Page 37 of The Familiar

Luzia was allowed a day of rest, and she used most of it hemming one of Hualit’s old gowns. Valentina was better with a needle, but she’d had enough of tending to a servant.

The dress was brown velvet, ill-suited to household chores or work of any kind. It was tight in the waist and across Luzia’s breasts, far too long in the sleeves, and finer than anything she’d ever worn. She told herself to be grateful that she wouldn’t have to live in bloodstained clothes as they waited for the trunks to arrive from Perucho. But she felt only resentment. Last night her aunt had seemed like a different woman, dreaming and tender. Did she really mean to leave Spain? To take Luzia with her? Luzia couldn’t quite reconcile that person with the one who had offered her up to Víctor de Paredes, who had never thought to grant her an extra coin or a discarded gown.

Luzia was dressed and clean and seated at her desk when Santángel arrived. She wasn’t sure when he’d come to retrieve his satchel, but she had to assure herself that, should he notice his letters had been tampered with, he would lay the blame at someone else’s door. People had been in and out of this room since the incident, and what interest could an ignorant servant have in his correspondence?

But he didn’t arrive with suspicion or recriminations. Instead he stood in her doorway and said, “Your dress doesn’t fit. I’ve brought you a pomegranate.”

“Is this a new way of saying good morning?”

He set his satchel down on the table and from it drew a square of linen, a small knife sheathed in leather, and a pomegranate.

“It’s one of mine?” she asked.

He nodded.

Luzia looked away. She couldn’t help but think of the fruit thudding to the ground beside Álvaro’s head.

“What am I to do with it?” she asked as he spread the linen on the table and set the fruit upon it. Its deep red skin had the papery thinness that came only when the pomegranate was ripe. “Am I to make it into another tree?”

“Too easy.”

“Change its color?”

“Novel.”

“Change its flavor?”

“Now, that would be a shame.”

There was comfort in this easy exchange and she realized she’d been afraid that what had happened in this room, what she’d done to Álvaro, would alter something between them. It wasn’t that she trusted him, but she enjoyed their lessons. She liked the feeling of his concentration on her, the pleasure he seemed to take in her success. And she liked looking at him. Strange as he was, she’d had few occasions to study a man, and he was more beautiful than Don Marius or the farmers and butchers down at the market. He was finely made in the way of a seashell, the silvery gleam of an oyster, the tight, bright-edged spiral of a nautilus.

He used the knife to score the skin of the fruit, making a circle around the crown to remove it.

“Your fingers have healed,” she noted.

“They have.”

“I thought you might have me sing over them.”

“Unnecessary.”

How had he endured such pain without ever releasing a cry? How could his long fingers move so nimbly when they’d been broken and useless just two days before?

He dug his fingertips into the skin and pulled the fruit open, revealing its blood-colored seeds, its juice staining the linen. “Eat, Luzia.”

Luzia folded her arms even as her mouth watered. She’d had little appetite since Álvaro had died in this room. She had killed a man—and worse, she hadn’t intended to. She wasn’t sure if it was guilt or fear that plagued her, but she somehow knew that to eat this fruit would compound her sin.

“This feels like a trick,” she said. The kind that the devil might play.

“Most good things do.” He reached into his bag and handed her another clean cloth. “The time for lessons will soon end and the torneo will begin.”

“Don Víctor still thinks I should compete? Even after—”

Santángel gave a single nod. “You must trust me when I say that Álvaro was no great loss.”

“But did he deserve to die?”

“Death doesn’t come to those who deserve it. I can attest to that.”