Page 38 of The Familiar

Her guilt was too great for such platitudes. “You and your master have made me a murderer.”

“If you become the king’s champion and build him a new armada, you will be responsible for many deaths.”

Luzia felt her anger prick. “I can wait to make my peace with that. What happened in this room, Santángel?”

“You tell me, Luzia.”

“It was the same song I’ve always used, the same miracle. ‘A change of scene, a change of fortune.’ But the melody twisted in my head.”

“Into what?”

“I don’t know,” she snapped, unable to stem her frustration. “I was … I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing, the sound … your fingers. Who does such a thing? Who commands such cruelty? Who obeys such commands?”

“You know the answer. Servants. Slaves. We do what we must.”

“I know,” she said hopelessly. “I know. All I wanted was for it to be over, to be anywhere but here.”

“Ah,” said Santángel.

“Ah?”

He reached for a segment of pomegranate and bit into it as if it were an apple.

“I’ve never seen someone eat a pomegranate that way.” She was annoyed at how tidily he’d done it, not a fleck of juice or pith gone astray.

“It is the best way. Without fuss.” He wiped his fingers on the cloth. “Your magic was trying to become bigger. It was trying to offer you escape, to take you from this place.”

“Impossible.”

“Yes,” he said. “Very much so. There are stories in some of the Greek papyri and the Sepher Ha-Razim of men who could vanish in one place and reappear miles away—on a mountaintop, in a market square. But who knows if they were true. And they always used a …” He hesitated, searching for the right word. “Taewidha. Lapillus. There’s a phrase in old Egyptian: aner khesbed wer. But even that isn’t accurate. A kind of stone, a talisman. They were rare and used for concentrating a sage’s abilities. These spells were of such great power they would crack the stone with a single attempt.”

“But they worked?”

“I see your busy mind leaping ahead, but think of your gold coins becoming spiders. This is the same thing. There are limits to the impossible. For every story of a man who managed to fling himself to a distant city or a hilltop, there are a thousand of those who failed, who ended up buried miles beneath the earth, or drowning in an ocean, or split down the middle where they stood.”

Luzia touched her hand to her mouth and Santángel’s eyes followed.

“You’re lucky it was just your tongue,” he said.

“Álvaro wasn’t so lucky.”

“Better him than you.” He was being gentle with her today, almost kind, but the hardness in him remained.

She picked up a piece of the pomegranate, admiring its perfect glossy seeds, begging to be eaten. “I’ve had the same thought,” she whispered.

“That’s not something to be ashamed of.”

“I’ve spent enough time in churches to know that isn’t true.”

And if she was honest she could feel the pull of that larger magic. Her greedy, wanting heart longed for it. Not just for the hope of escape from this city and this life. The truth was that she had liked being frightening. She had never contemplated what it might mean to be feared by Víctor de Paredes, by people like him. What did it mean for her shriveled soul that she had enjoyed it so much? Men weren’t kind to the things they feared.

“I brought you the pomegranate because it means something different to everyone,” Santángel said. “When Ferdinand and Isabella conquered Granada, they added it to their coat of arms. You can see it in King Philip’s heraldry still. But it doesn’t belong to them. The Qur’an says it was a gift from Allah. The Bible says the serpent used it to tempt Eve. Two hundred pomegranates were carved into the walls of King Solomon’s temple. San Juan de Dios made it a symbol of healing. A thousand stories. A thousand meanings. But in the end, it belongs to no one, except the woman who holds it in her hand. Eat it or don’t. Enter the torneo or turn your back on it. It is your choice.”

There were other stories too, about girls stolen from meadows, who had escape within their grasp but whose hunger bested them in the end. A peasant wasn’t supposed to know those stories. But she was tired of hiding, of her trembling turnip’s life. She was not going to reject the torneo. She was not going to flee on a ship with her aunt.

Luzia had always been a liar and now she was a killer. For it to mean anything, she had to keep going. She had to find a way to win. She would build herself a life of plenty. She would force her world to bloom as she’d made the pomegranate tree grow, and Santángel would help her do it. Even if blood watered the soil.

“I would like three things.”