Fedria, the sister nation east of Venazia, separated by Río’e Marle and the differences in politics between the Liberator and the caudillos who’d helped him free the land from the Segolean colonists. “You’ve been to Fedria?” Eva said.
“Oh, dear no, I wish. Then my life would have turned out differently. I was born in El Carmín, as my name can tell you. Living close to the border, you see all sorts of folk. I saw with my own eyes a valco or two, during the revolution.” She smiled bitterly at a distant memory.
Eva wondered what life had been like for Do?a Rosa, reaching maturity before the Liberator won the war for independence and freed nozariels from slavery. Before the revolution, Venazia and Fedria had been colonies of Segol, and nozariels were bred to serve the human aristocracy, including families like the Serranos. After independence was won and Segol’s influence was ousted, nozariels were sent to Fedria under an agreement between the new Venazian king and the Liberator. Do?a Rosa was the only exception Eva knew of, kept in Galeno for being the bastard daughter of the Contador patriarch. Had Do?a Rosa been enslaved under the oppression of humans in her youth? Eva swallowed the question, for she hadn’t earned the kind of trust to ask it.
Instead, she reeled Do?a Rosa back to finish the tale. “Did my mom say anything about my father?”
With pursed lips, Do?a Rosa shook her head. “I poked and prodded her for a clue of who your father was, but even in her moment of desperation, she wouldn’t confide in me.”
Eva stared down at her wringing hands. Perhaps Dulce had loathed speaking of the monster who’d beguiled her with dark magic, who had forced her to betray her vows to her then husband, father of Eva’s older half sister, Pura.
Disappointment filled her. Eva swallowed down a sigh.
“Do?a Antonia has done a fine job of keeping your father’s name out of everyone’s mouths.” Do?a Rosa leaned forward, purring, “Besides, didn’t you call him wicked last I saw you? Why would you want to get to know such a villain?”
Eva scowled, hating the mockery. It made her guard the truth: how she was without a crucial part of her identity. Perhaps she should just drop it and lean on her human side, exactly as her grandmother wanted it.
“So how did you cure me?”
The woman tapped her chin as if in thought. “Well, either one must procure the dance of a virgin, or you can take a tonic of galio.” With a chuckle, she added, “I’m afraid we were short on virgins at the time, so I made you the tonic.”
“Galio,” Eva mouthed, remembering the old rhyme for the major branches of geomancia, which Do?a Antonia prohibited Eva from speaking as soon as she learned it:
Bismuto in the sword
Litio for the shield
Galio in the salves
But no matter: to iridio you yield
The prickle Eva often felt in the air stirred, awoken. She rubbed her arms, glancing at the clay icon of Rahmagut sitting cross-legged. It was tucked in one corner of the room, a bowl of black beans and another bowl of midnight-blue powder facing him in offering.
Do?a Rosa fished in her drawers for a crystal vial filled with an oily, clear liquid with a fine powder precipitating to the bottom. “Today I mixed a solution of litio. Take it with you, ward your room, just in case. There’s a wicked spark in the air these days. Like something nasty is brewing. Don’t you feel it?”
Eva wanted to scream that she felt this all the time. But maybe she was the wicked thing.
“Do you feel it because you’re half nozariel? The spark?”
“Anyone who doesn’t shut themself off to the spark will feel it. Magic lives around us,” Do?a Rosa said plainly, as if Eva was the fool for not believing this already.
“But—the people of Galeno. Someone would have said something.”
“And risk being called a curandera? A witch? Risk reducing your social life to desperate mothers who don’t know how to treat their half-breed children? How many of the proper ladies in your circle are willing to choose this path? You’ve met that wolf dressed as an archbishop, always sniffing for people who are different. The world is changing, and the more Penitent humans there are, the less it’s ‘socially acceptable’ to acknowledge the existence of magic.”
Eva stared at her lap. Do?a Antonia’s wrath was the unspoken consequence. A sliver of understanding wormed its way into her. “Even humans can feel it?”
Do?a Rosa watched her long and hard. “Dulce had an aptitude for geomancia. And I watched your grandmother beat it out of her, along with what little happiness she managed to build up for herself. Have you inherited that aptitude?”
There it was again, a morsel. Another piece of the truth Eva so longed for. “Yes,” Eva said softly, “but I thought it came from my father.”
Do?a Rosa arched her brows in amusement.
“I’m ready to learn something new, please,” Eva said, gripping the edges of the table, her eyes rounding. “It comes easy to me. Maybe something with galio, since we’re on the topic.”
This drew laughter from the curandera. She searched through her belongings before withdrawing a small flask, a leather-bound journal, and a string holding together a series of colorful paper cutouts.
“Our little sessions—I should be compensated.”
“I’ll bring you all my escudos,” Eva said quickly, and the woman laughed some more. She slid the journal across the tablecloth.
Eva ran her hands along the rough leather cover, feeling the areas where the binding was weak. It was meant to look innocuous, to stave off suspicion. Scribbled within was all the knowledge on geomancia that Do?a Rosa had collected throughout her life.
Do?a Rosa lent Eva her middle finger ring. “Put this on.”
Eva did so, as all galio potions had to be worn on the middle finger. In order for a geomancia spell to be cast, one needed to carry the actual metal on one’s body. The geomancers of old solved this by developing recipes to dilute the metals into solutions, which could be worn in capped rings or lockets, to serve as conduits.
“Why is it so hard to come by the ingredients for geomancia?” Eva wondered, for she had only ever seen traders of geomancia metal powders once or twice at the Sunday pop-up market and never in an actual storefront.
“You can blame Penitents for that. People are scared to be seen as practitioners of geomancia nowadays. And with less demand comes scarcer supply. Before the revolution, it wasn’t uncommon to hear of miners selling ores to alchemists, who made small fortunes extracting, purifying, and selling mixed solutions to geomancers. But the Pentimiento Church has Galeno by the throat. In other places, there’s more freedom.”
Eva nodded. She wished she had the courage to leave Galeno, to head south.
Do?a Rosa lifted the string with the paper cutouts. They were part of the decorations put up in town during the Saint Jon the Shepherd holiday celebrations. The triangular cutouts were hung crisscrossed from rooftop to rooftop and were often in the tricolors of the revolution: goldenrod for the riches the Segoleans discovered on Venazian shores, cerulean for the Cow Sea and ocean separating their land from Segol, and scarlet for the blood shed by the revolutionaries.
“Every budding geomancer knows that galio is the conduit for healing through magic.”