Vázquez’s speech had none of the pomp of Pérez’s introduction the first night at La Casilla or the grim threats of Fray Diego at the second trial.
He looked out at the crowd as if unsure what they were all doing there.
“The king has been promised wonders,” he said, and sighed heavily. “So let us see how you may best serve your ruler and his empire.”
Was that all the guidance they were to be given? Her anger flared anew. Her conversation with Santángel was unfinished, her rage against him and Víctor and the unfairness of it unspent.
Lose, he’d said. Lose spectacularly. She had been transformed into La Hermanita, the milagrera in her stern black dress. She could be remade into the bumbling scullion once more, become so wretched that Víctor de
Paredes would turn his back on her. She could save her coins, sell off her silk and velvet and the rosary at her waist, find her way to Hualit in Salonika.
Or maybe Víctor would be so angry he’d have her murdered in the night. He was a petty, cruel man, and he had made it clear that she would pay for failing him. He could denounce her to the Inquisition, send one of the king’s heretic hunters after Hualit. Why had she not gone to the stables last night? And why did every path before her lead to servitude?
Maybe Santángel loved her more than the promise of freedom. Maybe he didn’t intend to bargain her away. But the grim truth was that love or the lack of it made no difference. A servant did the washing and stoked the fire and scrubbed the floors and carried the water up the stairs. What she felt when she was doing it mattered to no one. There was only the task before her, and the only way forward was what it had always been: win.
But how? Vázquez didn’t want to be impressed, and that meant she needed some sort of spectacle to wake him from his contempt. She could make the water boil like a great kitchen pot, but that might too strongly
evoke hell. She might make the lilies bloom to fill the lake, or topple the trees on the shore.
“I don’t understand,” whispered Donadei as she took her place next to him. “Where is the king? Why would he insult us this way? We’ve done everything asked of us.”
His voice was desperate. He was watching his chance at liberty from
Doña Beatriz slip away. What was worse, Luzia wondered, to be loved so hungrily that only a king could free you? Or to know the man who wanted you most had contemplated dooming you for an eternity?
“Donadei,” she asked, “does your offer of an alliance stand?” He stood up straighter. “Do you mean it?”
“I am considering it.”
He seized her hand. “Stand with me. We both know what it is to be used.
Together we might be greater than any noble name or title.”
More powerful than Víctor de Paredes or Doña Beatriz. Protected and valued by the king. Maybe it would mean nothing. Maybe it would be enough to defeat all of Don Víctor’s machinations and wiles.
“Please, Luzia,” he begged. “Surely there is enough room in this glorious future for both of us.”
“Then let us show them something beautiful,” Luzia said to him. “Something so miraculous neither the king nor Vázquez can deny us.”
“Tell me how.”
“He’s a priest,” Luzia said. “So we will build him a cross like no other. A cross to make him believe.”
Donadei’s smile was triumphant. “Together?” “Together,” she agreed. “Let us make our bows.”
She curtsied to Vázquez but did not do the same for Pérez. The game had changed and she would play the rules set before her.
“For God and the glory of our king!” she declared, surprised by the strength in her voice as it rang out over the crowd, as if her anger had built a scaffolding beneath it.
Luzia turned to the water and hummed softly, finding the old healing spell easily. The boards of the pier were rotting, so first they had to be fixed, made new as easily as a goblet could be refashioned or a split tongue made whole. Then she let the song shift. She shaped new words in her mind, the refrán she’d used to fill her basket with more eggs and onions on the way back from the market: wherever you go, may you find friends.
If only it were that easy. She let her voice lift, a plea for her aunt on her way to a new future, a prayer for herself. She needed friends now, and if the planks of the pier would be her sturdy allies, she welcomed them.
She began to clap, and to her relief, the crowd joined in. She met Donadei’s gaze as she stepped out onto the pier, encouraging him to follow, and he did, vihuela in hand, out onto the lake. He struck a chord, playing
the vihuela as if it were a guitar. Fish leapt from the water, in time with the music, arcing along beside them.
Luzia continued to multiply the boards, creating a path that unfurled like a carpet, one plank after the next, until she and Donadei stood at the center of the lake.
But how to assemble the cross? The words leapt into her head, as if they were fish themselves. El Dio es tadrozo ma no es olvidoza. God acts slowly, but He doesn’t forget.
She saw the shape of the words in her mind. They were a temple, a crescent atop a dome, a hand raised against the evil eye, a cross. The boards spread and increased around her, filling the lake, then stacking one upon the other in a rhythm that matched her clapping hands.
“Make it bigger!” crowed Donadei, his fingers strumming the vihuela as black birds chirped and fluttered above them. “Make it so large they can see it in Madrid!”
The cross rose, towering above them, dripping water from the damp boards as fish leapt at its base and birds sang around it in a circle like a crown.
The crowd on the lakeshore burst into applause. Vázquez was on his feet, leaning forward on the balcony.
“We have them!” cried Luzia.
“Thank you,” Donadei said. “I knew you would know how to get their attention.” Then he turned to the audience on the shore. “Does the king wish for symbols? Or does he wish for ships?”
He struck his vihuela, the chord jangling, and as it hung in the air, he placed a hand over his golden cross and lifted it. The birds above squawked in response, their wings seeming to lengthen, their bodies shifting from
sparrows into seabirds, long-legged and sharp-beaked.
“What are you doing?” Luzia shouted over the chattering of the birds. “What I must.” His fingers played over the neck of the vihuela. The flock
multiplied, an army of birds, whirring around the cross. They seized the
boards in their talons, tearing them away, assembling a new shape. “My gift is for the living world, not toying with objects and trinkets as you do.”
The birds moved faster, swooping and diving, a whirling frenzy, and it was only when they began to pull away, their arcs widening, their wings catching the air and drawing them higher, that Luzia saw what they had done.
The towering cross had been remade into a galleon. Sails of black
feathers billowed from its masts, and writhing eels formed black cannon at its railings. Her solid, stately cross transformed into something majestic and terrifying. Something useful.
Now Donadei’s bright smile was sly. He stood with his hand pressed to the golden cross at his chest as if God Himself sang through the strings of his vihuela. “It is a competition, after all.”
“Malparido,” Luzia growled. The bastard had set her up. He’d fanned her doubts about Santángel, but worse, he’d made her doubt her own gifts. He’d pretended he was as frightened and as vulnerable as she. He’d gotten her to squander her turn.
She stood helpless on the wooden dock she’d made, and she knew how she must look, her meager boards wobbling in the shadow of Donadei’s magnificent warship.
She had lost after all.
Would Santángel think she had done it on purpose? Would he know Donadei had made an ass of her?
Valentina would be disappointed. Don Víctor would be furious.
And Luzia was furious too.
But there was something in the movement of those eels, the feathers, the long-limbed birds that she recognized.
“You were the one who gave life to the shadows. You attacked Gracia and me at the puppet show.”
How? He had played no music, created no song. She would have heard.
Luzia realized just how stupid she’d been. He’d used the same trick she had. The music was a mask, a vehicle for the words in his head.
She didn’t know which language he was using to work his miracles, but she saw now that his magic was without real substance: birds who could sing but would never breathe, shadow creatures who vanished when the
lights were extinguished. Illusions. That was why he had needed her. She
had given him all the substance he required, a galleon’s worth of lumber with which to build.
She wanted to crack him open like a pomegranate, but she couldn’t, not in full view of the crowd.
“I’m sorry we won’t be friends any longer,” he said, smiling as his birds screeched and swooped overhead, the sails of his warship billowing in an
invisible wind. “You really do look like the girls from my town. Sun-baked and solid as a loaf of bread.”
Luzia returned his smile. She gestured to the large gold cross with its gleaming green jewels. “Don’t give me another thought, Fortún.”
Then, in words that had begun as Spanish and been transformed beneath a foreign sun, words made solid by ink and carried over the sea into her aunt’s waiting hands, she said, “Onde iras, amigos toparas.” Wherever you go, may you find friends.
This was the magic that was good for boards and beans and eggs and heads of garlic, but that made spiders out of copper and hornets out of silver. Because magic was never easy; because food was food, but coins were nothing without the greed of men.
The jewels at the four points of Donadei’s cross leapt from their settings. Shimmering wings snapped up from their backs as their thick scarab bodies took flight, buzzing around his curly head. The rubies at his shoulders sprouted wriggling legs and giant red ants reared up, clambering toward his collar.
Donadei shrieked, releasing the cross as it dissolved in his hands, a skittering heap of golden spiders. He swatted at the insects, beating his chest and clawing at his hair, trying to drive them away, losing the tune on his precious vihuela. Whatever words he’d held in his mind had been driven out by terror.
The birds and eels and fish vanished around them. The ship began to break apart.
“No!” Donadei screamed, trying to grasp the neck of the vihuela, seeking the song and its secret words once more.
Luzia heard shouts and cries from the crowd. Donadei turned on her. “You stupid cunt.”
Luzia laughed. “Smart enough to learn your name, Fortún. Do you think Vázquez is thinking of Philip’s armada when it was lost to England’s
queen? Do you think he’ll thank you for the demonstration of what a Spanish ship looks like when it sinks?”
Donadei snarled and shoved her. Luzia lost her footing. Her arms pinwheeled and she nearly plunged into the murky water. He swiped at her again and she called up the boards, struggling to keep the refrán in her head as her panic rose and the song tried to split.
No, she wasn’t going to lose her tongue or her life to fear today. She sang the boards into being, one after another, a path to take her back to shore.
Behind her, she could hear pieces of Donadei’s ship plunging into the water, its masts toppling, its feathered sails collapsing into nothing.
She ran, and as soon as her feet made contact with one of the wooden planks, she cast it aside so Donadei couldn’t follow, leaving him to the lake. Maybe his fish could carry him to shore.
Had she won? Had he? Would Vázquez curse them both for their petty games? She couldn’t think of that now.
But the shore ahead was a scene of confusion. The crowd had broken away from the water and some seemed to be running toward the woods as the king’s soldiers followed. Vázquez was bellowing something from the stage.
She stumbled, toppling forward into the shallows.
Then Santángel was before her, hauling her to her feet. “Did you see?” she gasped. “Did you see what he did?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, dragging her to dry land where his horse waited. “Antonio Pérez has fled. He used the trial as a distraction. The king’s men are rounding up anyone they can. Can you ride?”
Luzia tried to make sense of what he was saying. Where had Pérez gone?
What did the king’s men want with them? “Not well.”
He helped her into the saddle and then he was behind her and they were riding as she had dreamed they would, away from kings and climbers and curses.
