Once, Reina had tried to join the servants in their offerings to Ches. She saved a portion of her buttered arepa and brought it to the clay sculpture of his head that the laundress kept near the bedsheet storage, as a thanks for her change of fortune. A scullery maid yanked hard on Reina’s braid before she could offer it, telling Reina, “Don’t soil Don Ches’s offerings.”
A rush of heat sprouted from Reina’s chest to her armpits. She watched in disbelief but didn’t utter a word as the maid hammered the lid on the coffin of her absurdity, saying, “This is our offering. Touch his things again, and I’ll have the cook beat you bloody, you squalid little duskling.”
Duskling was what people in Segolita called nozariels for taking the worst jobs in the shadows of dungeons and cellars. It took her aback to realize the label had traveled to even the farthest reaches of this country.
Actually, what baffled her the most was the maid’s attitude and how she had it so utterly wrong. Ches didn’t belong to humans. He didn’t belong to anyone. Even the human vagrants in Segolita understood this. One could confer with Ches regardless of species. It was a personal relationship, not one set up for pomp and show like the humans had created with their saints. And the way she had called him Don Ches felt false. It implied that Ches was like the humans with their titles. But Reina understood Ches to be bigger than that, like how a dawning sky yawned away the darkness of night, unstoppably and irrepressibly.
She couldn’t eat the arepa after the experience either, because deciding it was for Ches made it for Ches. Reina had snuck away from her duties to find the sunniest spot near the creek behind the smithy and had left the arepa under the rays of the Páramo sun.
During her break, she went back to her shared room in the servants’ quarters to check on her scarring torso. Reina didn’t have to touch the ore to hear the whispering as she glanced at the monstrosity protruding from her chest. The mere act of focusing on the ore and tubes surrounded by scar tissue was enough to rouse the voices. Hearing them prickled her skin in goose bumps. She shivered, hesitant to learn where they originated from. If they were demons, how was she supposed to live with the truth? That darkness was the source of her life.
She glanced behind her, fearful of the shadows formed by the beds and cabinets. A straw Pentimiento cross was nailed above the doorway, yet Reina didn’t feel its alleged protection. Perhaps… with her wicked heart, the devil in the room was her.
Reina rearranged her garments. She sucked in a deep breath as she stared at the brown face reflected by the murky mirror hanging across the beds. The cold of the Páramo had burned her nose and cheeks a ruddy color. Her full lips were chapped—lips she now knew she had inherited from Do?a Ursulina. This was her life now, here in these mountains with her monstrous heart. The least she could do was learn what it meant to have it.
She was on her way to Do?a Ursulina’s underground lab with the question when a servant cornered and handed her a goblet of mora juice. “Take it to the Benevolent Lady,” they told her in passing.
“Wait—”
The servant snapped, “She likes to have it every day at this time. Don’t dawdle.”
Reina ascended to the third story of the manor, where Do?a Laurel’s quarters resided on a long corridor overlooking patches of ?guila farmland and the Páramo peaks. Past rippling wine-colored curtains, the windows allowed a view of the soaring golden eagle on ivory banners of the ?guilas’ battalion and of the people who sparred down in the yard. Reina had quickly learned the sight of the soldiers meant Don Enrique was home. Most recently he had returned from a summit held in Puerto Carcosa, the capital of Venazia, where he and his vassals had met with His Majesty Don Rodrigo Silva.
Don Enrique’s presence brought an anxious mood to the household staff, which had infected Reina the moment she first laid eyes on him. He was a good head taller than Javier, with broad shoulders made for swinging the greatsword he wielded to the battles of the revolution. His stature was made more impressive still by the pair of ivory antlers that sprouted from the crown of his head, which were thick, with cracks and chips revealing the history of his aggressive youth. His eyes were his most fearsome feature, however, as they were the color of dead blood. They regarded Reina without emotion when Do?a Laurel first introduced her as Juan Vicente’s daughter. To him, she hadn’t even been worth acknowledging.
Was it too bold of her to knock on the do?a’s door? It didn’t matter, because no answer came. Eventually she found herself on the second story. The spiraled staircase opened to a chilly corridor where the stone floors and walls trapped the cold of the region. A large portrait painting of Feleva ?guila, Don Enrique’s late mother, hung beside the door to Don Enrique’s study in a gilded frame. Reina paused in awe, as she always did when she passed by the portrait to bring up food or fetch laundry. With eyes of the deepest red and braided starlight hair, she was said to have been the last full-blooded valco of Sadul Fuerte. The portrait depicted her as a confident maiden, donning a tight-fitting military tunic and a rapier, her antlers gnarling up to the edges of the canvas. The painted woman’s beauty made Reina think of Celeste, and Reina’s cheeks scorched.
She peeled her eyes from the painting, swallowing to clear her thoughts.
Glass shattering rang out of the study, followed by faint noises. It sparked Reina’s curiosity. She found the door slightly ajar, as if whoever had entered it last forgot to close it all the way.
“Perhaps it’s for the best if we marry Celeste and Javier,” someone said as she approached, immediately piquing her interest—and disgust.
Reina peered into the room and saw Do?a Laurel’s black hair first, one of her shoulders exposed from her blue gown coming undone. She was sitting on Don Enrique’s desk with her back to the door, seals and quills and papers strewn out of her way as if in a careless hurry. Don Enrique stood in front of her, his body hunched, embracing her with his great frame.
Reina’s heart skipped a beat.
Do?a Laurel pushed him back slightly, angered, her words too soft to leave the room, but the action rooted Reina to the spot with curiosity.
“That boy is my brother and a half valco like me. We are the last of our kind in this land. Me, him, and Celeste,” Don Enrique said from the valley of Do?a Laurel’s collarbone and neck.
He held her with his big hands as if she were the last floating raft in a vast ocean. So mesmerized, Reina couldn’t peel her eyes away. She had never once seen someone be worshipped this way. A man so cold and severe with his blood-red stare, holding Do?a Laurel like her body was a lifeline and without her proximity he would drown. Reina forgot to breathe.
“He’s her uncle,” Laurel said, this time louder, her anger rising.
There was a fumble between them, their hands and their proximity getting in the way of shedding their clothes. Don Enrique lifted Do?a Laurel’s skirt.
Reina watched the forbidden. She didn’t move. Instead, she was painfully reminded of her ore as her treacherous heart raced. The fervent whispers returned, chanting something she couldn’t understand. They came because she, too, was wicked like it.
“It doesn’t matter,” Don Enrique whispered to his wife. “Mother’s parents were cousins. Every surviving valco is a valco because their parents married blood.”