Page 123 of The Familiar

After hundreds of years, if there were so many sinners left, what had the Inquisition accomplished? They might root out Jews and Muslims and Erasmists and alumbrados, but then what was left? The machine had been built to consume heresy and impiety, so would it simply keep finding heresy and impiety to feed on? Valentina’s soul certainly hadn’t been saved. The vicar’s threats hadn’t made her good, only scared—and not of purgatory. All this spectacle, all this misery, and she didn’t fear hell more than being shut up in a house with her lawful husband.

“It’s time to return,” Quiteria said. “They’re going to read the rest of the sentences.”

Even those prisoners who had escaped the Inquisition’s grasp or died in prison had their charges read. Small pasteboard figures were brought forward and placed in cages where children threw rocks at them. Trunks painted with flames and devils were placed beside them, full of the bones of those who had been sentenced after death and exhumed from their graves. They would be burned at midnight too.

“It used to be worse,” Quiteria said. “There was a time when the condemned were whipped through the streets. I don’t like to see things suffer.”

There are different kinds of suffering, Valentina thought. The kind that takes you by surprise and the kind you live with so long, you stop noticing it.

The day wore on, sentence after sentence, people beaten or sent off to galley service or confinement in prisons or monasteries. They confessed, they repented. Some were banished. Eventually, it was time for the heretics and secret Muslims and Jews who would be banished or exiled. Light ebbed away, as if the sun, like the audience, had grown bored and wished to abandon this wretched sight for happier entertainments.

“The world is a lonely place,” Valentina said.

“I have always found it to be a rather cheerful place,” said Quiteria. “Though on days like this that can be hard to remember.”

Because you are beautiful and charming and talented, Valentina thought but didn’t say.

Maybe this was why she’d come, why she’d washed Luzia’s linen, why she’d sold off Marius’s books to pay for better rations in the prison, why when this was all over, she would join the crowd beyond the city walls, why she wouldn’t turn away when the pyres were lit. It had taken years and strange circumstances but she understood now that she and Luzia were lonely in a way that only the overlooked could be.

She was sorry she had made her scullion perform milagritos. She was sorry she’d struck her and called her stupid. Mostly she was sorry that when midnight came and the fires burned, Luzia would be gone, and the world would be lonelier still.

CHAPTER 54

After so many years of refusing to die, Santángel had been sure he would be afraid to face the hour of his mortality. But he had no urge to weep or wail. He had seen plenty of the world. Without Luzia at his side, he had no wish to see more of it.

The humiliations were over, the floggings and recriminations. Ordinarily the male and female prisoners were kept separate, but there were too few facing the pyre this night for it to matter: only Luzia and Santángel, an old Flemish pirate who had been gagged to keep him from spewing Anabaptist calumnies, some trunks full of bones, and a heap of paper effigies to burn in place of prisoners who had died in prison or fled to countries where the tribunal couldn’t reach.

Their candles had been taken, their ropes removed, along with their absurd hats. The tribunal could spill no blood, and execution was forbidden on sacred ground, so they would be turned over to the city authorities to be murdered. Santángel thought they might be forced to ride asses—another gesture of humiliation the Inquisition liked to employ. Instead he, and Luzia, and the pirate were led barefoot beneath the Puerta de Bisagra, past the city walls, and on to the quemadero. Much of the crowd went with them. Some walked in silence. Some prayed. Some were drunk and laughed and heckled.

Last night, when Luzia had come to him in his cell, he’d told her he wasn’t sorry to die. He would have gladly taken a few hundred more years, but he regretted how little life she’d gotten to claim for herself.

“I’m sorry for all the things you will never see.”

Luzia had laughed. “I feel sorry for all the people who will never get to meet me.”

“How can you be so merry?”

“I make no promises, Santángel. I only know that when we were in that audience chamber before the tribunal, I saw a path before me. I don’t know if it leads to heaven or to hell, but there’s only one way to find out.”

“What is it you intend?”

“If I’m to die, I plan to tear a hole in the world as I leave it.”

Wild magic. True magic. The kind that had almost killed her. What was there to fear now?

“There’s still time to run,” he murmured as they climbed the stage. She could sing her bonds away easily, create a cover of darkness.

“Wherever I go they will follow. And I have work to do here still. Pray for me,” she said. “Pray for both of us.”

He wasn’t sure he remembered how.

Coal and kindling had been piled high beneath the platform and atop it. Their sanbenitos were stripped away to be hung in churches, reminders to the parishioners of the Inquisition’s power. He made himself watch as she was bound to a post. One of the alguacil’s men tied a gag around her mouth.

“What are you doing?” Santángel demanded.

The cuadrillero ignored him. Had Víctor suggested this? Was he afraid of what miracle she might work in her final moments? He could see fear in Luzia’s eyes, but he didn’t know how to reassure her.

Santángel was next to be bound to the post.