It was almost as if Maior could feel the inevitable coming, for she asked, “Do you have to take me back?”
Reina sighed. She ran a hand over her bangs, smoothing the frizz. “No.”
Maior let out an audible breath of relief, a cloud of condensation forming between them. She pushed herself to her feet.
Reina did the same, positioning herself so Maior was blocked between her and the statue. “But you’re coming with me,” Reina said.
“Wait—what?”
Reina pulled her machete off the ground and slid it back into its sheath. “The caudillo calls me a traitor even after everything I’ve done for his household. He’ll still think I’m a traitor if his men catch you,” she said, swiping the blood from her cheeks and temples, dusting the grime off her pants. She could hear Maior’s heartbeat, panicked and rushed, the implications probably unfolding like a bad dream.
“Well—you gave me the rings, so you were planning to help me—so, in a way, he is right.”
Reina couldn’t see why Maior would make this point at all, so she stopped Maior before she dug herself deeper into a hole. “If I let you go, they’ll still blame me, only you’ll most likely be caught and sent back to Don Enrique.” Which was counterproductive to where they needed to be. Reina’s future awaited her in Tierra’e Sol.
Maior paled.
“Don Enrique sent a whole party searching for you. We’re running out of time, and you better believe he’ll be spending all the resources he has to secure the damas who used to belong to him.”
“I don’t belong to anybody,” Maior said, sneering. She pressed herself against the statue of the Virgin, perking her chest up. Reina hated being distracted by it.
“You’ve got a ninth of Rahmagut’s power,” Reina said dryly.
Maior’s lower lip trembled. It reminded Reina of her own weakness against Don Enrique. All this time she had been banking on her strength being the pathway to a better life. And in the moment when she had needed it most, this “strength” had failed her.
Reina paced away, her jaw tight. Maybe she had no strength. Maybe she had always been a pawn in their games, and she wouldn’t stop being one until she started making moves herself.
“I’m searching for Celeste, the caudillo’s daughter who is a Dama del Vacío just like you. While you’re with me, you’ll be safe.” The words were a shiny apple poisoned with a lie, but she needed Maior docile. Trust was a better tool than fear. This she’d learned from her grandmother.
Maior hugged her trembling arms, her gaze on the graveyard’s emptiness. “And if they never give me up?”
“Rahmagut’s Claw will finish its journey in less than twenty days. You’ll be a free woman afterward.”
Reina could nearly taste her grandmother’s delight in her mouth when she saw Reina arrive in Tierra’e Sol with both Celeste and Maior. The last two pieces of Rahmagut’s puzzle. No one would be questioning her usefulness then.
Disbelief clouded Maior’s eyes, but there was no time to address it. Reina picked up on the voices of three ?guila soldiers who were headed to the chapel.
“They’re coming,” she whispered at once.
“Who—”
“The ?guila soldiers. If they see us, they’ll assume I really took you.”
“But you are taking me!”
Reina shushed her and crouched in front of her. “Get on.”
“Wh-what?”
“Are you only capable of stuttering?” she whispered. “Get on my back, and I’ll take us out of here. Now.”
As soon as Maior’s legs hooked around her torso, Reina leapt. There was little time to ease her into balancing her soft roundness around Reina. And when she tipped over to one side, Reina’s prehensile tail propped her up by the waist. Maior squeezed Reina’s chest and whimpered in shock at the hard edges of the protruding transplant beneath her clothes. Reina hissed at her to be quiet, propelling them up to the same roofs she’d come from before the bismuto high could run out. They reached the farthest house in leaping distance, where Reina brought them to solid ground.
Reina didn’t let Maior down until the valley was far behind them. Then she tugged the human into a brisk hike, breaking out of the mist blanketing Apartaderos. Relief flooded Reina as she recognized the hummocky landscape. The footpath was not easy to find.
“You can let go of me now, right?” Maior said with her gaze on the tug of her wrist. She glanced behind them. “No one is pursuing.”
Reina regarded her with thinned lips and a tight jaw. “I can’t let you run away.”
“You’re a nozariel. We both know how that worked out last time.”
Reina hated the implied meaning. At least Maior wasn’t stooping low enough to call her a duskling again. “Just be glad I’m taking you away from the caudillo” was all she said. Her lie.
“Where are we going, anyway?”
“To a place only a few people know of, where no one will be able to reach you. You’ll be truly hidden there.”
A yawning silence stretched out between them as the hike delivered them to dusk. The temperature dropped further, and the wind sparked with the stir of unnatural creatures. Reina sobered up from her bismuto spell, and the warmth of her muscles left her, replaced by weakness. She almost lost hope, glaring at the mark of Rahmagut’s Claw becoming visible in the darkening sky. Would Do?a Ursulina save Reina’s dying heart again, abandoning her threat, if Reina didn’t deliver the damas before the days were up?
Before Reina could ruminate on her grandmother’s possible bluffing, the clay tiles of a roof became visible beyond the hill. They arrived through the back of Gegania, which hugged the descending mountainside. Moss and lush vines hugged its walls where the yellow-and-white paint was visibly peeling off. A path of stone steps, flanked by overgrown yellow and lilac wildflowers, led them down to the house’s entrance.
The front door was not locked; Reina swung it open with her chest hammering in anticipation. It could only be an invitation from Celeste, who surely awaited her, who knew that Reina recognized their sticky circumstances and would want to come to be her support.
Behind her, Maior crossed herself and said, “Cuídame Virgen,” before following her in.
Reina ran through the kitchen and all the upstairs bedrooms, coughed through the dusty attic, then whirled down to the underground with a hopeful smile. Yet once she reached its cold depths, she found books and papers strewn all over the iridio table, the tunnel door shut, and the room empty.
In her disappointment Reina approached the iridio table and felt the sting of its activation as her fingertips fell over its edges. Gegania was connected to a new location. That was why the tether to ?guila Manor had caved in. The filigree branches of mineral veins superimposed on the map of Venazia and Fedria on the table were nearly all inactive, save for a single lighted path. The house was connected to a town beyond the Río’e Marle border.
Reina traced the lines with a burning question, and no matter how she spun it, she couldn’t arrive at an answer. Why, out of all places, would Celeste go to La Cochinilla?
25
Fleeing with the Red Sea