Page 59 of The Familiar

“You don’t know me.”

“We are the only two people here who understand what it is to work until your hands bleed. I knew you as soon as I met you, and I know you won’t tell her because you’re not a pretty snake like Gracia de Valera.”

Maybe Luzia should tell. A clever competitor would steal any advantage.

“I won’t,” she conceded, neglecting to add for now. “But this isn’t the country. You can’t … well, you can’t be so honest.”

“I can.” His bright smile returned, a white sail unfurling. “If I choose my friends wisely.”

“Then tell me something useful. Do you know what the next trial will be?”

“Our purity will be tested. I’ve been told we will face Satan in front of the vicar, but I don’t know what that means.”

Luzia tried to ignore the chill that overtook her. She supposed the devil himself would come to La Casilla if invited. “I’m not sure I want to guess.”

“Luzia!” called Teoda from her perch on the golden chair. “It’s time for you to sit for Signor Rossi.”

Luzia sighed. “Perhaps I look like the girls from his town too.” She started pushing to her feet and was grateful for the hand Fortún offered her, even if it wasn’t quite decorous.

“You cautioned me, Señorita Cotado,” he said. “I’ll give you the same warning: be careful.”

“I hardly think I’m in danger of being too honest.”

“I saw Don Víctor’s servant this morning, riding out for the hunt. El Alacrán.”

“Santángel?”

Fortún nodded. “He is not what he seems.”

She pulled back, forcing him to release her hand. “What do you mean?”

“Only what I said. Be careful.”

Fortún smiled and waved her along, as if he’d merely warned of coming rain.

CHAPTER 28

The hunt was tiresome and Santángel was grateful to avoid the feast that followed. His appetite for food had returned, but not for the pomp of such meals or the dull conversation that accompanied them. Instead he walked the palace and the grounds, listening to the idle talk of guards and servants, hoping to gather more information on tomorrow’s trial. He was not seen or heard. This was the way he’d determined who had placed the scorpion in Luzia’s room. The guard had confessed that Gracia de Valera’s patron had sent him on his murderous errand and then he had been silenced.

As for the scorpion, Santángel had ridden out to place him in a warm spot by a rocky crag and spoken the same words he’d said when he’d subdued the little creature: “You are not where you belong.” The scorpion had crept from his hand, free until death found it.

Luzia had asked him what he was, and familiar was the easiest name to put to it. He could have answered, A servant and a captive. He could have said, I am what is needed. Isidro de Paredes had first dubbed him El Alacrán, a name meant to shame him. But he was a creature without shame.

When he arrived back at La Casilla, he sought out Luzia. He told himself it was to glean what she’d learned from the other hopefuls, but he knew that was not the only reason. He had been without friends or companions for a very long time. The servants in the De Paredes home came and went, lived and died. The scholars and philosophers he wrote to enlivened his days with their letters, suggested visits to their laboratories and libraries, places he would never get to see. He could no longer tell the days or the years apart. Another business negotiation, another piece of land to acquire, another ambitious De Paredes to appease. Sometimes he looked at Víctor and wasn’t sure whose face he was staring into. Víctor’s father? His grandfather? The many who had come before? They all chased power as if it were a great hunt, as if there was novelty in its pursuit. Their enthusiasm and drive, their constant burnishing of their name, their flag, their holdings, never wavered, never changed. Always they spoke to him as if their goals were his, as if Santángel shared their endless, grasping desire. When all the while he felt nothing.

Until that cursed day in the widow’s courtyard. Now his heart beat, his stomach growled, his cock hardened. He was a man again, and he didn’t know whether to hate Luzia Cotado for this unasked for awakening or fall at her feet in gratitude. It was a kind of madness, but one that could be cured. When he was free. Then he would see the world. He would remember what it was to be human and forget the scullion he had chosen to doom.

Concha opened Luzia’s door and scurried away without being asked.

“At last!” Luzia said when he entered. “I thought you had disappeared entirely.”

“If only it were that easy.” She sat at her table of powders and ointments, bundled in her velvet dressing gown, wiping that awful lead paint from her face. He was sorry to see her remarkable hair was still in its tight braids, but that was for the best. His grasp of this tangled situation had begun to slip, maybe in the moment of Álvaro’s death, maybe long before it. He didn’t need further temptation. “Tell me what you discovered today.”

“I saw little of Gracia de Valera, but the Holy Child and the Prince of Olives both believe she’s a fraud.”

“Because they’re not fools.”

“If it’s true, how can she hope to survive the torneo?”