He slung her unconscious body over his shoulder like a sack of grain. Reina helped him load the girl onto the carriage while her conscience kneaded her chest with discomfort. The utterance of her heart resurfaced, delighted.
Reina turned a deaf ear once the girl woke up and realized she wasn’t in the safety of her family’s hacienda. Javier’s lashing of “Stay put!” was the only response to her begging to be returned home. Frightened, the girl endured the journey across the mountains in silence.
They took her to Do?a Ursulina’s study, where the witch and Don Enrique awaited.
Reina watched from the fringes of the room as Do?a Ursulina circled the girl who was supposed to be the first of Rahmagut’s reincarnated wives, seeing how her grandmother’s bejeweled fingers lifted the girl’s black curls to reveal cheeks mottled in tears, then further lifted her hair to look behind her ear. The girl seemed no older than fifteen.
“We must offer them at the same time. We must keep them safe until we have all nine,” Do?a Ursulina noted to the room. The girl wept harder.
“Then let us allocate them living quarters.” Don Enrique passed Reina and Javier, spared them a brief glance, and swept out of the underground after saying, “Well done, you two.”
Javier followed after him.
Reina rubbed her arms through her jacket. She stood behind the girl and faced Do?a Ursulina. Regret gnawed at Reina’s insides for the indifference she had afforded the girl on the ride here. At the very least, she should have been gentle.
“Are you sure she’s one of them?” she asked her grandmother. And she knew she deserved a lashing for doubting her, at this stage, but if the girl’s life was to be reduced to being a captive, then she needed to say the words.
Do?a Ursulina yanked the girl’s hair, earning her a yelp, and rotated her head so the marks behind her ears were visible. Moles dotted her beige skin below the hairline. Do?a Ursulina waited until Reina counted all nine of them before approaching her star map and jabbing a bejeweled index at the constellation inked among all the other stars lighting the nights of the Páramo.
“Rahmagut’s constellation.” She pointed at the same pattern that was marked on the girl’s skin. The drawing of a bull was superimposed over the nine stars on the map. “‘A birthmark of the constellation lighting the sky on the night of their birth, branded on the place where Rahmagut handled his wives most adoringly,’” Do?a Ursulina added, quoting the lore written in the legend.
The girl’s shoulders shuddered like an earthquake, her body overtaken by fear. Her frailty only made Reina think of Celeste, who appeared frail of frame but in reality was quite the opposite. What would she think of Reina, if she saw what she was doing?
It didn’t matter. Once the Benevolent Lady was back to warming the corridors of ?guila Manor with her light, Celeste would see that it was all worth it.
“It is an imprecise estimation, of course, with all the factors involved,” Do?a Ursulina said, “but there’s a way to test it out.”
“How will you do it?”
“Wait outside,” her grandmother commanded. Her black skirts swept the flagstones as she walked to a shadowed corner of her laboratory, where a chest of drawers held the weight of a basket full of blankets.
“Why?”
It wasn’t until Do?a Ursulina dug her hand into the basket that Reina realized something stirred and cooed within. The soft mewling of a baby.
It was the last thing she expected to see in this dungeon. Whose baby was it? And what role could an innocent babe have?
“The person who invoked Rahmagut forty-one years ago tested the powers of the Damas del Vacío by having them bless a newborn babe with their protection,” Do?a Ursulina explained in a gentle voice, as if she were capable of harnessing the tenderness to handle a newborn.
When Reina frowned, Do?a Ursulina pointed at the worn journal filled with the thin, elegant writing for Reina to read the notes herself.
Do?a Ursulina said, “If we abandon the babe in the mountains, where whistlers and tinieblas and other creatures haunt the land, the dama’s blessing should protect him. He will survive the night, and come the morrow, we will know with utmost certainty that she is the correct one.”
An ache throbbed in Reina’s belly. She inhaled deeply, her jaw tightening as the girl cried silently to herself in painful anticipation of what her captors had in store for her. In Do?a Ursulina’s arms, the babe gurgled contentedly, oblivious.
Do?a Ursulina’s lips thinned to a dangerous line, her eyes hardening. “Do not waste my time, Reina. We must act now, or else we will miss the moment that comes once every forty-two years.”
This was her last opportunity to parley with the god of the Void. They both knew it.
Reina backed away. The air was slapped in her face when Do?a Ursulina’s wordless magic slammed the door of the laboratory in front of Reina. She leaned against the hardwood door, her skull clattering behind her, the pain nothing but a distraction. The weaker part of her begged her to turn away. It moaned how it was not yet too late. She could change course now and save her heart from this stain. Then she remembered how Ches had given her silence and suffering. How all the praying to the Virgin had made no changes to their lives. Only Rahmagut’s void magic could offer a second chance, as proven by her new heart.
Besides, it was only a little bit of blood to be taken from the damas, and the girl’s blessing would keep the babe safe in the mountains. These were the sacrifices they needed to make, to have the lives they wanted. With Do?a Laurel, Celeste’s gratitude, and all the power Rahmagut was willing to spare for his devoted disciples.
The laboratory door cawed open sooner than Reina expected. Her grandmother stepped through with the bundled babe in her arms, the infant’s rosy lids draped shut in a deep sleep. Without care or decorum, Do?a Ursulina handed her the wrapped baby.
“Take him. Leave him high up in the mountains. And note the location so you can fetch him at dawn.”
“Me?” Reina’s voice broke.
“Yes, you. Being my left-hand woman isn’t always a glamorous job. Isn’t that what you want?”
Reina watched the babe’s peaceful sleeping face, his cheeks so velvety and pure.
She was wretched for nodding and for taking him through the shadowed trails leading up the mountain. But there was no use denying her nature. Reina was a creature of the Void, with her whispering, monstrous heart reminding her at every opportunity. She was in the retinue of the ?guilas, valco masters of the iridio that drew demons and shadows into this world. And she was going to prove she deserved to be the rightful successor of the greatest sorceress who ever was.
15
Rahmagut’s Servants
A bright dusk bled the sky red. It was the kind of sunset rarely seen on mountains prone to evening rains, as clouds tended to roll down those snow-caked peaks on most nights to shower the ?guila estate with icy water. Reina descended the tracks to the manor with the red sky as her guide, aware that a dusk this bright only bred starker shadows. She watched the long shapes formed by boulders and trees and the occasional frailejón plaguing the rugged mountainside, tense. Should one such shadow move, it could mean a tiniebla. Her fear was an icy trickle on her spine, a clawlike scraping over the scars from that night.