“You are both mad for thinking so,” Néstor told Eva and Don Jerónimo.
“So it’s a coincidence?” Eva said, her voice breaking. She wasn’t sure she believed it. This wasn’t the first time something inexplicable happened because of her. This was just the most… catastrophic.
Néstor gave her the straight face parents gave their children when hoping to avoid riling emotions. “Eva, please.”
She ran her hands over her face, wiping the perspiration gathering at her temples. “Whatever happened back there—it only supports their case.”
Néstor looked down at his feet. “You shouldn’t have talked back.”
“For how long must I put up with people saying I have a darkness in me? He said it was my duty to atone for my father!”
“People like to talk, but no one really believes it in their heart. It’s only entertainment.” Néstor shrugged. “Otherwise you’d be worrying about a trial rather than silly gossip.”
Eva grimaced. “Are you trying to console me? That doesn’t make me feel better. What if one day… they do it?”
“You are granddaughter to the governor. No one is going to outright accuse you of dark magic,” Néstor said with a light wave of his free hand.
Don Jerónimo’s gaze traveled up to her bangs. Eva wondered if he saw her like everyone else in Galeno and if he was only civil for Néstor’s sake. “Outside of Galeno there are places where geomancia is seen differently,” he said.
Eva nodded. Like in the southern mountains, the place valcos used to call home before humans had arrived on the continent. The bits of valco history she knew, she had pieced together from what people said—she never had access to any education on the matter. Again, she was struck by the hunger to play with geomancia.
“I don’t want to go home. Take me to Do?a Rosa,” Eva blurted out.
Do?a Rosa was a bastard of the Contador patriarch, a nozariel half-breed the gentry referred to as the curandera, after she’d gained infamy for spelling back to life the dead avocado tree in the Contadors’ yard and for curing a Contador baby from the illness of mal de ojo.
“Again? Are you obsessed with making your situation worse?” Néstor said, reaching for her.
Eva withdrew from the touch. Yes, Do?a Rosa was an outcast, hidden away in the Contador residence while the people of Galeno formulated horrible narratives about her origins and her openness to geomancia. Eva understood Néstor was afraid Do?a Rosa gossip would inevitably embroil her. But she was desperate for a change of pace.
“You have no high ground here,” Eva said, eyeing Néstor’s and Don Jerónimo’s intertwined hands. Néstor and Don Jerónimo’s relationship was a secret everyone knew yet no one acknowledged, least of all Don Jerónimo’s mother and Do?a Antonia, who were both fond of the idea of getting grandchildren out of them. On their clandestine visits to the Contador residence, Eva and Néstor were coconspirators.
Don Jerónimo smirked, and Néstor sighed in defeat.
“Do?a Rosa understands me,” Eva added.
“I understand you.”
“No, Néstor, not about this. You don’t have the blood of a monster in your veins.”
They were silent in the carriage: Don Jerónimo pretending to look out the window, while Néstor’s and Eva’s gazes met in conflict. Once upon a time, he would have chided her for speaking of herself that way. But everyone who knew her in Galeno thought this behind closed doors. For once in her life, Eva wanted to stop pretending.
Unlike the Serranos, who lived in a hacienda, the Contadors had a downtown house. Wrought iron gates shielded a pampered topiary garden and a red bougainvillea that looped around the house’s majestic double doors. The two-story mansion had a fa?ade of white-and-ocher stucco, with window frames and balconies of black-painted iron wrought in filigree designs and curling olive vines, all in a baroque style inherited from Segol. Inside, the house was as stuffy as the capitol building, with polished tiled floors and walls decorated in Pentimiento trinkets—rosaries and icons of the saints and the Virgin.
The main hallway opened to an outdoor kitchen, a courtyard, and another archway leading to a large plot of land, where the infamous avocado tree stood in its center. The yard was big enough to fit a servant house, stables accessible from a different street, and the curandera’s house.
Eva headed to the shanty house on her own. The building was made of red clay, unpainted, and shaded by the canopy of a vast mamoncillo tree. A wicker curtain interwoven with the seeds of moriche palm fruits served as a door.
The scent of tobacco hung heavy in the single-room home. Shadows rose behind baskets, chests of drawers, and a cooking counter populated by herbs and utensils. From the ceiling hung garlic bunches and salted meats. A woman sat across the table, facing the door, her skin the same sun-kissed sandy shade as Don Jerónimo’s. She wore a dress of undyed cotton that wrapped around one shoulder, the other shoulder exposed and showing her nozariel scutes. Her hair was in long braids, abundant and frizzy with curls.
“I’m never getting rid of you, am I?” Do?a Rosa said, her voice low, the result of a lifetime being overly friendly to the pipe. She was a beauty around Don Alberto’s age. She had a symmetrical face, plump lips, high cheekbones, and pointed nozariel ears. Her frame was large and well-fed.
“Do you want me not to come back?” Eva ground her teeth at this, stung by the relentless rejections thrown her way.
The woman chuckled. “How can I deny you?”
“I’m not forcing you to see me.”
“You entertain this dull life,” Do?a Rosa said.
Eva sat across from her on the rattan chair. The table was covered in a tablecloth embroidered with an eclipsed sun. The iconography belonged to Rahmagut, god of the Void. Do?a Rosa revered him for representing the opposition of what was conventional. Like Ches, god of the sun, Rahmagut was one of the few deities who’d survived the arrival of Pentimiento. Only under this roof was Eva free to talk about Ches and Rahmagut, whom Do?a Antonia had forbidden from her grandchildren’s lexicon. But Eva didn’t engage in it unless absolutely necessary. Speaking of Rahmagut was an assured way of inviting the Virgin’s scorn, or Her abandon.
“I went to the governor’s office today, to see if there were any mentions of my father in my birth records.”
Do?a Rosa croaked a laugh at that. “You are na?ve for believing you would find anything in the books.”
Eva let her mouth fall open to retort, but she knew the woman was right. “I had to try…”
“Your family will never allow the secret to come out.”
She spoke with so much surety. Eva arched a brow. “Do you know anything?”
“When I was your age and you were this big”—Do?a Rosa lifted her palm up to her hip—“your mother, the gentle Do?a Dulce, brought you here with a sickness no human doctor could cure. You were vomiting your guts out, and shitting them out as well. Don’t you remember?”
Eva smiled graciously but shook her head.
Do?a Rosa squinted an eye at her. “The illness has no proper name, and no human physician has treated it. But I’d seen it before, in other little valcos in Fedria.”