One moment Santángel was staring at Álvaro’s satisfied face as he listened to the sound of his own finger bones popping and the next the
man was gone. Luzia fell to her knees, blood gushing from her mouth.
The pomegranate tree burst to life beside him, its branches slamming against the ceiling, heavy fruit tumbling from its branches.
Víctor was pressed against the wall, more shaken than Santángel had ever seen him.
He ignored the pain in his fingers and went to Luzia, stumbling over something on the floor. Her eyes were wild and rolling, the noise coming from her throat something between a whine and a growl, an animal sound. Blood covered her chin, her neck, the fabric of her dress. It was on her hands, the rug.
“Luzia,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm. “Luzia, your tongue has split and I need you to sing to heal it.”
She was shaking now. Soon she would lose too much blood and there would be no way to help her. He didn’t have his own magic, and whatever had happened in this room had shattered the protection of his influence with its power.
He heard a sputtering, mewling sound and realized it was coming from Víctor. Valentina was in the hallway screaming.
“Luzia,” he said again, her name repeated, an incantation. “Luzia, pay attention to my voice and nothing else. You must find a song. You are the burnt bread. You are the broken glass. I cannot put you back together, but you can.”
She shook her head from side to side and he didn’t know if she was rejecting his words or if she was simply too frightened to understand him.
He grasped her hand in his. “I was wrong when I told you to fear men and their ambition,” he murmured in her ear. “Fear nothing, Luzia Cotado,
and you will become greater than them all. Now sing for me.”
He wanted to shout in triumph when she squeezed his hand back.
She couldn’t form words, not with her tongue split down the middle. But a tune came anyway, from somewhere in her chest, ragged and faltering at first. Then the melody emerged, became clearer. He knew this song, from long ago. He had heard it in a garden. His nostrils filled with the scent of an orange grove in bloom.
The song rose and fell and rose again and then she was still. Gently, he wiped the blood from her face with his sleeve.
“Open your mouth for me.” Her tongue was whole and pink. “It still hurts?”
She nodded.
He looked up at Víctor, who remained pressed against the wall, at
Valentina weeping in Don Marius’s arms. “Get me ice if you have it, cold milk if you don’t. Bring water to get her clean. And stop that sobbing. All is well.”
They looked at him as if he were speaking some mysterious language.
It was only then that Santángel understood what he had stumbled over. In the midst of the blood and the cracked bodies of pomegranates, Álvaro, El Peñaco, was lying on the floor. But not all of him. His shoulder, part of a leg shod in the mustard livery of De Paredes, half his head and one staring eye, as if he’d lain down to go to sleep on his side and simply fallen through the floorboards.
“Where is … Where is the rest of him?” Víctor panted.
“My study,” Don Marius croaked from the hallway where he held his weeping wife. “I was looking at the accounts from our holdings and … pieces … fell through the ceiling.” He pressed his hand to his mouth and Santángel knew they’d find his vomit next to the rest of Álvaro’s body.
He understood now what had gone wrong, what Luzia had done, but this wasn’t the time for explanations.
Santángel rose with Luzia in his arms, his fingers sending bright bolts of pain up through his shoulders.
“Show me to your room,” he commanded Valentina. “Get Juana up here from the kitchen and let the cook go home early. Tell her someone has taken ill. Víctor, send the coach back to the house and have them return with Gonzalo and Celso. They can help us set this mess to rights. Do you
understand?”
Víctor closed his mouth and managed a grunt.
“Good,” said Santángel. “And if my master would be so kind to send for someone who might set my broken bones so that they heal straight?”
He waited for Víctor to meet his gaze. “Yes,” Víctor rasped.
With his scullion in his arms, Santángel strode past the luckiest man in Madrid.
