Luzia was allowed a day of rest, and she used most of it hemming one of Hualit’s old gowns. Valentina was better with a needle, but she’d had
enough of tending to a servant.
The dress was brown velvet, ill-suited to household chores or work of any kind. It was tight in the waist and across Luzia’s breasts, far too long in the sleeves, and finer than anything she’d ever worn. She told herself to be grateful that she wouldn’t have to live in bloodstained clothes as they waited for the trunks to arrive from Perucho. But she felt only resentment. Last night her aunt had seemed like a different woman, dreaming and tender. Did she really mean to leave Spain? To take Luzia with her? Luzia couldn’t quite reconcile that person with the one who had offered her up to Víctor de Paredes, who had never thought to grant her an extra coin or a discarded gown.
Luzia was dressed and clean and seated at her desk when Santángel arrived. She wasn’t sure when he’d come to retrieve his satchel, but she had to assure herself that, should he notice his letters had been tampered with,
he would lay the blame at someone else’s door. People had been in and out of this room since the incident, and what interest could an ignorant servant have in his correspondence?
But he didn’t arrive with suspicion or recriminations. Instead he stood in her doorway and said, “Your dress doesn’t fit. I’ve brought you a
pomegranate.”
“Is this a new way of saying good morning?”
He set his satchel down on the table and from it drew a square of linen, a small knife sheathed in leather, and a pomegranate.
“It’s one of mine?” she asked. He nodded.
Luzia looked away. She couldn’t help but think of the fruit thudding to the ground beside Álvaro’s head.
“What am I to do with it?” she asked as he spread the linen on the table and set the fruit upon it. Its deep red skin had the papery thinness that came only when the pomegranate was ripe. “Am I to make it into another tree?”
“Too easy.”
“Change its color?” “Novel.”
“Change its flavor?”
“Now, that would be a shame.”
There was comfort in this easy exchange and she realized she’d been afraid that what had happened in this room, what she’d done to Álvaro, would alter something between them. It wasn’t that she trusted him, but she enjoyed their lessons. She liked the feeling of his concentration on her, the pleasure he seemed to take in her success. And she liked looking at him.
Strange as he was, she’d had few occasions to study a man, and he was more beautiful than Don Marius or the farmers and butchers down at the
market. He was finely made in the way of a seashell, the silvery gleam of an oyster, the tight, bright-edged spiral of a nautilus.
He used the knife to score the skin of the fruit, making a circle around the crown to remove it.
“Your fingers have healed,” she noted. “They have.”
“I thought you might have me sing over them.” “Unnecessary.”
How had he endured such pain without ever releasing a cry? How could his long fingers move so nimbly when they’d been broken and useless just two days before?
He dug his fingertips into the skin and pulled the fruit open, revealing its blood-colored seeds, its juice staining the linen. “Eat, Luzia.”
Luzia folded her arms even as her mouth watered. She’d had little
appetite since Álvaro had died in this room. She had killed a man—and worse, she hadn’t intended to. She wasn’t sure if it was guilt or fear that plagued her, but she somehow knew that to eat this fruit would compound her sin.
“This feels like a trick,” she said. The kind that the devil might play.
“Most good things do.” He reached into his bag and handed her another clean cloth. “The time for lessons will soon end and the torneo will begin.”
“Don Víctor still thinks I should compete? Even after—”
Santángel gave a single nod. “You must trust me when I say that Álvaro was no great loss.”
“But did he deserve to die?”
“Death doesn’t come to those who deserve it. I can attest to that.”
Her guilt was too great for such platitudes. “You and your master have made me a murderer.”
“If you become the king’s champion and build him a new armada, you will be responsible for many deaths.”
Luzia felt her anger prick. “I can wait to make my peace with that. What happened in this room, Santángel?”
“You tell me, Luzia.”
“It was the same song I’ve always used, the same miracle. ‘A change of scene, a change of fortune.’ But the melody twisted in my head.”
“Into what?”
“I don’t know,” she snapped, unable to stem her frustration. “I was … I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing, the sound … your fingers. Who does such a thing? Who commands such cruelty? Who obeys such
commands?”
“You know the answer. Servants. Slaves. We do what we must.”
“I know,” she said hopelessly. “I know. All I wanted was for it to be over, to be anywhere but here.”
“Ah,” said Santángel. “Ah?”
He reached for a segment of pomegranate and bit into it as if it were an apple.
“I’ve never seen someone eat a pomegranate that way.” She was annoyed at how tidily he’d done it, not a fleck of juice or pith gone astray.
“It is the best way. Without fuss.” He wiped his fingers on the cloth.
“Your magic was trying to become bigger. It was trying to offer you escape, to take you from this place.”
“Impossible.”
“Yes,” he said. “Very much so. There are stories in some of the Greek papyri and the Sepher Ha-Razim of men who could vanish in one place and reappear miles away—on a mountaintop, in a market square. But who
knows if they were true. And they always used a …” He hesitated, searching for the right word. “Taewidha. Lapillus. There’s a phrase in old Egyptian: aner khesbed wer. But even that isn’t accurate. A kind of stone, a talisman. They were rare and used for concentrating a sage’s abilities. These spells were of such great power they would crack the stone with a single
attempt.”
“But they worked?”
“I see your busy mind leaping ahead, but think of your gold coins becoming spiders. This is the same thing. There are limits to the impossible. For every story of a man who managed to fling himself to a distant city or a hilltop, there are a thousand of those who failed, who ended up buried miles beneath the earth, or drowning in an ocean, or split down the middle where they stood.”
Luzia touched her hand to her mouth and Santángel’s eyes followed. “You’re lucky it was just your tongue,” he said.
“Álvaro wasn’t so lucky.”
“Better him than you.” He was being gentle with her today, almost kind, but the hardness in him remained.
She picked up a piece of the pomegranate, admiring its perfect glossy seeds, begging to be eaten. “I’ve had the same thought,” she whispered.
“That’s not something to be ashamed of.”
“I’ve spent enough time in churches to know that isn’t true.”
And if she was honest she could feel the pull of that larger magic. Her greedy, wanting heart longed for it. Not just for the hope of escape from this city and this life. The truth was that she had liked being frightening. She had never contemplated what it might mean to be feared by Víctor de Paredes, by people like him. What did it mean for her shriveled soul that she had enjoyed it so much? Men weren’t kind to the things they feared.
“I brought you the pomegranate because it means something different to everyone,” Santángel said. “When Ferdinand and Isabella conquered Granada, they added it to their coat of arms. You can see it in King Philip’s heraldry still. But it doesn’t belong to them. The Qur’an says it was a gift from Allah. The Bible says the serpent used it to tempt Eve. Two hundred pomegranates were carved into the walls of King Solomon’s temple. San Juan de Dios made it a symbol of healing. A thousand stories. A thousand
meanings. But in the end, it belongs to no one, except the woman who holds
it in her hand. Eat it or don’t. Enter the torneo or turn your back on it. It is your choice.”
There were other stories too, about girls stolen from meadows, who had escape within their grasp but whose hunger bested them in the end. A peasant wasn’t supposed to know those stories. But she was tired of hiding, of her trembling turnip’s life. She was not going to reject the torneo. She
was not going to flee on a ship with her aunt.
Luzia had always been a liar and now she was a killer. For it to mean anything, she had to keep going. She had to find a way to win. She would build herself a life of plenty. She would force her world to bloom as she’d made the pomegranate tree grow, and Santángel would help her do it. Even if blood watered the soil.
“I would like three things.”
His brows shot up. “Only three?”
“For now,” she said. “I want you to tell me about the trials of the torneo, so that we will be ready to face them together.”
“I can do that,” he said, and his relief was clear. “I want to eat this pomegranate.”
“That’s why I brought it to you.”
“And I want you to turn your back while I do it, so that I can enjoy it as it was meant to be enjoyed, without worrying what I look like with juice streaming down my chin.”
“I can do that too, Luzia Cotado.”
For the second time, he turned his back on her.
