Reina’s heart broke a little. If Celeste was their only child, they must have been trying for nearly two decades.
They passed the archway to the dining hall and slowed at the sight of a lit candle. Javier sat at the head of the table, alone, so engrossed in a book that he didn’t look up. Do?a Laurel shook her head and led Reina to the backyard.
“I try not to judge him too harshly. I really do,” Do?a Laurel said. “That boy grew up without his mother, with Enrique’s indifference raising him.”
“His mother died when he was young?” Reina asked, more because Do?a Laurel seemed keen to revisit her memories than out of her own curiosity.
“Soon after Celeste was born. Your grandmother will say Do?a Feleva raged her way to an early grave after I married Enrique.” Do?a Laurel scoffed at the memory. “Anyway, I couldn’t raise him myself. He was always latching on inappropriately and jealous of Celeste. After living with valcos for so long, I’ve learned they like to indulge in their emotions and primal instincts. Javier especially, and he has a natural talent for triggering Enrique’s anger. So let’s just say he wasn’t exactly raised… gently.”
Reina squinted at the dark yard, where the night was cold and undisturbed, her tail twitching with disagreement. After her father had died, she’d also tasted a fair share of cruelty, but she hadn’t turned out insufferable.
A shadow broke out of the introduced pine grove near the grounds. Don Enrique zipped along the gravel road with his magnificent steed, detouring to the stables. Reina noticed Do?a Laurel beaming. She thought of the fairy tales that highborn girls told themselves, about princes coming to rescue them from the traps of a witch in acts of fated true love. Do?a Laurel epitomized what those maidens ought to look like. Reina liked the thought, because Do?a Laurel was kind and beautiful. She deserved this home, and her baby boy, and to be worshipped by the richest man of all.
Don Enrique found them within moments, the light from the archway’s sconces revealing his disheveled short-cropped hair and flushed cheeks. He paused to allow a petting on the cheek from his wife; then he regarded Reina, again with his monumental indifference.
Reina looked down at her espadrilles as she conveyed Do?a Ursulina’s message.
Then the three of them descended the spiraling stone steps together and entered her grandmother’s lair. A single sconce remained lit, the one closest to her desk. In the dim light, Reina couldn’t be sure if the long shadows resembled the pieces of furniture they belonged to or if they were bipedal in shape. Her tail switched and turned uncomfortably, her chest prickling.
Do?a Ursulina stood behind her large desk with the star map splayed over it. She wore a black tunic and gloves, and in her palm she held a glittering ore not unlike the one feeding Reina’s heart.
“Masters,” Do?a Ursulina said with a nod.
“What is this that can’t wait until dawn?” Don Enrique said. “I could have been asleep.”
Do?a Ursulina offered him an insolent smile. “Something told me you wouldn’t be.”
“Iridio is strong here,” he said, covering his nose with the back of his hand. “It’s suffocating.”
Reina had heard many tales about valcos, because that was what people did: talk about what they knew of them, since their numbers were so sparse, regardless of if there was any truth to it. The Liberator was a valco, so the people of Segolita said valcos were handsome beyond belief. Reina had found this to be true the moment her eyes opened after her attack and she saw Celeste. They said they leapt and ran so fast it was like a strike of lightning: Blink, and you’d miss it. This Reina had seen when she witnessed Don Enrique spar in the yard. They even said that valcos could see geomancia at work, as glittering threads looping around whatever a spell was trying to achieve or manipulate. And as Don Enrique’s eyes followed something she couldn’t see above the star map and the ore, Reina now understood this was true as well.
Do?a Ursulina’s other hand grappled something over the ore and tugged as she raised it high above her, drawing an invisible substance out of the ore’s orifices. The movement spurred the tang in the air, the sourness taking up residence in the back of Reina’s throat. It grew strong as Do?a Ursulina placed the ore on the table and waved both hands over her star map.
With her arms spread wide, Do?a Ursulina used magic to peel the charts and scripts off the map and shove them overhead to the ceiling, tugging along the projection of a hundred different dots and constellations that manifested everywhere in the room. Stars and nebulas pierced Reina’s skin like the caress of a breeze. Too many to count, they glowed such bright cyans and oranges that they twinkled white.
The stars looked familiar. Reina understood why her grandmother called them when it was darkest, for they were the arrangements in the sky tonight.
It would have been a beautiful sparkling sight, if the whispers in Reina’s heart hadn’t erupted in a fervor. They weren’t within her anymore. The words slithered and punched and rebounded, a medley of guttural and high-pitched voices filling Do?a Ursulina’s laboratory. Reina’s skin rose in goose bumps. She hugged herself, pressing her back against a wall where there would be no star to pierce through her and no shadow to sneak up on her.
Don Enrique blanched like he understood what the whispers said.
Do?a Ursulina brandished her arms and transposed the position of the stars. She waved and waved, nights turning into days turning into nights again, changing the view of the constellations until she arrived at a future moment in time. She paused as a great rock ripped through the night, glowing with cyan and violet light, its long tail tearing the fabric of the black sky and allowing another world to peek through.
“Forty years ago, Rahmagut’s Claw tore open the sky for twenty days and twenty nights,” Do?a Ursulina said, the whites of her eyes again inundated by the blackness. “On the last night, his favor was summoned by one of his disciples.”
Reina covered her nostrils and lips with her palm. She stared at her grandmother in awe.
“According to the legend, Rahmagut can grant any wish a person desires. Immortality. Reanimation. The breaking of void curses. Boundless power and riches. Nothing is out of his reach, as long as his will is summoned by an act of great evil, such as spilling the blood of his runaway nine brides—their reincarnations, that is.”
Where was the falsehood? For there had to be one. Rahmagut was the deceiver. Ches wouldn’t have banished him otherwise. The whispering grew feverish, and Reina’s fear of the demon god clutched her. She ground her teeth, needing the vision to end just as much as she wanted to understand Do?a Ursulina.
Do?a Laurel gripped Don Enrique’s forearm, also afraid.
“Rahmagut’s Claw is returning?” Don Enrique murmured.
With her chin Do?a Ursulina pointed at the manifested sky, where the cyan tail of the shooting star left a dent in the safety of their world. “Two years hence, Rahmagut’s Claw will tear open the seal between this world and the Void for twenty nights. During that time, anyone bold enough to pursue the legend will be able to ask anything they want from the god del Vacío.”
“We will have no part in this,” Do?a Laurel said with a jerk to her husband’s forearm.