Page 17 of The Familiar

“This will end badly, Víctor.”

Víctor de Paredes smiled. “For someone, perhaps. But not for me.”

CHAPTER 10

Luzia didn’t have to wait long for revelation. The next morning, she returned from the market and had barely closed the door when Valentina careened into the kitchen, waving a letter in the air as if ringing a bell.

“La Casilla!” she screeched, the words like a spell she was casting, and perhaps there was magic in them. “We are to go to La Casilla!”

This was the invitation that De Paredes had said would come. But was it good news or bad? Was God speaking or the devil?

“A palace of sin,” Águeda said with a sniff.

“Is it a very grand palace of sin?” Luzia asked, setting down her basket and unwrapping the shawl from her shoulders. She could see the broken wax seal of the letter and what looked like the impression of a horse standing in a labyrinth.

“Twenty-two rooms, works by the great Italian painters. It is said that Pérez had his bed …” Valentina giggled at her indiscretion. “He had his bed made as an exact copy of the king’s!”

The cook slammed down the lid of the vinegar pot. “The pretense of the man.”

“What a thing to get to see such a place,” Luzia said carefully. “I imagine all of the women there dress very finely. They must have the most wonderful jewels.”

Doña Valentina’s fingers clenched around the paper, the pleasure draining from her face. She looked around the kitchen, touched her hand to the front of her gown, as if just realizing what such an invitation entailed, what it would mean to enter a ballroom in her tired old velvet, with her sad yellow wedding pearls around her neck. How would she arrive with no private coach or horses?

“La Casilla,” she said again, fighting for a smile, a bird who had been taught only one word. She turned and made a slow path up the stairs.

Luzia watched her fade upward into the gloom like a dying spark. Doña Valentina rarely looked happy, and Luzia had stolen that happiness from her. But better she take a knife to her hope and Valentina’s, before it quickened and found form.

Wishes granted were rarely the gifts they seemed. Any goose who believed otherwise hadn’t listened to a story all the way to its end. Víctor de Paredes could give Luzia a new life, scrub her antecedents clean, and he would control her as he did Hualit. Her powerful, beautiful aunt who laughed so easily and never doubted her own judgment, who took pleasure in all things and did as her mood suited. Luzia had always imagined her as some kind of sorceress, enchanting a powerful nobleman, keeping him in her thrall. But that wasn’t what she’d seen in that courtyard. Hualit could claim she knew how to play this game, but it was Don Víctor who had issued commands and they had all jumped to do his bidding, even the strange Santángel, who had made Hualit quake with fear.

Don Víctor’s whims weren’t really what worried her. Luzia’s days were already shaped and battered by Valentina’s fits of temper. But last night she’d had to grapple with what a performance might require if she sought to climb higher. How was she meant to speak her refranes before Pérez or the king, let alone compete in the torneo? Her stomping and clapping were a feeble shield. What was Hualit’s solution for that? And how was Luzia to explain to a man like Víctor de Paredes that she couldn’t do as she was bid? Maybe the Ordoños’ poverty would save her. They didn’t have the means to visit La Casilla, no matter who issued the invitation.

Be glad, she told herself. Be grateful you can go no further down this path. But it was hard to claim victory at the thought of spending the rest of her days chopping cabbage and feeling her life drain into the dirt floor every night. Surely this bit of magic, this little scrap of power had to mean more.

Not so little, she thought as she rolled out dough for Águeda. Amid the grapevines, her magic hadn’t seemed small. It had filled her like a well that would never run dry. It had nearly overwhelmed her. She had once ridden a horse with her father, when he was still doing business on the outskirts of the city. It had been a farmer’s horse, old and flea-bitten, but Luzia had loved being up high, and she’d felt like someone else, a princess or a fine lady in a king’s retinue, as the horse plodded through the dry hills outside the city walls. When they’d reached a gully, her father had said, “Hold on, Luzia,” and kicked his heels into the horse’s sides.

The animal had come to life beneath them, as if it were an entirely different beast, as if wings might sprout from its flanks. It leapt the trench, its muscles a coursing river beneath her. Less than a minute that horse had run, but Luzia’s heart had run with it, exultant with the glimpse of another life for her, for the horse. That was what her magic had felt like in Hualit’s courtyard, as the vines thundered into life around her, powerful and only barely within her control, a lunging, sinewy thing that might carry her anywhere. Or that might rear up and toss her from its back, leaving her in a broken heap on the riverbank.

Hualit had told her the refranes were nothing, a secret to be kept, small comfort for a small life. Why had Luzia been so ready to believe her?

High above someone rapped on the front door.

“Luzia.” Her name floated down the stairs. It seemed the bird knew more words after all. “Come along.”

Luzia wiped her hands and tromped up the stairs to find Valentina waiting, her face pale as candle wax, patting her hair as if for comfort. Would her mistress punish her now, for swiping away her delusions?

“Come along,” Valentina repeated. But she didn’t turn her feet toward the stairs.

Luzia followed her to the salon, the grandest room in the house, though it had no real view from its windows nor fine paintings on its walls. A fire was burning in the brazier and Luzia could tell it had been filled with coal instead of olive stones, despite the cost. Her steps faltered when she saw the man standing at the window, hands clasped behind his back. That was why the Ordoños were showing off. Víctor de Paredes. He hadn’t wasted any time.

She was almost equally shocked to see Don Marius in the room. He was rarely home for the midday meal and spent most of his time in the house tucked away in his study. It was strange to see him in the light of day and she was surprised at how young he appeared. Because he’s smiling, she realized. He looked pleased instead of sour and scowling because a rich and powerful man was in his home.

“I will leave you here,” Valentina said with a quick curtsy.

Luzia wanted to call her back. As if Valentina could protect her from whatever was coming.

“Don Víctor, this is Luzia Cotado,” Marius said.

If the sight of him in sunlight was strange, then the sound of him speaking her full name was utterly bizarre.