The room they entered was large as a cathedral, its ceilings painted with frescoes, its massive chandeliers blazing with candlelight. Luzia
couldn’t help but do the calculations of how much so many candles must cost and wonder how long it took to light them, to raise and lower the pronged frames, to wipe dust from the crystals. Somewhere in the crowd, musicians played, flute and drum and instruments she didn’t know.
“Pay attention,” Santángel said. “You are entering the arena and it is time to meet your fellow gladiators.”
“I thought I was to perform later tonight. Why did no one tell me the first trial would begin when we arrived?”
“No one knew.”
“Pérez is giving us a reminder,” said Don Víctor. “It is his game we play.”
“Think of it this way,” said Hualit. “If you’re going to fail miserably, best to get it over with now.”
“But the glasses,” Luzia objected. “I need—”
“All was arranged on the stage for the trial tonight,” Hualit said, gesturing to the raised platform with its golden curtains. A silver medallion hung above the stage, stamped with the image of a centaur at the center of a labyrinth. Luzia remembered the same symbol from the broken wax seal on the invitation to La Casilla.
Santángel had told her that there would be three trials: the demonstration of proof, followed by the proof of purity, and finally, the purity of power.
“Only the first will be easy,” he had warned. “We’ll use your trick with the goblet but make it more of a performance. This is where you must earn your right to compete in the torneo. Failure is a humiliation Víctor will not forgive. Beyond that I know very little, only that Juan Baptista Neroni will attend the second trial to make sure your milagritos are holy.”
The Vicar of Madrid. She supposed she should be grateful she wouldn’t face the Inquisitor General.
“And the third trial?” she had asked, thinking of the bribed linajista, of Hualit’s letters to the rabbi in Salonika.
“The remaining competitors will be presented to the king at El Escorial.” El Escorial—part mausoleum, part monastery. The king in his palace.
The lion in his den. And the kitchen rat freed from the larder and dressed as a fine lady. But she didn’t feel like a rat anymore. The costly clothes helped, the first hot bath of her life, but mostly it was the pomegranate, a gift from Santángel, a thing of her own making. She had consumed it ravenously, watching his back in its black velvet cloak, barely recognizing herself as the linen in her hands soaked up red juice and her belly filled. She had made her choice to enter the torneo despite the risks, and whether it was in the choosing or the eating, she was changed now. She looked up at the stage and wondered if either the woman she had been or the woman she was becoming were up to the task.
“So you will perform your miracle a few hours early,” Hualit whispered in Luzia’s ear. “God will understand.” She reached into her sleeve. “I have a gift for you.”
She drew a rosary from the gray silk. The heavily carved beads were strung on a braided cord, alternating red and white, and trimmed in silver gilt. Real ivory and garnets? Or maybe just painted boxwood and bone. The string ended in a tassel and a scalloped shell carved with a cross.
“Here,” said Hualit. “I will fasten it around your waist.”
Again she wondered who her aunt truly was. If the garnets and ivory
were real, this gift might be a sliver of safety to clutch in her hands. Money for a house or a voyage or something that could last beyond these gilded
walls if she failed. But the warning was also clear: be careful and play your part well, no matter the cost. Luzia needed no reminder. She was a servant.
She was Juana scrubbing blood from the floors. Servicio y silencio. For now.
Don Víctor watched them closely. “What does the little scullion think of La Casilla?”
Luzia had never seen so much gold or silver, so many gleaming windows framed by velvet, so many servants in matching livery. She knew nothing of art, but everywhere she looked she saw massive canvases, men waging war,
gods making love. It was glorious, magnificent, ridiculous. If you are not the king, she thought, it is dangerous to pretend to be one.
But she said, “I have neither the taste nor the experience to judge my betters.”
Don Víctor looked satisfied. “You’re finally learning to manage your
tongue.” He gave a bare nod to Hualit. “Come, I will be introduced to the other patrons, and I would have you there.” They moved off together, keeping a respectable distance apart. They hadn’t arrived in the same coach, and he wouldn’t offer her his arm in public. An agreement like theirs was common enough but not something to be flaunted.
“Are you wondering if she’s happy?” Santángel asked, as they moved closer to the stage.
“Does it matter? She is a servant just as we are.” She was surprised to hear herself say it. She had never thought of Hualit and herself as anything close to the same. Maybe now that she was in a palace, dressed in lace, sleeping in a bed every night, her vision was less cloudy.
“What do you really think of this place?”
Luzia gave a small snort. “What does a beetle think of the boot that
crushes it? It is a very excellent boot with a most impressive sole and made of the finest leather.”
A small smile touched Santángel’s lips, and it pleased her. “Do you really care nothing for such splendor?”
“Of course I do. When was the last time you took a bath?” “I … Has my person offended you?”
Luzia laughed. “Not lately. But I’ve never bathed in hot water before today.” She closed her eyes. “You cannot imagine such pleasure.”
“You should not speak of such things to a man.”
Luzia’s eyes flew open. She was surprised to see a scowl on his face. “Of the joys of heated bathwater?”
Santángel looked away. “It isn’t seemly.”
“Well, I am a peasant. Little better than a beast of the field.” She was goading him but she didn’t want to stop. She couldn’t claim that they were friends, but whatever transformation the eating of the pomegranate had worked on her, it had changed something between them as well. “Without morals or manners. And if you want to know what I think of this … I think it’s a very grim little party. Everyone in black. Sad music, no dancing. The wealthy can afford anything but a good time, it seems.”
“What would you do with a fortune in gold?”
Luzia considered. She couldn’t say any of the things that entered her head. I would have my mother’s name etched in marble. I would find my father’s grave. I would buy a great deal of books, and buy myself a house to read them in, and erect a high wall outside of the house, so no one would bother me. I would hire an army to stand atop the walls and guard me from kings and inquisitors and men who tell other men to break fingers. And yet she couldn’t quite summon the correct servant’s answers she knew she should deploy: I would wish for a comfortable home, alms for the poor,
masses to be said for me after my death. When she was with Santángel her mind leapt forward, eager to play, slipped free of the leash of humility she knew might keep her safe.
So she spoke nonsense. “I would build a very large palace.” “Bigger than this?”
“Oh yes. Twice as wide but only half as tall. And in it I would place a very large bed.” Again his brows rose and she hurried on before he could tell her not to speak of beds. “I would never leave it except to be rolled into steaming-hot baths.”
“And to take your meals?”
“No, I would make my cook lay cakes on my pillow.” “You would grow very fat.”
“I certainly hope so.”
Santángel laughed then, an odd croaking sound that he silenced quickly, afraid to draw attention. “You are quite mad,” he said.
“One has to get through the day somehow.”
“Now that you’ve forgotten to look frightened, let’s get closer to the stage. I want you to see the competition.”
Had he been distracting her? She had certainly entered the room overwhelmed by splendor and the terror of her first performance, but Santángel had set her mind to the dance of conversation. How annoying that it had worked. How embarrassing that he hadn’t been her partner in the
dance but her teacher once again.
“What is the meaning of the creature in the labyrinth?” she asked.
“That is Pérez’s personal device. The same impresa his father used when he was himself secretary to the king.”
Luzia wanted to ask why a centaur would stand at the center of the labyrinth and not a minotaur, but that was too heady a question for a
scullion.
Santángel dropped his voice. “It is said Pérez commissioned a new
impresa when he fell out of favor with the king. The centaur freed, standing before the ruins of a broken labyrinth. There …” he said, his attention shifting. “The Holy Child, Teoda Halcón.”
“The girl who speaks to angels.”
“One in particular, I’ve been told.” “Those are her parents?”
“That is her father and one of her nursemaids. They are a wealthy family, so the Holy Child has no need of a patron.”
“And her mother?”
“They say her mother’s death was her first prediction.”
Luzia couldn’t banter over such a thought. Would she have felt the loss
less keenly, if she had known her mother would die? Or would it have been worse? A death drawn out over weeks or months, the knowledge taking on its own life as if feeding on hers? Would she have wondered if she had brought about her mother’s death by dreaming it like Lucrecia with Philip’s armada?
“I would think a gift for foresight would give her an advantage in all of this,” Luzia said.
“If the gift is real. She is very much the favorite, a direct rebuttal to Lucrecia’s dreams of Spain in tatters and Philip being devoured by birds of prey. Now, look to your left. Slowly, please, let’s not make a spectacle of ourselves. They are watching you as you are watching them. The young man with all the hair is Fortún Donadei, the Prince of Olives. He comes from a family of farm laborers in Jaén.”
The prince. So Luzia would not be competing with anyone of royal blood. The title was meant to mock him. He had a wiry frame and a crown of thick, dark curls.
“He looks terribly sad.” And frightened too, his mouth slightly agape as he took in the luxury of the room. That’s what I must look like, Luzia thought with sudden shame. A clumsy peasant ill at ease in her finery, gawking at every new thing.
“I don’t see why he would be. He has a wealthy patroness who is said to be unabashedly in love with him. The story is that he was tending his olive groves and sat down to play his lute in the shade of a tree when she happened upon him playing.”
“So his power is in song too?”
“Yes. He can play any instrument and is said to have materialized a miniature of the marquesa’s childhood pony in the olive trees.”
“I cannot make something from nothing.”
“No one can,” Santángel said. “Not even God.” “You think he’s a fraud?”
“Fortún Donadei or God?”
Luzia couldn’t hide her shock. “You caution me on my tongue,” she whispered, “but you could be tortured for such blasphemy.”
“I might say this party is torture enough. But you’re not wrong. I’ll be more cautious.”
“You don’t fear the Inquisition at all?” “Why would I?”
Because you aren’t natural. Because you know things a good Christian shouldn’t. Because there’s no sign a man broke three of your fingers only a week ago. His strange eyes studied her, almost amused, daring her to give voice to any of it.
At that moment a hush fell over the room, as if they’d all taken a breath at once. The crowd turned like flowers in a field seeking the sun, necks craning. Luzia didn’t even know what she was looking for, but she found herself doing the same.
A woman had entered the ballroom. Her hair was smooth and so black it shone nearly blue. Her milky skin seemed to catch the candlelight so that
she glowed like a captured star. Her staid gown was black velvet and covered her completely, but it was so heavily embroidered with diamonds and metallic thread that it no longer looked black, but like quicksilver, sparking beneath the chandeliers.
“Who is that?” asked Luzia.
“That is Gracia de Valera. The Beauty.” “She’s something more than beautiful.”
“She is said to perform milagritos herself, and I’m told that she can speak to the spirits of the dead. She has asked to perform first.”
Luzia watched Gracia drifting through the crowd like a petal borne aloft on a breeze. She had never felt more sturdy, more earthbound, a knob of coal in her dour dress, her coronet of braids with its modest pearls and shells.
“I fear we will all disappoint after such a visitation.”
But Santángel’s eyes were still on her, not trailing Gracia de Valera through the crowd. “If the king wanted a pretty woman to look at, there are plenty of those in Spain. Do just as we practiced and no one can match
you.”
A child. A farmer. A scullion. And a young woman who looked like the Virgin herself had stepped from the frame of one of Pérez’s many paintings. Luzia could taste the pomegranate in her mouth, the flavor of her own ambition, her appetite for more. She eyed the golden curtains of the stage and knew she would prove Santángel right. She was done going hungry.
