That night, in the shadow of the Puerta de Bisagra, not far from the rush of the Tagus river, the traitors Guillén Santángel and Luzia Cotado died

by order of the Inquisition, alongside a Flemish pirate known only as Pleunis. They were consumed by earthly flames and passed onward to eternal damnation to burn again and again in the fires of hell.

At least those were the words spoken by Fray Diego, the royal confessor, to his king. If there were whispers that no remains were found in the ashes, then it was deemed further proof they had been creatures of the devil, not mortal at all, but illusions in corrupted bodies.

Those whispers never reached the king, who lay dying behind the walls of El Escorial, his gout burning through him. He was unable to find a

comfortable position in which to rest.

Philip had heard what the gargoyle Teoda Halcón had predicted, but he was determined his death would be a good one. He would not plead with God or give in to his suffering. He would show the world how a great man passed on to paradise. He called to his confessor and his brothers and had them bring his precious reliquaries to him, pressing the bones of his saints to his lips. He sought comfort and found little, though he marveled at the scent of orange blossoms that each holy relic seemed to emit. Surely, he told himself, as he wept for Spain and for a loneliness he couldn’t name, that meant something.

Doña Valentina returned to Madrid after the execution, but she refused to welcome Marius back into her bed. Instead she invited Quiteria Escárcega to stay along with her loud artist friends. The cook quit, but Valentina didn’t

seem to care. She hired a new one from the orphanage, who Quiteria taught to read and write, and who had a great talent with sauces. They filled the

rooms with singers and actors, artists and poets. They held a ceremony in Luzia’s old room over the place where the bodyguard had died. They washed the floor with sugar and drank water boiled with rue. They claimed the spirits had been appeased and great art would be created in the house.

They laughed constantly over jokes Marius didn’t understand.

When he could bear it no longer, he decamped to the countryside, where he could ride his horses and bemoan his paltry olive groves, which still failed to fruit. Valentina never did bear a child, but she had many daughters, who came from all over Spain to the house on Calle de Dos Santos, seeking sanctuary.

Fortún Donadei did not sleep well that night or any night after. After the execution, his great powers seemed to desert him. He could still sing beautifully and raise a mournful or merry tune on the vihuela. He could even summon the occasional illusion to entertain. But there would be no galleons or singing birds or shadows that did his bidding. His new patron demanded explanations but he had little to offer.

“Why do you never wear your golden cross, Fortún?” Víctor asked him. “Have you had a crisis of faith?”

“I gifted it to the poor,” he lied.

He couldn’t tell Don Víctor that the great emerald at the cross’s center had cracked and why this was so disastrous. The stone that had collected and magnified his gifts, that had made so many milagritos possible, had split in the heat of the flames. He couldn’t explain it and yet he felt sure that somehow Luzia Cotado was to blame.

So he told his patron he was feeling poorly, that he was certain his

abilities would return. Don Víctor had assured him that he knew a wise man who could restore his talents, who could give him strength and power beyond all he’d imagined. They’d have to travel far to see him, but at the end of their journey, beyond the gates of a southern city, they would strike a bargain.

Víctor had told his disappointing milagrero that they had a trip to take. He had the map and the instructions Tello de Paredes had written in his own

hand, and that had been passed from one De Paredes to the next for nearly five hundred years. He told Donadei they would leave soon, any day now. And yet every morning he found new cause to delay.

He was afraid to leave his wife. He was afraid to travel.

He was afraid of what news the next letter would bring.

When his wife became pregnant, he experienced a dread so vast he had no way to contain it. Fear was too new to him, too fresh, too limitless.

I’ll be different when my child is born, he told himself. But when he saw his newborn son lying in his cradle, his fear only grew larger. He could think of nothing but the perils this world held for anything small or helpless. He feared drafts. He feared heat. He called doctors and consulted with astrologers. His holdings dwindled to nothing because he was afraid to make a choice, lest it be an unlucky one.

Eventually his wife left him. “Find me when you’re able. I will wait for you,” she promised, and went home to her wealthy parents with the baby in her arms.

I will go to her, Víctor vowed. Tomorrow.

We will journey to the southern city and I will regain my vigor, he told Donadei. Tomorrow.

He died that way, alone in his bed, afraid to leave, afraid to stay, afraid to whisper anything but “tomorrow.”

In the early hours of the morning, in a cheap room, in a shabby inn, in a

disreputable neighborhood in Valencia, a young couple waited for the sun to rise.

Sometime around midnight, three people had appeared on a street near the harbor, naked and streaked with soot. One of them, a Flemish pirate who had somehow been granted a second life, didn’t question his good

fortune. He pulled the gag from his mouth and, without a word, ran off into the night.

The other two bathed themselves with salt water and dressed in laundry off the line that the woman multiplied with a few whispered words. They had no money, but the man with the ice-colored hair had connections among the outlaws and thieves in every port town.

Now they lay together atop the covers, the door locked, their hands clasped, forehead to forehead.

“If you are the last thing I see,” he whispered, “it will all have been worth it.”

Perhaps he would have said more, but as the first rays of sun shone through the window, he burned away to ash. Luzia had known her love would destroy him.

She closed her eyes and prayed in Castilian, in Latin, and in the scant

Hebrew she remembered. And then she spoke in a language that was all of these things and none of them, the words she’d used to free them. The only real magic she knew.

She breathed in, breathed out, watched the ash gust away from her across the bed, and then his pale body was stretched out beside her once more,

made whole as a broken glass had once been made whole.

“Perfect,” she whispered as he returned to her in the soft light of dawn.

No one was pursuing them. No one knew they were alive. Luzia had waited until the last second to throw her words into the flames. They had to die, so that they would never be hunted again.

He booked their passage on a boat bound for Holland.

They did not age. They did not change. They traveled the world a thousand times over. They may be traveling still.

Each city is new to them, each shore a strange one. Time has that effect on places, when enough of it has passed. One day they open the gate to a garden in an unfamiliar village. They walk between the orange trees hand in hand. They both think, So, this place is real, never knowing they have both dreamed this moment.

Every night she shuts the windows tight to guard against drafts, and every morning he dies and is reborn beside her. She reminds his heart to beat again, as she did so long ago. He kisses her fingers, and combs her hair, and he treasures her, as only a man who has lost his luck and found it once more ever can.