Page 95 of The Familiar

“Make it bigger!” crowed Donadei, his fingers strumming the vihuela as black birds chirped and fluttered above them. “Make it so large they can see it in Madrid!”

The cross rose, towering above them, dripping water from the damp boards as fish leapt at its base and birds sang around it in a circle like a crown.

The crowd on the lakeshore burst into applause. Vázquez was on his feet, leaning forward on the balcony.

“We have them!” cried Luzia.

“Thank you,” Donadei said. “I knew you would know how to get their attention.” Then he turned to the audience on the shore. “Does the king wish for symbols? Or does he wish for ships?”

He struck his vihuela, the chord jangling, and as it hung in the air, he placed a hand over his golden cross and lifted it. The birds above squawked in response, their wings seeming to lengthen, their bodies shifting from sparrows into seabirds, long-legged and sharp-beaked.

“What are you doing?” Luzia shouted over the chattering of the birds.

“What I must.” His fingers played over the neck of the vihuela. The flock multiplied, an army of birds, whirring around the cross. They seized the boards in their talons, tearing them away, assembling a new shape. “My gift is for the living world, not toying with objects and trinkets as you do.”

The birds moved faster, swooping and diving, a whirling frenzy, and it was only when they began to pull away, their arcs widening, their wings catching the air and drawing them higher, that Luzia saw what they had done.

The towering cross had been remade into a galleon. Sails of black feathers billowed from its masts, and writhing eels formed black cannon at its railings. Her solid, stately cross transformed into something majestic and terrifying. Something useful.

Now Donadei’s bright smile was sly. He stood with his hand pressed to the golden cross at his chest as if God Himself sang through the strings of his vihuela. “It is a competition, after all.”

“Malparido,” Luzia growled. The bastard had set her up. He’d fanned her doubts about Santángel, but worse, he’d made her doubt her own gifts. He’d pretended he was as frightened and as vulnerable as she. He’d gotten her to squander her turn.

She stood helpless on the wooden dock she’d made, and she knew how she must look, her meager boards wobbling in the shadow of Donadei’s magnificent warship.

She had lost after all.

Would Santángel think she had done it on purpose? Would he know Donadei had made an ass of her?

Valentina would be disappointed.

Don Víctor would be furious.

And Luzia was furious too.

But there was something in the movement of those eels, the feathers, the long-limbed birds that she recognized.

“You were the one who gave life to the shadows. You attacked Gracia and me at the puppet show.”

How? He had played no music, created no song. She would have heard. Luzia realized just how stupid she’d been. He’d used the same trick she had. The music was a mask, a vehicle for the words in his head.

She didn’t know which language he was using to work his miracles, but she saw now that his magic was without real substance: birds who could sing but would never breathe, shadow creatures who vanished when the lights were extinguished. Illusions. That was why he had needed her. She had given him all the substance he required, a galleon’s worth of lumber with which to build.

She wanted to crack him open like a pomegranate, but she couldn’t, not in full view of the crowd.

“I’m sorry we won’t be friends any longer,” he said, smiling as his birds screeched and swooped overhead, the sails of his warship billowing in an invisible wind. “You really do look like the girls from my town. Sun-baked and solid as a loaf of bread.”

Luzia returned his smile. She gestured to the large gold cross with its gleaming green jewels. “Don’t give me another thought, Fortún.”

Then, in words that had begun as Spanish and been transformed beneath a foreign sun, words made solid by ink and carried over the sea into her aunt’s waiting hands, she said, “Onde iras, amigos toparas.” Wherever you go, may you find friends.

This was the magic that was good for boards and beans and eggs and heads of garlic, but that made spiders out of copper and hornets out of silver. Because magic was never easy; because food was food, but coins were nothing without the greed of men.

The jewels at the four points of Donadei’s cross leapt from their settings. Shimmering wings snapped up from their backs as their thick scarab bodies took flight, buzzing around his curly head. The rubies at his shoulders sprouted wriggling legs and giant red ants reared up, clambering toward his collar.

Donadei shrieked, releasing the cross as it dissolved in his hands, a skittering heap of golden spiders. He swatted at the insects, beating his chest and clawing at his hair, trying to drive them away, losing the tune on his precious vihuela. Whatever words he’d held in his mind had been driven out by terror.

The birds and eels and fish vanished around them. The ship began to break apart.