As Reina leafed through the pages across the multiple books, she saw they were all recounting Rahmagut’s legend, the changes his claw exerted on the world, and his reign of el Vacío. Celeste had taken a deep dive into the pursuit she had abjured from the very beginning. It made sense she sought a solution, now that she knew she was a Dama del Vacío. And she’d always had the resources to do so: first with the wealth of knowledge Do?a Ursulina and her laboratory held, and now with the collective books and maps of Do?a Laurel’s cartographer ancestors.
One of the open books had a page ripped out, and beside it on the remaining page was the tale of Ches’s Blade. Reina barely spared it a second look, for it was one of those fables she had known from rhymes and superstitions since she’d been a child: Ches leaving signs and tools for those he deemed worthy. The honorable and righteous warrior reaching the summit of the Plume and encountering Ches’s Blade, a weapon that could tear nighttime from the sky to create a full day of perpetual daylight if swung from the highest peak of the highest mountain. Reina chuckled. If one such place ought to exist, it would probably be in the Páramo.
Her chest shook her with pain again. She fell to her knees, the fall scraping the skin beneath her pants. Black dots cluttered her vision, and her temples throbbed, deafening her. She realized she wasn’t alone when her name flitted out of Maior’s lips as Reina’s body contacted the ground a second time.
An ache like two boulders colliding sprouted from the left side of her chest. “I need more iridio,” she said breathlessly. For she was so tired of continually collapsing. Of being so utterly weak, like some trout out of water. What Do?a Ursulina had given her wasn’t enough sustenance, especially as she dared not use it all in one go.
Maior’s brown eyes fixated on Reina. They were arched with worry, and her rosy lips were slightly parted. It filled Reina with anger, that Maior was acting this concerned for the fate of her heart, after all the angry side-glances and the speciesist quips about her nozariel blood. But mainly, it angered Reina to notice how comely she was, with her smooth freckled cheeks and thick lashes curled up.
“I can try a galio spell—if it can ease the pain,” Maior said with her gaze hinting at Reina’s galio rings.
“I can’t be cured with galio,” Reina muttered. She would have howled it, but her belly was full from the meal Maior had cooked her.
“I’m not trying to cure you. But galio can make you forget you’re suffering this much.”
“So that I can ignore the pain and walk myself straight into my grave?”
Maior opened and closed those lips of hers like a fish. Finally she blew away at her own hair in exasperation. She sat across from Reina but shoved some distance between them. “Do you have to be this difficult? I’m trying to be grateful.”
“Grateful?” Reina’s voice was brittle.
Maior waved at the vastness of the underground room, gesturing all about her. “I’m trying to force myself to believe this is the best thing for me. I’m trying to show gratitude to you, for not taking me back to that witch. You know—you spend so much time thinking about how I’m going to hate you that you can’t even recognize kindness when I’m obviously trying to offer it.”
It left Reina without anything to say because… Maior was right. So Reina stubbornly retreated to the facts. “A spell of galio can numb me, but I will still be weak. I will need to buff myself with bismuto, to make it anywhere before I can find more iridio.”
“And where can we get more?”
“Anywhere with geomancers. The richer, the better.”
They had Gegania’s connection to La Cochinilla as an option. Reina had never visited the town before, but the name wasn’t unknown to the travelers of Venazia; hence it had to be more than a mere dilapidated mark on the map.
“Someone should sell it in La Cochinilla,” Reina added.
“Do you have escudos? Or something we can barter for it?”
Reina nodded, thinking of the velvet pouch given to her by her grandmother.
“All right, give it to me, and I’ll go fetch you more iridio.”
Reina choked on her own spit. She spluttered until tears gathered in her eyes. Meanwhile, an indignant glare manifested in Maior’s expression, at the mockery of her offer. But even as she tried, she couldn’t manage looking menacing, for she was soft and plump, with the face of someone who had never attempted malice before.
“You will not,” Reina said, though she was in disbelief to have to say it at all.
“You need help.”
“And you are forgetting what you are.” She lacked the finality she needed, but she was weak and grimacing and clutching her chest again.
“Well, I am not your prisoner!” Maior said like a child, stretching the truth. For beneath the surface of her attempted self-preservation existed an irrefutable fact: what Reina would do if Maior ever did try to leave on her own. She muttered, “I just don’t want to be left behind in this house. I think you are my only ally in this.”
Reina nodded with a pointed eyebrow.
“You might die if I let you out of my sight.”
“Maybe so.” What she didn’t know, which Reina didn’t bother to attest, was that until she had ensured Celeste’s safety, she would fight tooth and nail before she let herself perish.
Maior’s brows bunched up. A plea.
Shivers rocked Reina, so she surrendered to the offer. She leaned toward the human and said, “All right, soothe me with a spell, and you may come.”
Reina handed Maior her galio rings for the incantation. Reina carried them for the most basic first aid, a superficial cut or a sprained ankle.
Maior wore the rings up to her middle knuckles, as the bands were too small for her fingers. They fit snuggly as she intertwined her fingers and massaged her hands. Then she spread both palms as if tugging threads of candied sugar between them. Her warm hands surfed over Reina’s frame, hovering over her frizz and shoulders and chest before ferrying along the length of her arms. The soothing effects were instantaneous. Reina’s heartache disappeared, her breathing calming to that of a pleasant resting state.
Reina closed her eyes, more to ignore Maior’s proximity, her warmth, and the fullness of her chest. A pang of betrayal hit Reina then, for the desire worming itself within her. She forced Celeste into her thoughts, as if by conjuring her into her mind, she could remember just how rudimentarily plain Maior was in comparison.
They leaned away from each other when it was over.
“Better?” Maior asked.
Reina nodded and got to her feet, wiping her palms free of floor dust. She fetched her machete from where it stood against the staircase doorway. “We must go immediately,” she said. “The gold is in the kitchen upstairs.”
Maior looked eager and ready when she returned with the velvet pouch in hand. She was a sweet, expectant thing.
“I never imagined myself adventuring with a nozariel.”
“Adventuring,” Reina parroted in mockery. Her tail slapped the air behind her as she approached the tunnel’s door, to make a point of what she was.
“It’ll make me hate you a little less for forcing me to live here,” Maior said lightly, following.