Just two days’ travel meant they weren’t too far off from Galeno. Yet it was the farthest Eva had ever been from home. As farmers and traders joined the hard-packed road with their horses or mules hauling produce, Eva couldn’t help stealing glances over her shoulder, expecting to see a familiar face who would yank her back to Galeno by the hair. Surely her grandmother would send a search party after her or put a bounty on her return. Eva couldn’t imagine Do?a Antonia ever forgetting this slight or admitting to the Galeno gentry that her granddaughter was courageous enough to abandon them of her own accord.
Eva stole secret glances at Javier as the long dirt road opened to the fringes of the port town, where a white chapel stood with its golden cross reflecting morning sunlight. He was a real person. Not a savior born out of her fantasies. A tangible, handsome valco man dressed in a vest of midnight blue and carrying a knapsack twinkling with flasks of geomancia reagents, he later told her.
The respect with which he regarded her was an assurance, even though every inch of her skin screamed that she had reached new levels of madness. Because it had been mad, to abandon the Serranos like this. Yet Eva felt so sure of her path.
The chapel was the first building on a cobbled street where other colorfully painted adobe houses welcomed them. The morning air was hot, smelling of fresh bread and, faintly, of roasted pork. A Pentimiento preacher beckoned all passersby toward the chapel, his booming voice announcing the beginning of the Saint Jon the Shepherd celebrations.
“Hopefully we’ll be out of town before the procession starts, and we won’t get stuck in them,” Javier said with a tinge of annoyance.
She understood his meaning. In Galeno the whole city amassed to follow the Saint Jon the Shepherd statuette. The celebrations were a revel of singing and dancing to the beat of drums. Eva was delighted to see other places partook in it.
“Where are we?” she asked him.
“In El Carmín.”
“We’re already at the border? Heading straight to Fedria?” she said, hoping her knowledge of the world would make him forget everything inadequate about her.
He nodded. “First we marry. Then we seek Rahmagut’s reward.”
The way he said it—like it was written in the laws of fate, with its inevitability—made her chest soar.
He led her to a three-story inn near the town square, with clay-tiled roofing and orange paint chipping off the adobe walls. By the entryway was a cluster of gambling men. They sat in a circle and placed painted cards on a wheel, which was attached to a wound figurine that spun its pointed hand to choose the winning card.
“Calamity,” Eva said as she watched the game master, also called the arbiter, who kept the winning prize in a bucket by his side. “Look how many escudos they’ve got.”
“Oh, yes—but don’t get too excited. They would never let you place a bet,” Javier said.
To humans and nozariels, Calamity was a game of luck. But playing against a valco, who could see the workings of its magic, was a fool’s bargain.
Eva glanced up at Javier’s curving antlers as he held the door open for her. They were the most majestic thing she had ever seen. She touched her bangs, which she kept layered at the crown to hide her stunted ones.
The scent of roasted corn jumped out of every crevice inside the inn. Groups of people were scattered across mismatched tables, some drinking the hangover away, some enjoying a coffee to break their fast.
Eva and Javier settled on a table near an abandoned corner, away from curious eyes, and were approached moments later by a strange man. Strange because Eva never imagined seeing the tips of his ears pointing up at a stark angle or the scaly skin draping the bridge of his nose.
“What do my masters fancy?” the middle-aged man said, his fast-paced Fedrian accent stomping every t with vigor.
Javier waved him off. “Whatever’s the special. And three cups of your house coffee.”
Eva waited until the man walked away, then leaned forward on the table and said, “He’s nozariel.”
“Indeed.”
“I thought… they are banished from this land.” Her grandfather had once told her how, before she was born, he had given the order to round up all nozariels in Galeno in many great cages to transport them to Fedria, where the Liberator was offering them asylum. That was before she’d met Do?a Rosa.
“Oh, they are. But it is more work for the politicians in the capital to enforce their banishing than it is to look the other way. Besides, this is El Carmín. You can’t do anything in this town without having some wretch serve you. I suppose it helps. Their labor is cheaper than dirt.”
Eva frowned. She tried not to think too much of the memory of Do?a Rosa, of imagining her agonized screams when she’d been burned alive by the archbishop. Eva hadn’t been around to witness the brutal scene, but her heart ached and she cried for several nights after Décima shared the news with a veneer hardly shrouding her glee. Sometimes when she woke up from nightmares of Do?a Rosa, where Eva was the one being burned alive for rejecting the conventions of Galeno, Eva welcomed the sorrow and the fear. For she had been a coward, and she deserved them.
“You should probably get used to it. We are traveling to Fedria.”
Eva cleared her throat, shooting furtive glances at the two servers walking between tables and carrying coffees and food. All were missing their tails, likely cut off soon after birth. If one didn’t look too hard, they could pass as regular humans.
“But how can they live so openly here? Couldn’t a caudillo’s army come and deport them—or worse, jail them?” They would have no recourse should a madman decide to murder them, like the archbishop had immolated Do?a Rosa.
“I suppose the measly escudos they earn are worth the risk. You see them all over El Carmín because it’s more trouble than it’s worth to hunt them out, especially as we’re right at the crossing. They’re like cockroaches. They always find a way in.”
Eva wrung her hands under the table. She hated hearing the words, especially with how they were in perfect dissonance with the gentle tenor of his voice. “Have you met many nozariels?”
He shrugged. “I’ve had to travel all over Venazia for the family business of dealing iridio, and I’ve seen them everywhere. After a while you start realizing they take the labor no one else will do. Humans are hypocrites in that way, shunning them while profiting off their work.” He smirked. “Didn’t your family own more than a hundred nozariel slaves before the revolution?”
“Before I was born,” she emphasized. “It’s a part of my family history I’m not proud about.”
“Don’t fret. You will not be paying reparations in your lifetime.”
Eva faked a smile, which he saw right through.
He laughed. “Eva, you and I are going to be profiting off the humans. It’s the natural pecking order.”
The server returned with a dish of cachapas and queso de mano. Melting between the folded flat bread made of sweet, chunky corn dough was the thick slab of cheese. As Eva finished her dish, strings of cheese spilling onto her plate, a third person joined them.
He grabbed a chair from a neighboring table and took a side of theirs, as if he’d meant to meet them all along. The man wore the velvety red-and-black robes of a Pentimiento cleric and introduced himself as Javier’s servant. Then, after some pleasantries, he produced a scroll, which he unfurled on the table.