Page 47 of The Familiar

If Gracia de Valera had any kind of magic, she hadn’t chosen to use it tonight.

So now they knew at least one of the competitors trafficked in fraud. But it might not matter. If Luzia embarrassed herself there would be no coming back from it. Santángel wouldn’t be able to spare her Víctor’s wrath.

The curtain dropped and the crowd chattered, marveling at Gracia’s beauty, her poise, the perfection of her gown. She descended into the crowd to applause, her wealthy patron, Don Eduardo Barril, greeting her with a bow.

Again the musicians struck their chord. Again the curtain rose. The tower of glasses remained and there was Luzia in her plain black dress, La Hermanita, a solemn little penitent with seashells in her tightly braided hair, the rosary Víctor and the widow had gifted her the only sign of ornament.

Santángel couldn’t tell what she was thinking. She stared out at the ballroom and he wondered if she was contemplating cracking the table with the song she used to split firewood or if she could make a fig tree grow from the platters at the sideboards. Her mouth was set in what he could only describe as an angry line.

She eyed the tower of goblets, approaching them with none of Gracia’s ease. She looked like a frustrated captain surveying her disobedient troops and considering their punishment. She seized one and smashed it to the ground defiantly. Then another. And another. The audience stirred, restless. Someone laughed under his breath. Antonio Pérez was slouched back in his seat, his lips pulled down in a scowl.

She can’t be foolish enough to perform the same trick. He felt a sinking disappointment, not that she would be mocked, not even that Víctor would disavow her, but that he had thought better of her, of her wit, of her lively speech that galloped along like a skittish pony, hooves dancing, nothing like the hesitant creature he’d met in the widow’s courtyard, a peasant girl who was not at all what she seemed.

As if she could hear his thoughts, she glanced at him, her brow cocking slightly, the look of a woman amused. Well. Enjoy your smiles now. Víctor would chase her from Madrid for the crime of humiliating him. Santángel supposed he should be glad to see his master made a laughingstock, but he remembered Luzia standing in panic before the stalk of a pomegranate tree, trying to find a song to save him. Endure, endure. They both knew that refrain so well.

She closed her eyes. She must be hearing the words to bring the goblets back together. Once she stomped her foot, twice. As if she were furious, as if she wore the boot now and all who watched would be crushed beneath it. When she stomped her foot a third time, her voice rose in a high, eerie wail and the shattered bits of glass rose with it, a gently whirring glimmer of dust in the candles’ glow.

The audience went quiet, their attention snared. This was at least different from the mist and artifice of Gracia’s performance.

Luzia lifted her arms gently and the cloud of shattered glass rose high above her head, then out over the audience. The pieces hung in the air, some larger, some smaller, shifting slowly this way and that.

Pérez’s brow had lowered. He looked perplexed but not pleased.

The cloud separated, lines forming, creating points of brightness. Santángel understood what she was doing a bare breath before the crowd did. They gasped. Pérez’s mouth opened with an audible pop.

The glass had arranged itself into stars, a glittering constellation that hung above Antonio Pérez’s head: the shape was unmistakable, as if a slice of the distant universe had appeared in this ballroom. The Pleiades. The sign under which the king’s secretary had been born, the chart that had pleased him so powerfully, the promise that his fate was bound up with kings and queens.

The illiterate peasant girl had read his letter. A letter contemplating Pérez’s arrogance, his attachment to this dream of his own greatness. A letter written in Latin.

The crowd burst into thunderous applause, surging toward Pérez, trying to reach up to touch the glass constellation. Pérez himself rose to his feet, his eyes bright and fastened firmly on Luzia.

The scullion had bested Gracia de Valera in stunning fashion. She had taken the Beauty’s insult and turned it theatrically to her benefit. Víctor seized his shoulder. “Brilliant,” he crowed. “What is the matter with you? Why do you look like you’re ready to do murder?”

Santángel mustered a smile. “I am merely thinking of what challenge may come next and how to meet it.”

Assuming the liar Luzia Cotado survived the night.

CHAPTER 24

Still humming, Luzia brought the glass cloud back to the stage and let it fall gently to the surface of the table in a soft heap. She knew she should leave it at that, but when she saw Gracia de Valera staring at her with her perfect lips pressed together like a fresh pleat, she waved her hand over the dust as if she were bored, as if she were swiping crumbs off a table. The glass formed itself into goblets obediently. A petty gesture. They weren’t quite as perfect as they might have been if she’d taken her time, but she was interested in defiance, not perfection. She wanted Gracia to know she would not go quietly.

Before she reached the bottom of the stage steps, the crowd had parted and Antonio Pérez glided through. He was so small, so compact, and possessed of a strange, smooth elegance, as if he’d been polished to too high a shine. He smelled of plums and amber. Don Víctor and Don Marius trailed him as best they could, surrounded as he was by courtiers. Hualit and Valentina had been swallowed up by the crowd, and she couldn’t find Santángel among them. Pérez waved a hand and a courtier stepped forward—the man with the dyed-red beard and heavy-lidded eyes.

“Luzia Calderón Cotado. Of Casa Ordoño and Casa de Paredes.”

Calderón. That was not her name. She was Luzia Cana Cotado. Luzia knew Jews sometimes changed the names of children who were sick. What was she sick with that she needed her name changed? The linajista had scrubbed away her mother’s name—Blanca Cana, daughter of scholars, pruned from Luzia’s family tree.

Luzia curtsied, keenly aware of the eyes upon her and gladder than ever that she’d practiced.

“How does a simple peasant know the shape of the constellations?” Pérez queried. “Or did your patron plan this little surprise?”

Somehow Don Víctor had made his way closer. “I assure you, Don Antonio, I did not.”

“Then how did such knowledge come to you?”

Luzia kept her eyes on her shoes. “It is not for me to know,” she said softly, in the humble scullion’s mumble she’d spent years perfecting. “And I cannot pretend to answer. God shows me the way and I follow it.”

“A good, pious woman,” said Pérez, but he sounded like he was sizing up a melon at the market. “Show me your hands.”