Page 106 of The Familiar

“You’re scaring her,” Teoda said quietly.

“I was already scared,” Luzia said. But it was hard not to think of those marks, of what it would mean to cry out and not be heard, and to know all the while that none of it made a difference because she was going to be put to death anyway. There would be no pardon, no gentler punishment.

She thought of poor Lorenzo Botas, sitting by the fishmonger’s stall, sliding off to sleep, carried home in his son’s arms. Who would carry her? The refranes could heal her. She could put her body back together as she had restored her tongue, but the question twisted and wriggled inside her: Who will carry me?

The answer had to be no one, as it had been for so long.

Hualit was gone, and who else was there? Had she believed Santángel would come to her rescue again? Lift her up on his horse and spirit her away from this place? Some nights she lay awake in the dark, certain he was dead, imagining his blood watering the forest floor. Others she feared that Don Víctor held him captive, punishing him for trying to help Luzia escape. But she knew she was a woman without a soul because the worst nights were not when she contemplated her lover’s death or his misery, but when she imagined that he didn’t suffer at all, that he hadn’t come because she was no longer worth his time or trouble.

A shame. A tragedy. A casualty. He might pity her, even mourn her, but he was a creature who had endured lifetimes of loss. What was one silly, pining woman in the scope of all that? She had known him only a few weeks. He had contemplated sacrificing her to his master even as he’d kissed her mouth and combed her hair, even as she’d lain trusting in his arms. Enough people had warned her to beware of Santángel.

She wanted to ask Lucrecia de León about him. Had he visited her? Courted her for his master? Told her she was brave and powerful and rare? But she wasn’t going to shout about Víctor de Paredes or his familiar through the wall, and she never saw Lucrecia out of her cell. The girl who dreamed was never made to fetch her own water, and she had received special permission to visit the courtyard for exercise by herself.

But what real solace could any answers from Lucrecia provide? Santángel had been using her. Santángel had cared for her. Both things could be true and still mean nothing. In the end, she was not worth the risk of the Inquisition’s attention or Don Víctor’s ire. A cruel calculation, a single efficient blade she could cut herself with every night. You are not worth saving, Luzia Cotado, Luzia Cana, Luzia Calderón. Luzia whose name would vanish in the ashes.

CHAPTER 47

In the mornings it was easier to be brave. She remembered Santángel telling her that servants were better equipped to be spies. So maybe a lifetime of beatings and humiliation would give her an advantage now too. Mostly she thought about how her refranes might serve her when she was taken to the inquisitors.

Neva and Teoda had advised her there would be no formal trial, and she was ready when she was brought before the tribunal, three men who might have been anyone, priests at San Ginés, bakers at the ovens, farmers at their market stalls. Teoda had told her their names: Don Pedro, Don Gaspar, Don Francisco. She wasn’t sure which was which, but it didn’t seem to be important. Their secretary scribbled away as they questioned her about her family, her life with the Ordoños, her relationship to Víctor de Paredes, his wife, Catalina de Castro de Oro, Teoda Halcón, Antonio Pérez. She stuck to the false family tree the linajista had created, hoping that Don Víctor hadn’t revealed her secrets. She never mentioned Santángel or spoke her aunt’s true name. She didn’t tell them she could read. She did her best to speak the truth, but there were so many lies, she felt as if she were leaping from rock to rock, always in danger of losing her balance.

Three times they warned her to consult her conscience and confess, but she didn’t know which crime to claim. She didn’t even know enough about Teoda’s faith to pretend she had been seduced by it.

When they finally took her down the stairs, she held her refranes close, all the words she had gathered in her cell, armor forged in exile.

If they used the potro as they had on Neva, the best she could do was to try to heal herself while the damage was done to her.

If they used the garrucha, the nasty trick that had popped Lorenzo Botas’s knees and ankles from their joints, she could lighten the weights they attached to her feet with the same words she’d used to lighten firewood. She would scream and jounce as if she’d been pulled apart so that they thought the torture was working.

“They can only torture you once,” Teoda had told her. “That is the law.”

“Then it’s over?”

Neva cackled. “Oh no, amiguita. They don’t stop the session. They just suspend it. It ends when they say it ends.”

They took her clothes, stripping her and describing each item to the secretary as it was removed. It was cold, just as Teoda had said, and she had been naked before no man but Santángel. She didn’t want to think of him in this room, in this place full of their ugly, awkward machines.

Think of magic, she told herself, think of how it may serve you, remember that secret music—big, dangerous, unwieldy, the song she was meant to ignore, that had swept her up when Don Víctor tortured Santángel, that had torn a man in two. It had nearly killed her, and if the pain got too great, then she would let that song loose to destroy her and maybe leave some damage in her wake. That thought, that she might choose her death, that she could hold the end of it all in her hands, steadied her. It shouldn’t. Who knew what torments awaited her in purgatory? But still the knowledge of those words, that bloody song that was bigger than this room and the men who pretended not to watch as she tried to cover herself, that might buy her a little vengeance, gave her comfort.

“It is your guilt that has brought you here, and only your full confession can prevent this. Speak it now.”

“Please, señor—”

“Lie down on the table,” he told her. Was he Don Gaspar or one of the others?

She lay back and they bound her hands and ankles with ropes, then her hips, her chest.

“Now you will be a bride,” said the man whose name she didn’t know, and he placed a soft cloth over her face. “You have brought this upon yourself,” he said again, “and your confession will end it.”

Luzia could only see the shapes of the men, shadows in the room. Don’t panic, she told herself. She could sing herself free of the bonds if she had to, if the pain of whatever this was became too great. All she had to do was keep her head as she had at the trials, summon a refrán, and endure.

“Tell us how you created your illusions,” said a voice.

“I sing and—”

She didn’t have the chance to finish. Her mouth was full of water, her nose, her throat. She coughed but the water kept coming. She was drowning. This was not the potro or the garrucha or any other torture made by man. This was death, pushing into her chest, her lungs. She couldn’t sing, couldn’t speak, couldn’t think. There were no words. There never had been. There was only death, cold and dark.

She was drowning in a bucket, a squirming rat, pink and newborn, looking up at Águeda’s face. Her aunt was above her, hands around her throat, choking her slowly, and then her aunt was beneath her, sinking to the bottom of the river. She had no eyes, no lips. The fish had eaten them. Hualit’s lipless mouth opened. “I’ll pray that our suffering will be swallowed by the sea.”