Page 23 of The Familiar

“Spanish,” she lied.

“No great miracle has ever been worked in Castilian.”

“And why is that?”

“Because it is a language that spends its power in command and conquest. But you were wrong when you said you didn’t need the words. You do need them. Just as God did when He set this whole miserable clockwork running. Language creates possibility. Sometimes by being used. Sometimes by being kept secret. I will see you again tomorrow, Luzia Cotado.”

“What am I to do with all of these beans?”

“Add them to the soup,” he said, and took some pleasure in being the one to turn his back on her.

CHAPTER 13

The weather had finally begun to cool, and the walk through the city was a pleasant one. Santángel had known plenty of misery, but summer in the stench of Madrid was its own unique punishment. He turned his feet south to the rougher part of town. He could go far enough to manage his errand, but if he pushed much beyond the city walls, he knew he would feel the tether that bound him to De Paredes pulling him back. Santángel could ignore it, but not for long, not if he didn’t wish to endure the consequences.

He didn’t. Because he was a coward. He had always feared death more than he resented this unrelenting life.

His first lesson with the scullion had shown him two things: she had an agile mind and she was doing her best to hide it. Never a bad strategy for a servant, though he’d long since stopped bothering with such deception. Neither Víctor nor Antonio Pérez would be eager for a champion with thoughts of her own. She was stubborn, combative, secretive. But she wanted to learn and she was capable of it. He’d gleaned little else.

She might be a conversa or a morisca. Most of the magic that survived in Spain came from Morvedre or Zaragoza or Yepes. But who knew how long any of it would last, lost to exile and the Inquisition, magic bleeding away with the bodies of Jews and Muslims, their poetry silenced, their knowledge buried in the stones of synagogues made into churches, the arches of Mudéjar palaces. The tolerance for mysterious texts like the Picatrix would be stamped out by the Pope, and King Philip would follow.

He could already feel the effects of his brief time with her. His stride was surer, his lungs breathed more deeply. There was pleasure in shared magic, and danger too. It pricked the mind and the spirit. It filled the room with possibility.

Santángel cut down one of the crooked alleys, keeping Avapiés to his left, and hurried on to Garavito’s workshop and kennels. This was the part of the city known as El Rastro, crowded with tanneries and coal burners and coopers, its slumping buildings snug against each other, its streets choked with mud and shit and blood from the slaughterhouse. No one saw him as he moved through the traffic of carts and wagons, men loaded down with cargo and goods. His gift for stealth served Víctor well, and so it had come easily to Santángel, but he wondered sometimes if, as he’d lost interest in the world, the world had taken less notice of him.

Garavito lived on the lower floor of a building with sweating plaster walls built around a courtyard where his landlord let him keep his cages. He came from a family of trappers, and though he’d tried his hand at becoming a furrier, he didn’t have a talent for it. He sold lesser pelts to peasants and merchants for their bedding, but the martens and genet cats screeching and crying from the cramped wooden boxes in the courtyard would be sold to men with a greater gift for turning living things into fashionable fur-lined coats, felted hats, and scented gloves.

Santángel could have entered the house easily enough, but he knocked instead. A young man answered the door, hiding his face from the passersby on the street.

“Hello, Manuel,” he said. “Is your father home?”

The boy nodded and stepped aside, turning away from Santángel. When Manuel had been only eight years old he’d accidentally released a fox in his father’s care. Garavito had seized the hammer he used to nail and stretch skins, and smashed in the left side of Manuel’s head. The boy should have died, but he’d kept on living, his eye forever half-shut, the skin of his forehead healing over the crater in his skull. His mother was long gone, but whether she’d run away in the night or been murdered by Garavito depended on where you got your gossip.

Santángel set a stack of silver reales on the battered table. “Go from here. Find your uncles. Or set out on your own.”

The boy kept his gaze on Santángel as if fearing a trick. “Are you going to kill him?”

Santángel didn’t answer, only waited. There was a time when some sense of justice or righteousness would have made him want to kill a brute like Garavito, but now it was just a task to be done with.

Manuel snatched the coins from the table, holding them close to his chest.

“Go,” Santángel repeated.

As he made his way through the courtyard, he caught the glint of panicked eyes and scrabbling claws through the holes in the cages. He hated this place and he was only glad that after today he wouldn’t have to visit it again.

Garavito was seated on a bench, hunched over the body of a bloodied squirrel, his knife making messy work of separating the animal’s limp body from its skin.

“Garavito,” Santángel said softly.

The big man startled and lurched to his feet, knocking the bench backward. He had a thick head of black hair and a nose that had been broken so many times it lay nearly flat against his face.

“Shit,” he blurted, registering Santángel. He stood with the mangled squirrel in one hand, his knife in the other, and bowed awkwardly. “Señor,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

Again, Santángel held his tongue, letting silence fill the courtyard, the only sounds the mewls and hissing from the cages.

“I … I have no new information,” Garavito said. “You can be sure I will send word when I do.”

Garavito’s brothers hunted and trapped far afield and spoke to other hunters and trappers. In the past, those contacts had provided Víctor with vital information and word of unusual happenings in the countryside.