Reina waited, listening to the orchestra of nightly critters surrounding the house, the crickets and the awakening amphibians. She squinted in an attempt to keep herself from surrendering to sleep. She couldn’t pretend she had heard of the order before, but a lot of things from these mountains were new to her. Every day she was learning.
“We take care of the tired and injured. Our founder has experimented with the powers of healing through galio, how it’s related to our faith for the Virgin. She taught me how to use it.”
“Pentimiento and geomancia are in contradiction with each other,” Reina muttered. She’d learned it from Do?a Ursulina and seen it with her own eyes. “Penitents are the first to deny magic.” In fact, Penitents were the first to decry anything that didn’t fit into their arbitrary mold: how a human woman should look and act; what their role and profession should be. Under these molds, Reina was undesirable and abnormal, for her senses, her tail, her muscles, and her capabilities.
“The Virgin created this world with geomancia in it. How can something that exists under Her watch be a contradiction with Her teachings?”
This sobered Reina. Anger stormed within her, sloshing in her weak stomach and sharpening the edges of every object in the shadowed room. Her nozariel blood gave her an acuter vision than humans, and with it she took in the sight of Maior, with her round cheeks and na?ve eyes. How she wanted to shut her up for her ignorant view of the world. “My existence is contradictory to Her teachings,” she hissed.
Maior paused, and Reina could imagine her jaw tightening as she wound herself up for the typical sermon all Penitents engaged in, to justify their hatred for her kind.
“You exist in Her world; therefore you belong in it. You aren’t wrong.”
The meaning was clear in her intonation: She was wrong for her opinions but not for existing under Maior’s version of the Virgin’s world. Reina glared at the human, who likely couldn’t even see her expression in the darkness.
The silence stretched on, ragged and cold. As Reina waited, she realized Maior had no intentions to further patronize her with her beliefs.
“So Las Hermanas de Piedra dabble in galio healing,” Reina said, reeling them back to the query that led them down this path. Geomancia was a stoppered skill. One needed to unlock only one school, and the rest could easily follow like toppling dominoes. Or perhaps Maior’s prowess was due to Rahmagut’s power, since she held a fraction of it within her.
“Not only galio. We study the body, tend its wounds. I have seen many sick travelers and have tended to the caudillo’s soldiers as well. That’s how I can tell on the surface that your shivers are from a lack of rest and not because your blood is spoiled.”
“Spoiled blood?”
“An inner bruise or a curse.”
Reina snorted. Then Maior didn’t know anything at all, because Reina was sick from a deficit of iridio in her heart. Her ailment couldn’t merely be cured with a hot meal.
“My mentor, she taught me a galio spell to ease the mind and put people to sleep. We use it when the pain of treatment turns the procedure into torture, like when you have to saw off a limb. With your litio, I tried it on the servant who came to bring me supper. It didn’t put her to sleep, but she was paralyzed beyond remedy. She fell like a rock, and I used the moment to escape. I regret what I did to her, but my freedom came first. Anyway—you have the strongest geomancer of Sadul Fuerte in your manor to set her right.”
A bitter smirk warped Reina’s lips at how wrong Maior was, but she kept her silence on the matter. “So, this order of yours, are you duty bound to cure me?”
“Not at all.”
“Then why?”
Maior rose suddenly. “I do what I want, especially with a duskling.”
Reina wanted to spit at her feet.
“You will need your health to teach me how to properly live here, while that star journeys through our sky. They won’t want me after that, right?”
Reina let out a noncommittal grunt.
“Tomorrow you can show me.” Maior maneuvered out of the room.
She was a human with many pretenses, Reina noted with a scowl, used to reaching for and getting what she wanted under the guise of exchanging kindnesses. Obtaining comforts during her time of captivity as a trade for getting on Reina’s good side.
No other human had attempted this tactic on her. Perhaps because Reina had never before been in a position of power over their lives. Faintly, Reina decided she liked it.
The next day, after boiling creek water for a bath and raking the tangles out of her curly hair, Reina showed Maior around Gegania. The house was bordered by a garden of herbs now overrun by weeds, a stable without a donkey or mule, a shed with tools to process grains, and a conuco where purple potatoes, cassava, corn, and malanga grew freely. The fresh water came from a nearby sparkling creek, which fed seven small lakes at the base of the valley farther east. The bushel of corn and bundles of cheese in the stores were the telltale that Celeste had planned to make an extended stay before disappearing.
Maior didn’t need much more instruction to make herself at home. She ground the corn and made them arepas on the dusty budare and inquired about the potatoes to later cook a pisca without a chicken or an egg.
Reina ate the shared meal and laughed when Maior grew flustered at the insinuation that she always had to keep her hands busy. The human had a talent for cooking, but this compliment Reina withheld.
They spent the day in friendly cohabitation. Maior pretended there were no hurt feelings between them, or maybe she was just easy to talk to. Mostly, Maior kept to herself while Reina cataloged Gegania’s curiosities and inspected any traces left behind, seeking to understand why Celeste chose to travel to La Cochinilla at all.
As nighttime fell and Reina’s belly was full from Maior’s arepas, the healer again coerced Reina into sleeping for a full night. And Reina humored it, to prove her ailment was due to the caudillo’s rot and the deterioration of her starved heart, nothing else. Indeed, the next day her exhaustion became an insidious thing, resurfacing when she needed to take the steps up and down the house and the surrounding conuco. The iridio her grandmother had given her was a salve. It refreshed her ache anytime she applied another droplet or two, until the haunting pain returned with the reminder that she was no longer complete.
Iridio was the catalyst to change the course of Gegania’s connection, and so Reina dared not touch the iridio table, afraid it would consume what little fuel she had in her. As she stood at the entrance to the underground storage, she saw that a ransacking or a whirlwind hadn’t been the cause of the mess. Everything stood right where she expected it to be, with the exception of open books surrounding the table, a trail of crumbs leading to the tunnel’s heavy doors to the outside world. She knelt by each book and found their commonality: All were accounts and publications on the folklore and legends arisen from the lands of Fedria and Venazia before Pentimiento’s arrival. Ancient tongues and fairy tales and traditions of worship. The native valcos, nozariels, and even the extinct yares had believed in as many gods as there were facets of life: gods for blacksmithing; gods for mixing herbs into salves; gods to oversee funeral rites; gods for growing bountiful harvests. Few names escaped obscurity through the passing of generations, like Ches and Rahmagut did for being protagonists in many surviving tales. Perhaps it was because their magic was the realest. Or at least Rahmagut’s was. （The susurration in her heart stirred in agreement.）