for a crime she had as good as confessed to.
“No,” he admitted.
Some honesty at last. “Then what do you believe happened? Who is to blame?”
“That isn’t for me to say.”
“Then whom?” Luzia glanced over her shoulder, but there was no one to hear. “You tell me we are to be soldiers together, holy servants of the king, but you won’t speak the name of someone who may wish us both dead?”
“Not us both.” She knew what he would say next, and still the name sounded with a hollow clang. “Santángel.”
Luzia turned her back on him and began to stride toward Valentina.
Fortún jogged past her and cut off her path.
“Think, Luzia … Señorita Cotado, think of what is to be lost and gained.” “That shadow … I was almost killed.”
“But you weren’t. Those demons frightened Gracia out of the competition. Now Teoda is gone too. Santángel murdered Gracia’s guard. If he could have dispensed with me as quickly, do you doubt he would have?”
“You’re making dangerous accusations.”
“But you don’t deny them. Because you know what he is. Cursed.”
Now Luzia paused. How did Fortún know of the curse? Or was he trying to lure her into revealing Santángel’s secrets? “What curse?”
“Surely we’re past dissembling. He used magic to obtain immortality and lost his soul in the bargain. My mistress told me so.”
“She has proof of this?”
“The proof is in his long life. His demon’s eyes.”
Luzia made herself laugh. “So no proof at all.”
“I didn’t think you were such a child. A creature like that can’t be trusted.”
“And you can?”
“All curses require sacrifice. In the making and the breaking. Have you never wondered what part you might play in it? You are not the first
milagrera he and his master have pursued.”
He is your rival, she reminded herself. He is a tactician. “Speak plainly. Do you know something real or are you just spinning gossip to scare me?”
“They had spies roaming the cities and countryside, seeking out seers and milagreros. Why do you think I ran so quickly to Doña Beatriz?”
“Doña Beatriz whom you loathe?”
“Yes,” he said without hesitating. “I seduced her because I’d heard rumors of Víctor de Paredes and his creature. People who gain their attention do not share in Don Víctor’s good fortune.”
When Águeda had muttered her warnings in the kitchen of Casa Ordoño, Luzia had dismissed them as rumor, superstition. People who cross paths with that man come to bad ends.
She knew she needed to be careful now. Anything she said against Don Víctor could be used by Donadei. “All I hear is speculation.”
“The alumbrada Isabel de la Cruz was approached by Santángel. Where did she end up? The Inquisition’s cells. Piedrola met the same fate.
Santángel was among those who visited Lucrecia de León when Don Alonzo de Mendoza began recording her dreams, and you know how that ended.”
Luzia made herself focus on the neat rows of hedges, the branches of the apple tree, bare of fruit. I could make them grow, she thought. I could fill a whole orchard. “Still you offer no proof.”
“What proof can I provide but whispers passed from one milagrero to another? Catalina Muñoz was wise enough to avoid Don Víctor and Santángel. The daughter of Maslama al-Majriti vanished from history entirely.” He glanced once at Doña Beatriz, still in conversation with
Valentina. “I’ve been told there is a secret chapter from Juan Diánoco where he writes not just of the milagros worked by a farmer named Isidro, but of
the devil who appeared to tempt him at his plow. A demon with white hair and silver eyes.”
“I see,” said Luzia. What else could she say? What was she meant to believe? The sky seemed too close, too heavy, a smothering hand.
“I’m only suggesting there are questions you’d be wise to ask.”
“Or you’re trying to weaken my resolve and fracture my bond with a powerful ally.”
“God wants this for both of us, Luzia. I feel that.” “Do you have visions now too?”
“I don’t need a vision to see what we might build together.”
“I will think on what you’ve said.” Her voice was steady despite the frantic thud of her heart.
He lowered his voice. “Perhaps I should be ashamed I seduced Doña Beatriz, but I’m not. Despite all her wealth and power, love has made her mine to command. I think you understand me.”
Luzia couldn’t stop the blood that rushed to her cheeks. Had she and Santángel been so indiscreet?
“I understand you very well,” she replied sharply. “You know you can win.” She shouldn’t say it. Santángel would tell her it was bad strategy to speak so baldly. “You’re popular with Pérez’s friends and your gift is as great as mine.”
“Together we might be greater still.” He reached for her hand and Luzia flinched.
“Don’t,” she whispered furiously. “Your mistress will see. So will mine.”
He drew back, ashamed. “I don’t … I don’t know the ways of this place. I never have. I only know I don’t want to bear the weight of the king’s
expectations by myself. What happened to Teoda could happen to any of us.”
“She’s a heretic,” Luzia said because she must.
“Search far enough, dig deep enough, and the Inquisition can find an excuse. I don’t want to live in fear.”
Luzia considered the sketch on its easel. Was it so easy to rewrite a
moment? To change a story she thought she knew? A child erased with the swipe of a thumb. A scullion transformed into a holy warrior. Two rivals made allies.
“I don’t want to do this alone, Luzia. I don’t think I can.”
“But we are alone,” she said as she turned away from him. “Always.” A warning to the Prince of Olives. A reminder to herself.
