Her opinion of him solidified into stone. “Why speak to me if you’re just going to insult my family?”
“I figured you would enjoy a few jabs at them. Don’t tell me you’re actually excited about the plans they’ve got for you.”
“And for you,” she said, accepting the refilled goblet the bartender slid her way.
“Indeed,” he said, as his eyes surfed the curves of his companion. “That is why I insult them. I’m only pretending to make conversation with you because my grandmother expects it of me. She wants you to be charmed and forget about the fact that I have five uncles who have at least three sons each, so I’ll be lucky if I inherit a house or even a coffer of escudos. She wants you to feel like the luckiest maiden in the world for being invited to join our family, even though I have as much chance as this bartender of ever becoming heir. But… I feel quite the opposite. As you can tell, I have good taste, so I can’t be in any way excited about ending up with a bachaca like you.”
Eva chucked her wine at his liqui liqui without thinking. The joropo music was loud enough that nobody noticed Don Marcelino’s outrage at first. And Eva didn’t linger long enough to witness it either.
Heat crawled up her cleavage and neck as she whirled on her espadrilles. “Shit, shit, shit, shit” was her mantra as she took to the dance floor, dodging the dancing guests. She rushed to the gardens beyond the patio, far from the music and the lights, near the solitude of an avocado tree decorated with hanging paper banners of the country’s tricolor. There she leaned against the trunk, hugging herself with trembling fingers as the implications of her aggression fully unraveled in her mind. She’d chucked her wine at a prince! Eva gripped the fabrics of her dress hard as she imagined Do?a Antonia’s outrage. Despite her plans for the night, Eva couldn’t shake the apprehension at the guaranteed consequences: a whipping, likely.
A shiver ran through her. Maybe they were right. She was mad, for how could the whole world say it and be wrong? She could run away from home and still carry that madness everywhere she went. In the stillness it was easy to take notice of the shadows. How they seemed to be watching her; how they waited for the moment to seize her attention.
One such shadow on the patio moved. Eva stilled. She watched the darkness in front of her as an orchestra of cicadas and crickets masked the sound of whoever or whatever stood before her.
“Who’s there?” Eva said loudly. The spell for a protective ward came to her mind. It was a small, silly one, but it was better than nothing. She hoped she wasn’t about to witness another bull fly away.
The shadow moved again, stepping into the dim light cast from the party behind them. She froze as her eyes made out a frame of average height and sharp shoulders, made tall because of the two twisting shapes sticking out of the head. Antlers.
Her breath hitched. The moment she had been waiting for. She exhaled in relief.
The young man took two steps forward, where he became real.
“Eva Kesaré de Galeno, pleasure to finally make your acquaintance, in person,” he said, his voice a velvety chocolate melting at the last emphasis. Like he knew he was making her heart flutter.
Eva couldn’t conjure a reply.
He filled the silence for her. “I’m sorry you had to suffer through the idiocy of a Silva.” He was younger than he’d looked from the far distance of the patio. A fistful of years older than her, perhaps.
“You… saw that?”
“I was watching you, waiting for the moment to approach. I’m sorry it couldn’t be done sooner. But I fear the mighty Do?a Antonia wouldn’t take too kindly to an ?guila taking interest in her granddaughter.”
He lifted a hand, palm side up, and produced a wisp of fire. Geomancia, Eva realized with a flutter in her heart, watching the golden strings twirling in and out of his pale skin. She took in his eyes as the firelight kissed him. They were the color of recently spilled blood, glossy and terrible, in a face of hollow cheeks and a pointed nose.
“Don Javier,” Eva said in a weak, girlish voice. She couldn’t help it. She had dreamed of this moment for too long.
Their meeting was predetermined, agreed upon in the letters they’d exchanged for nearly a year since she had initiated the connection.
Her pulse shuddered, and sweat licked the back of her neck.
“Please, call me Javier. You are no stranger to me,” he said, lifting a slim hand between them, the gesture an invitation. Firelight danced in his eyes. They were unlike any she had seen before, red and rare.
Finally she took the hand of Javier ?guila, son of the last full-blooded valco, and her heart was ready to drill straight through her ribs. His touch was cold and ragged. He lifted her hand to brush his lips against the back of it.
She followed him farther away from the sounds of the party. Behind the avocado tree was a carved bench, just the right length to accommodate two people. They sat together.
“So we meet,” he said. “Is that disappointment I sense in your silence?”
Eva shook her head furiously. “No—no, I just can’t believe it finally happened. That we made it real.”
Once upon a time, she had been too scared and small-minded to imagine she would get to meet another living valco. But after witnessing the bull soar into the night, she’d written a short, desperate plea addressed to the ?guilas and sent it in secret. She figured it was luck it had landed in Javier’s hands.
“Thanks for coming.” She tried tapering her voice so he wouldn’t hear it shaking.
He smirked. “There’s no need to thank me.” His gaze surfed her crown, where her antlers had been oiled to appear lustrous for the party, her curls braided tightly and pinned back with a fuchsia barrette to match her dress. “I couldn’t ignore the pleas of another valco. We are few and far between, and I was raised to put our kind first. I’m more than happy to take you away, as you’ve so eloquently pleaded in your letters.”
He smiled and she blushed.
“But there is another detail I couldn’t mention in our correspondence, in case it was intercepted. The matter is too delicate.”
“What is it?” Eva liked the sound of his voice, the way it was raspy and androgynous. She wished to never stop hearing it.
“There are many changes occurring in my family. We’re standing on a house of cards ready to collapse, and it will happen soon. This wedding and your family’s invitation came at the right moment.”
She nodded eagerly, for he couldn’t come without his brother’s blessing, and it would be impossible for an ?guila to openly arrive in the city without the governor’s approval. Their families were allies on paper only. The thought delighted Eva; how it would anger the mighty Do?a Antonia to hear her granddaughter ran away with the valcos of the Páramo.
“It was lucky for me, too. I don’t have very much time,” she said. “My grandmother wants to marry me to Marcelino Silva, the swine that he is.”
“All the Silvas are.”
She smiled at that; how he understood her perfectly.
“What you said in your letters—you are prepared to do whatever it takes not to follow your family’s command, correct?” he said.