Page 84 of The Familiar

“One few men get to taste.” He slid his hands up the strong muscles of her thighs, helping her find her balance, then her rhythm.

“Only the very lucky ones,” she said. Her words turned to moans and he was borne aloft again.

Santángel left before dawn so as not to be discovered. When he brushed kisses over her cheeks, her lips, her eyelids, she smiled.

“I see you’re glad I’m leaving,” he said.

“I’m trying to imagine a time when you don’t have to.”

He made no promises of “someday” but kissed her again and was gone. Luzia fell back asleep, then woke late. She had nothing to do today but fret about the final trial and Hualit’s offer.

In the mirror her cheeks were flushed, her skin damp. He’d left her with no bruises or love bites. He was no fool. But she could see him all over her. Her hair was a grand tangle and she knew the brush would do no good, so she worked her fingers through it, again and again, first with water, then with oil, then at last the silver comb.

“I can help,” said Valentina when she arrived, and she worked for a while in silence, arranging Luzia’s braids in a coronet.

Luzia realized that Valentina must have been without a maid since Concha had gone. Had Marius helped her to dress and undress these past nights? She couldn’t quite imagine it, and she really didn’t want to, not with another happy evening fresh in her mind.

She knew she was unwise to let that happiness shape her worries for the future. Her focus had to be the torneo and all that might or might not follow. Santángel could speak of an eternity spent braiding her hair, but what did that mean when he was cursed to serve the De Paredes name and she might still become a servant to the king?

If she found a way to force Don Víctor to break the curse, then Santángel would be free to leave and she would never deny him the life he’d longed for. She knew what it was to be pinned in place like a moth. Would she dare to go with him? She might travel the world, visit Hualit in Salonika. They could sleep beneath their own roof in some foreign city. Would he want that? Did she?

“Let’s walk in the gardens,” Valentina said. “I don’t know how many days of good weather we have left.”

Luzia was surprised at the invitation but she had no other way to waste these hours. Tomorrow they would see beyond the bend in the road. They would know what lay before them: a world of palaces and power, or a more uncertain fate. If the king didn’t select Luzia as his champion, she wondered what choices might remain to her.

Luzia and Valentina made their way down to the terrace. She sensed that Valentina wanted to speak, but she said nothing, only fussed with the lace at her cuffs.

The Prince of Olives was walking in the gardens, trailed by Doña Beatriz, dressed in aubergine silk edged in green and gold, the colors of olive fields in the afternoon hours. She had gray in her hair and her eyebrows had been heavily plucked. They might have been mother and son.

Valentina’s sigh was wistful. “She has worn a different gown every time I’ve seen her.”

When Fortún glimpsed Luzia, he raised a hand in greeting. He bowed to his mistress and kissed her hand, and Doña Beatriz bloomed, her eyes bright, alive in his attention. Luzia knew there was a lesson here in the danger of letting someone else make you happy, but she was not in a mood to be taught.

“Is that what happened?” Valentina asked.

It took Luzia a moment to understand what she was asking. She followed Valentina’s gaze to the sketch resting on an easel in the shade of the apple tree and drifted closer to get a better look.

Signor Rossi had abandoned his staid portraits of the torneo’s competitors in favor of a dramatic rendering of the previous night’s horrors, the study wrought in blurred clouds and slashing lines of charcoal. Gracia cowered beautifully, her hands clasped in prayer, while Luzia and Fortún Donadei seemed to float together, side by side, charging in on a divine wind from the right side of the scene, staring down what might have been a large storm cloud, but that, when you squinted, took the form of something more sinister.

“That is less frightening than what we faced,” Fortún said as he approached.

Doña Beatriz had been waylaid by Valentina. Was this strategy? Had Valentina asked Luzia to walk in the gardens to encourage a meeting with the Prince of Olives?

“When the trouble started, I don’t remember standing side by side with you,” Luzia said, too tired and anxious to play diplomat. “I saved Gracia. And myself. And the whole cursed house.”

“I was seeing to Doña Beatriz’s safety,” Fortún protested.

“And your own?”

“I won’t apologize for that.”

“I didn’t ask you to. But this …” She gestured to the painting. “This is fiction.” Luzia had been drawn in her convent gown, light gleaming around her braided head like a halo, beams of it cascading away from her. Rossi had not made her beautiful, not precisely, but she was all light and shadow, her eyes determined, her mouth set in a forbidding line. This was how she dreamed herself when she was shaping the refranes into song, a woman cut adrift from the earth, her garments billowing around her.

Fortún looked even more handsome in the sketch, holding up his bejeweled golden cross to ward off the evil descending upon them, the hastily rendered gems like eyes.

There was a blur in the crowd, and Luzia realized that was where Teoda Halcón had been erased by Rossi’s thumb.

“I think he captured you well,” said Fortún, “and it needn’t be fiction. This is as it should be. You and I, fighting together, two peasants of unremarkable blood welcomed to the king’s court and celebrated.”