Maior huffed in disbelief.
“What?”
“You dragged me around like I was a twig, in ?guila Manor and in Apartaderos.”
Reina snickered. “More like a bollo.”
Maior opened her mouth in feigned offense.
Reina didn’t bother clarifying her thoughts on the matter, and she only jested. She liked Maior’s roundness, she decided. “Yes, we’re stronger and faster than humans. But I also use bismuto a lot.”
“You’ll take me back to Apartaderos after this is over, right?”
The sincerity in the question took Reina aback.
“You promised me I would be safe. That’s your part of the bargain.”
Reina shrugged and muttered a noncommittal, “You’ll be fine.”
With a toothless smile, Maior sized her up.
“What is it now?”
“I suppose I should consider myself lucky, to have you as protector.”
Reina rolled her eyes and added dryly, “I’m all you’ve got.”
Maior nodded and said, “But yes, to answer your question, I probably made it back to Apartaderos before you because I know the mountains better. They’ve been my home all my life.” She arched a brow, waiting for Reina to fight the declaration.
Ego wounded, Reina almost blurted that she’d nearly wasted a whole day of hiking searching for Gegania’s burrow. But she caught herself and swallowed it down. Why did it matter what Maior thought of her? This moment was nothing but an inconsequential detour on her path of reconciling with Celeste.
Soon enough the riverbed met a footpath, and they walked until the crumbling remains of a fort came into view.
“This must be it,” Reina muttered, wiping trickles of sweat out of her brows and temples. “La Cochinilla.”
They took in the entirety of the town from the highest point of a mild knoll. La Cochinilla was nothing more than a walled stone fort with rusted cannons spiking out of the highest turrets like a thorny crown. From their elevation, they had a view of the dilapidated houses of clay and stone within, as parts of the walls were caved in or had holes where they’d been breached by a siege. Beyond the fortress, and visible from their vantage point, were raised rectangular fields growing produce, kept humid and prosperous by the flooded canals surrounding them. And even farther behind those fields was a colossal mountain in the shape of a table, jutting out of the earth as if forced by a willful god, a blot of dark brown against a blue horizon. The Plume.
Maior had a look of silent determination as they entered the town. She took rein of their mission once Reina shrugged upon being asked if she knew the way around. And Maior didn’t flinch or cower, as Reina had expected her to, after encountering one nozariel after another.
“Why don’t they have tails, like you do?” Maior asked as she watched a chiding mother drag a boy by the pointed ear back into their home.
Reina clenched her jaw at the question, though she knew it came from a place of innocence. “You recoiled at the sight of mine.”
“You’re the first nozariel I’ve ever met. Don’t tell me only you have it?”
It certainly felt like it. “I just told you why they cut it off: Because humans treat it with disgust. Because you already don’t accept us when you realize what we are, and having a tail just makes it even more difficult.”
When she’d been just a child, a gang of boys from her street had even tried to chop it off her. The kids in Segolita mocked her endlessly in church and school and in the streets, when Juan Vicente wasn’t looking. And one day, they actually caught her—by the tail, no less. Reina had nozariel strength, but she was skinny and always hungry, and she was against six boys who dragged her by the tail into the shadows and pinned her to the muddy ground. They brought with them a sheep’s shears, claiming they were doing her a favor. She would have lost it, and likely her life from the blood loss or infection, if one of the chapel nuns hadn’t heard her cries through the alley at the right moment in time.
“In Segolita the nozariels who aren’t poor or homeless wear their hair long to hide their ears,” Reina explained. “They wear long-sleeved clothes even though it’s always hot like today. There’s a powder to be worn over the nose. And it’s preferable not to smile, to avoid showing the teeth. A tail has no purpose for people who want to live in a world of humans.”
“So they’re cut off?” Maior asked softly. It was a wonder, how she made her face as tender as her voice. Reina couldn’t even look away.
“Most mothers do it to their newborns, because the bone is soft and the body heals quickly.”
“And what about you?”
“My father was a fool. He thought the world would change after the revolution, so he made the decision for me. Don’t give me that pitying look. You treated me with disgust like all the rest.”
Maior glanced down, jabbing her boot on the dusty path. “I’m sorry for that.”
Reina could only bring herself to shrug.
They continued their search, and most townsfolk eyed them curiously, pointing here and pointing there when asked about the alleged trader of geomancia reagents. The town had a curandera, a smoking grandfather with a straw hat told them in exchange for an escudo （but not without laughing at their accents, which he called odd）， his leathery finger gesturing to the derelict citadel that had once belonged to the Segolean loyalists who’d founded La Cochinilla.
As they passed the citadel’s splintered and dislocated double doors, they found that it had been repurposed as a trading market, its vast hall conveniently providing shade and protection from the elements to the farmers and herders who made La Cochinilla their home. The stone walls concentrated the heat, soaking the air with the stink of manure, spices, leather, and sweat. The outdoor hallways and adjoined courtyards were a hub for meetings, gossiping, and even gambling on Calamity. A cuatro’s melody was a constant companion to the citadel’s chatter, played by a beggar sitting under the shade of a bougainvillea.
Maior lingered over a round of Calamity, watching, until Reina was racked by coughs and they were reminded of their urgency.
“Let me ease the pain,” she offered, to which Reina swiped her hand away.
“Don’t waste the galio—I’m fine,” she said, earning her Maior’s scowl.
Finally, after bribing a group of gossiping abuelas for directions, they found the curandera on a higher floor of the citadel, in a wide chamber that had likely once belonged to the former masters of the town. Cracked colorful marbles decorated the floor. The wooden double doors had delicate carvings of moriche palms, herons, and caimans, but now their edges were dull and rounded, swelling with the humid heat of the Llanos.
A man in worn military uniform bid his goodbyes to the curandera as Reina and Maior entered the room. The air was pungent with a mixture of incense and tobacco, and the contents of the room reminded Reina of the caudillo’s office, with its maps, dark wood furniture, and plush brocade seating. The crests and family portraits hanging from the walls. The inkwells and pens of exotic plumage.
A wrinkled woman sat behind the counter, filling in a ledger. She was large and dark-skinned and irrefutably nozariel. Her tail switched behind her, like a cat’s. A crimson satin ribbon looped around its silky, curly end. Reina watched the tail in awe, as she did on the rare occasions of meeting another like her.