The tapestries, the chairs, the rugs.
María paces the house, reciting to herself the many changes she will make, but soon grows bored. She goes upstairs and lets herself into her husband’s rooms, surprised to find them a cluttered version of her own.
A suit of armor poses on a wooden model, the metal polished to a shine.
Another portrait of the viscount himself looms over the hearth, this artist’s hand flattering to the point of jest. Andrés’s hair rendered a glossy black, his chin as hard and sharp as stone.
A desk sits before the window, a trio of books perched along the back. María takes one up and turns the pages. As a child she had learned to count using lines drawn in the dirt, and to write her own name, common as it is—even that was less a knowing of letters and more a memorized design—but beyond that, there seemed no point.
Now, as she weighs the book in her hand, she wishes she’d had cause to learn. She can tell that it’s valuable—leather-bound, the pages full of painted shapes, the edges filigreed with gold—but the lines of ink striped across the paper are nothing but a pretty pattern.
She returns the book to the table and turns to survey the bed.
A carved four-poster frame surrounds the pallet, pillows full of down and blankets hemmed with gold. She climbs up and flings her body across the massive bed, but when she turns her face into the pillows she’s met with her husband’s smell, sudden and sharp enough to turn her stomach.
María recoils, abandoning the bed as well as the room.
And goes to find her maid.
The servants startle at the sight of the viscountess, bowing and veering out of her way, no doubt wondering if she is lost.
Their quarters are simple compared to the casona’s main rooms. The same stone walls, minus the adornments. The rugs worn bare by rushing feet.
María finds Ysabel in the kitchen, elbows resting on the counter, a fistful of cards in one hand and a cup of wine in the other. Across from her, a man—so old that his face is more wrinkle than skin—lays down his own cards as the cook elbows him aside to turn out a loaf of bread.
There is a moment before they see María.
A moment when Ysabel’s eyes are not cast down, and the sun catches the strands of light in her braided brown hair and turns it gold. A moment when her expression is unguarded, open, and she looks both tired and amused, one brow arched, and a wry smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.
And then her gaze drifts to the doorway and—
“Mi señora!” Ysabel yelps, nearly spilling her cup. She throws the cards down as if they’ve burned her, and ducks her head, eyes going to the floor at María’s feet. The old man shuffles backward and bows, and the cook stops waving a towel over the bread and looks around as if searching for escape. Finding none, she too goes still.
Eventually, Ysabel chances a look up.
“I’m sorry, mi señora. I thought you would still be sleeping.” Her gaze flicks over the half-fastened dress, the ribbons María tried and failed to reach. “You should have called for me.”
María thinks of her horse, locked in its stable, and smothers the flare of rage before it spreads. She shakes her head dismissively. “What’s this?” she asks, flicking her fingers toward the cards on the counter.
“Nothing,” answers the maid quickly. Then, “Only a game.”
María grabs hold of this, as if it were a rope.
“Teach me.”
“It’s called Chinchón.”
They have traded the servant quarters for the inner courtyard, two chairs drawn up to a low table. It took several polite invitations, followed by one firmly worded command, to get Ysabel to sit across from María, but now that the maid is seated, her shoulders have begun to loosen.
She lays the cards face up. “There are four suits—that’s what they’re called. Cups, coins, swords, and clubs. Each card holds a certain number of these things.” Ysabel’s finger taps the cards as she points this out. “Three cups. Four coins. Five swords. Six clubs.”
María’s gaze flicks over the many cards, trying to keep up.
“They’re beautiful,” she says, fingering a delicate illustration. “How did you come by them?”
Color rises in Ysabel’s cheeks. “They were a gift. From the count.”
Count Olivares. Andrés’s father. María lifts a brow. “How generous.”
“Yes,” says the maid, adding under her breath, “he can be.” She sets down a new kind of card. This one has a king holding out his cup. “The highest cards have men on them.”
María can see that. There are men holding clubs. Men holding swords. Men holding coins. Men holding cups. “Where are the women?” she asks, and Ysabel only laughs, as if it were a joke.
“We shuffle the cards,” explains the maid, gathering them into a pile. “And then, we deal.”
She begins to place cards on the table, alternating between María and herself, as she explains the rules. It is a matching game. The goal is to create a series in the same suit. Or a set of the same cards in different suits.
They each take up their hands.
María studies her own set, one finger silently tapping on her skirts as she adds the numbers on her cards while her maid rearranges her own hand.
“Where did you learn to play?” she asks.
Ysabel’s gaze flicks up, then down again. She throws away two cards. Draws two more, says at last, “By watching my father.”
María studies her maid instead of her hand. She may only just be learning to read cards, but she has always been good at reading other people. There are two parts to every answer. The part that’s said, and the part that isn’t. Which is how she knows that Ysabel is holding back more than just her cards.
She lays her hand out on the table. So does María. It takes her a moment to count, and realize she has won. She is used to winning, but Ysabel beams, praising her for being such a quick study, and María feels sun-warmed by the words.
“Another?” she asks, and María nods.
Ysabel shuffles and deals again, and as she does, María finds herself studying the girl’s hands. The length of her eyelashes. The way she bites her bottom lip when she is thinking, turning the pink flesh red beneath her teeth.
This time, María loses.
For once, she doesn’t mind.
She only wants to play again.
When Alice wakes the day after the party, her first and only thought is this:
The world is far too fucking bright.
Sunlight splinters through the dorm’s cheap curtains, attacking the room with daggers of white. Alice sits up, and immediately wishes she hadn’t. She groans, a feral, miserable sound, and slumps back down, shivering as her cheek hits the damp pillow. Her wet hair must have soaked in overnight and even though the hair dried, the down-filled cushion didn’t, and is now a damp and lumpy block under her head.
Her skull is throbbing and her mouth is dry and she is unbearably hungover.
(The first time she ever got drunk, it was on a bottle of sherry Catty swiped from the pub, shared on the picnic bench out back, and it had gone down sweet and come up sour, a headache so fierce Alice could feel it behind her eyes, and this is ten times worse.)
It takes her a moment to remember where she is, another to remember where she was last night, a third to remember that she wasn’t alone. She rolls over, half hoping and half dreading that she’ll find the violet-haired girl curled up beside her in the bed, but it’s empty.
There’s no sign of Lizbeth, either, her bed still made, as if she hasn’t been back.
Alice presses her palms into her eye sockets and tries to think. There’s something there, a memory just out of reach, something between collapsing into bed and now, something just beyond the ache inside her skull, but she’s still grasping in the dark when she hears the sound.
A soft drumming, like fingers on a desk.
“When I was a child / I got lost in the woods,” sings an eerie voice, and it takes her a second to realize it’s just her phone’s alarm, the song she programmed coming from the shelf beside her bed. Alice slams her hand down on the screen, killing the alarm, and that’s when she notices the purple Post-it Note tacked to the lampshade above.
Three words, written in a slanted cursive.
Goodbye, Alice.
xo Lottie
And even with the sickness rolling through her skin, she feels a wave of disappointment at the sorry little note. There’s no call me, no number, not even a see you round. Just Goodbye. So formal. So finite.
Alice squeezes her eyes shut again and the night before comes blinking back, like a lightbulb on the fritz before it steadies; fragments of music and rain and tangled hands, and heat, and if Alice didn’t feel like death, she’d probably play the whole thing over in her head, not to relive the good, but to assess the damage. Trace over everything she said and did, trying to decide if she’d made a fool of herself, what her classmates would think. Play out the scene with the girl in her bed—Lottie—until the pleasure of it soured, replaced by shame over the sounds she made, the sheer, mortifying abandon of being that other, reckless Alice.
But embarrassment requires energy and she has none, and it doesn’t matter if she made an idiot of herself because Lottie is gone.
And Alice can’t stop shivering.
At some point in her sleep she must have kicked the comforter off, because the bulk is now piled down around her feet, and she’s naked except for the scratchy sheet tangled around her legs and torso. The once-white cotton is dappled with pale purple splashes (the last dregs of hair dye, a watery ghost).
There’s another stain on the sheets.
The unmistakable red-brown of dry blood.
Alice frowns, touches the place between her legs, wondering if that’s what this is—not a hangover, just the world’s worst PMS—but her fingers come away clean. And anyway, the stain isn’t a smudge, or a smear. It’s three perfect drops, like someone dripped paint, and looking at it gives her the weirdest sense, a kind of mental vertigo, like she’s leaning over the place where a memory should be.
But it’s not there.
Nothing to grasp. Nothing to hold on to.
She peels off the sheet, still searching for the source of the blood, and yelps at the sight of half a dozen bruises blotting her pale skin, before she touches one and realizes it’s not a welt or a wound, but the remnant of a kiss. Pomegranate lipstick dotting her thigh, her stomach, the inside of one wrist.
Alice shivers, less at the memory than the fact she’s naked and cold, and feels like total shit.
She looks around, searches for something in reach because the thought of getting up is just too much right now. The old oversized T-shirt she normally wears to bed is draped on the desk chair and she tugs it on, shaking from that smallest effort as she hauls the comforter up, and curls beneath the blessed dark and tries to sleep—
Her head pounding—
Like a fist against a door—
Bang bang bang—
Until it slams shut—
So hard it bounces in its frame and—
Alice takes off, nine years old, all elbows and knees, bare feet slipping in the marshy grass as she tries to catch up with her sister.
Because Catty is running away.
Not away away (because if Catty were serious, she’d have headed for the train station instead of the hilly slope at the edge of their yard), but away from the house, and the dinner, and Eloise Martin.
Eloise, who walked into their lives a year ago, and upended everything.
Eloise, who hails from Edinburgh and has an accent so soft it might as well be English, who never raises her voice, and who once made the fatal error of telling Catty to “call me whatever you like.”
An offer that Catty put to rude use until Dad intervened.
Eloise, who was apparently Dad’s childhood sweetheart, way back before he went to uni and met Mum. A fact they just learned about that night at dinner, because Eloise has friends visiting from Leith, and while dessert was cooling on the counter, she took Dad’s hand and said that maybe they were meant to be, which Catty took as Eloise saying their mum wasn’t, and did that mean that Mum was meant to die, and no, of course that wasn’t what Eloise was saying, but it was too late, the chair was scraping back, and the door was slamming, and Catty was off.
It’s the second time she’s run—the first was after Dad came home from that first date, looking almost happy, like the lights were finally coming on again inside his house, and it was such a relief—or so Alice thought—but Catty saw only a betrayal. As if there was an unspoken agreement that when they buried Mum, the grave would follow them home, a six-foot hollow in the bed, a hole at the table, a plot of land left fallow for their entire lives, and then Dad broke his word by planting something there.
The first time Catty ran, Alice didn’t go after her, but only because it was dark, and her sister was gone before Alice could see which way she went. She had cried herself sick, and when Catty finally showed back up the next morning, Alice made her promise—not to stay, but at least, next time, to wait, to take her with her.
But she’s twelve now to Alice’s nine, and fast—so fast that Alice can’t catch up, the distance between widening a little more with every stride.
“Catty!” she calls out.
(Catty, not Catherine, or Cathy—Alice couldn’t make the th sound when she was small, so it came out Catty, and then one day their neighbor Mary Galford tutted at the name, said it wasn’t nice, so of course her sister went and looked up the meaning—mean, nasty, spiteful—after which she gleefully declared she’d answer to that and nothing else.)
“Slow down!” shouts Alice now as Catty lopes up the hill, but of course, she doesn’t slow down, doesn’t look back, just tells her to “Catch up!”
Catch up, as if that’s easy, as if she doesn’t have three years on Alice.
Three years that don’t feel like much, not unless she’s running. Or the subject of Mum comes up, which it doesn’t—not directly, but it’s always there, like a hazard, a pothole they have to skirt, and every time they hit it, the years between them open up.
The difference between missing and memory.
Because Catty remembers their mum.
And Alice doesn’t.
It’s not her fault—she was only five when Sarah Moore died, and the few memories she has are mostly smudges, like old dreams.
Here is what she does remember: the sadness that hung over the house like a shroud, the sound of her dad weeping into a dishcloth when she was supposed to be in bed, the way his shoulders bowed beneath a weight no one could see but everyone felt.
The way the air in the house got lighter after he met Eloise.
But still, Catty is too fast.
She crests the hill, and vanishes, and a strange terror grips Alice, that she’s crossed some invisible threshold, one long stride carrying her forward, out of Hoxburn, out of the world, and by the time Alice scrambles, breathless, to the top, she’s convinced Catty will be gone.
But she isn’t.
Alice sees her, a dozen strides down the hill’s far side, fetched up against the low stone wall like it’s a finish line, one that holds instead of breaking.
(The hills around Hoxburn are dotted with sheep and crisscrossed with dozens of low stone walls that always look as if they’re about to crumble but never do, and for a long time Alice assumed it was some kind of magic, or imagined that the walls went deep, deep beneath the ground and that’s why they never fell, but now she knows that there’s a mason who walks the walls once a season and patches them up.)
Alice slows, gasping for breath.
Catty’s back is turned, but even from here she can see how hard her sister’s gripping the wall, her knuckles going white, and Alice is sure one of them will break—the rock or her fingers, she doesn’t know which—so she starts forward, ready to pry her sister’s hand away. But Catty hears her coming, and lets go, scrubbing a palm across her cheeks.
“Hey, Bones,” she says.
It’s a nickname, going back to the time when they shared a room, a bed, when Alice liked to sleep with her knees curled into her chest, so some sharp edge was always poking Catty in the side, the back, and she would shove a pillow between them, muttering that Alice was all bones.
“Needed some fresh air.”
Catty slumps forward, resting her elbows on the wall, and Alice pads forward like her sister’s not a girl at all, but one of those nervy dogs that is always on the verge of startling.
“It’s nicer out here anyway,” she adds, even though it’s not, it’s cold, and windy, and wet, and there was cake inside, chocolate with vanilla icing.
But Alice only nods, and says, “Yeah,” running her palm along the top of the wall.
(This one isn’t on their property, but that didn’t stop Catty from declaring it hers—“See, right there, a C stamped into one of the stones”—and Eloise once explained to Alice that it’s because the stones came from the old church before the town built a new one, and that letter was just a maker’s mark, but she didn’t tell Catty because it doesn’t hurt anyone, to let her have it.)
Her sister swings her legs over the wall, and Alice climbs up beside her, shivering as the cold soaks like damp into her jeans. The sun’s going down, shadows growing dense around them, but up here they can see most of Hoxburn—which admittedly isn’t much, but it looks even smaller now, and kind of quaint, like it could fit inside a snow globe, or an open hand, and Catty must be having one of her psychic moments because she lifts her hand and squints, and Alice can picture her cupping the whole town in her palm.
Catty closes her fist. Lets it fall.
She sighs, and then stretches out along the wall like it’s a bed, and it’s too narrow for them to lie side by side, so Alice twists round and lies so they’re head to head. Cheek to cheek.
Sisters, staring up at the darkening sky.
On paper, they look the same.
Fair skin, blond hair, blue eyes.
But Alice’s skin is too pale, burns in summer, where Catty’s is dusted with freckles. Alice’s hair is a lifeless shade, Catty’s the color of melted butter. Alice’s blue eyes are tinged with gray and green, Catty’s the cold, clear shade of winter mornings.
They don’t talk about the dinner, or the fact that when Catty bolted, it was Eloise who stood up first, meaning to go after her, but Dad caught her hand and told her not to bother, to let the daft girl go.
They don’t talk at all.
Alice sucks a breath, wishes she knew what to say to make Catty happy, or at least to make her hurt less. But she knows that the wrong words will make things even worse, and she’s still searching for the right ones when Catty pulls out her phone and shoves an earbud in one ear. She offers the other one to Alice and taps the screen and the music comes spilling out, and Alice exhales.
She knows the song, recognizes it just by that opening beat, which isn’t a drum, exactly, but the primal thud of a palm striking wood, a summons. It’s always made Alice think of the Pied Piper, it has the same strange effect of pulling you along in its wake. Sure enough Catty starts rapping her knuckles on the wall in time with the beat, and Alice feels her own pulse work to match the rhythm.
It is stripped bare, this song, a simple, hypnotizing thing. The beat never rises, but after eight counts, a girl’s voice kicks in, haunting and high, carrying the air of incantation.
“When I was a child / I got lost in the woods
The trees parted for me / made such a clear trail
Then closed up behind me / now I’m turned around
Been trying so long now / to find a way out.”
They don’t sing along, it’s not that kind of song, would never show up on someone’s karaoke list. Instead, they simply lie there, and let it wash over them.
“The woods want to keep me / the ground wants to eat me
The trees want to hold me / can’t find my way home.
The night’s getting dark now / the air’s getting cold
So tired of walking / can’t find my way home.”
The music unfurls over them like a tent, and it isn’t comfortable, bits of loose rock dig into Alice’s back, but this is an enchanted moment, and she knows better than to ruin it by moving. It’s almost over now, anyway, the drumbeat slowing like a tired heart as the voice becomes higher and softer.
“I live in these woods now / the trees hold me close
The voice is a whisper as it gets to the last line.
“No longer lost now / I found my way—”
But before the last word, Catty taps the screen and the song starts over. Alice fidgets. By now, the sun’s gone down, the shadows growing dense, and she’s cold, and Eloise and her friends are probably gone, and they really should go back, go home, but when Alice brings it up, Catty says Yeah.
Says Sure.
Says We will, we will, as soon as the song is done.
And Alice wants to believe her, so she stays there, sprawled on the cooling rock beside her sister as the music unravels again. Holds her breath and waits, sure that if the voice can just get out that final word, the spell will break, the world will come unstuck, and Catty will agree to get up with her, to come home.
But the end comes around again, and Alice knows what’s going to happen, and sure enough, when the voice hits the last line, Catty taps the screen and starts the song over. And over. And over.
“No longer lost now / I found my way—”
“No longer lost now / I found my way—”
“No longer lost now / I found my way—”
Alice hits the phone, silencing the alarm a second before the singer says the word home.
“Bloody hell,” says Lizbeth from the doorway. “I thought you were dead.”
Alice groans. The sun is gone, but her skull is still pounding, and her jaw aches as if she’s been clenching her teeth in her sleep.
“That alarm’s been going off for ages,” adds her roommate curtly. “I had to study in the common room.”
Alice frowns, head spinning. She’s always been a light sleeper, usually wakes up somewhere around the second verse, but she was buried somewhere deep, had to climb up through layer after layer of sleep, the panic rising as some distant part of her heard the lyrics passing by, carrying her close to the end.
She stares at the screen now, trying to understand how it’s somehow still nine o’clock, until she realizes that it’s now nine at night (she must have nudged the AM/PM button when she turned it off before) which means she’s gone and slept through all her classes and now she has a whole new reason to feel sick.
(Catty used to ditch class all the time, but Alice never missed a day of school unless she was well and truly ill, and even then, she made sure she could borrow someone’s notes so she wouldn’t fall behind, and now, three weeks into her first year of four, the professors will have it out for her, and and and—)
Alice is well along the panic spiral when she remembers that it’s still Sunday.
She heaves a strangled breath and slumps back into bed.
“No offense,” adds Lizbeth, hooking her backpack on the edge of her chair, which is never a good way to start, “but you look wretched.”
Alice tries to answer, but her throat is full of cobwebs and her skull is full of rocks and her tongue is a useless mass inside her mouth, so it takes two tries to manage a bone-dry “Thanks.”
“Are you ill?” she asks, but there’s no real caring in the question, only a prodding worry and a measure of distrust. She might as well be poking Alice with a stick.
“I’m dying,” answers Alice, because hangovers require a measure of hyperbole, and because she has truly never felt so awful. The words come scraping out, leaving a horrible taste in her mouth, and Lizbeth starts packing a bag and explaining that she really can’t afford to be getting sick, with her courseload being what it is, and it’s no problem, really, she will stay with Jeremy.
(Jeremy, who was assigned to show Lizbeth around campus when she came to visit that spring, after she’d been let in, and “he must have been smitten” because they kept in touch all summer, and now that they’re in the same place they’re attached at the hip—“making up for lost time” she likes to add, as if he’s been in a war and not studying biology).
The phone slides between Alice’s fingers as she starts to shiver again, and she wishes there were a kettle in the room, but she hasn’t got around to buying one and Lizbeth is one of those rare English monsters who for some reason favors coffee over tea, and insists on getting it made fresh by someone else.
Lizbeth scurries out, and Alice thinks of folding herself back into the nest of her duvet, but her whole body aches from lying down so long, and what Alice really wants in that moment is El. (She resists the urge to call her Mum, even now, even just in her head, Catty’s glare pinging like a pebble against the side of her skull.) Dad was never any good when his daughters were sick, all awkward head pats and there, theres, but El always knew exactly what was needed, a hot water bottle or a ginger tea, a day in bed or a bit of fresh air.
Fresh air.
The thought suddenly feels better than lying in this sweat-soaked bed in this too-small room, the air around her close and stale. Alice flings the covers off, gets to her feet, instantly regretting the sudden rise as her limbs tremble and the whole room dips like a cheap ride. She squeezes her eyes shut and waits for space to steady before she attempts the daunting task of getting dressed.
Her jeans are sitting in a pile on the floor, still rain damp, which is just as well because the thought of anything tight against her skin makes her nauseous. Alice fumbles in the drawers for a pair of sweats and an oversized jumper. Catches her face in the mirror on the closet door and pauses long enough to see the remains of last night’s makeup streaked black around her eyes, making them look sunken, hollow, the irises fever bright, the only time they look pure blue. Her hair has dried wild, a gorse-like tangle, her fringe askew, but she doesn’t have the energy to scrape it back—her arms feel too heavy when she tries—so she settles for scrubbing at her face with the cuff of the jumper, and leaving it at that.
Alice stumbles out into the suite common room, and she must truly look as shit as she feels, because Rachel physically startles at the sight of her, and Jana looks up from the sofa and says, “Uh-oh, do you need a burrito or a bucket?”
Her stomach twists, the way it does when part of you is hungry and the other part is sick, and your insides can’t agree on what should go down and what should come up, so Alice keeps her mouth clamped shut as she shakes her head, and soldiers out into the hall.
Students pass, their voices echoing, too loud, inside her battered skull, and twice on the stairs she has to stop and brace herself against the banister. Each time she looks down and half expects to see the trail she and Lottie made the night before.
But it was water, only water, and has dried to nothing now, leaving only Alice, who sighs and shoves open the door, hoping a bit of fresh air will set her straight.
Something in María loosens as she steps into the widow’s shop.
It is cooler than she expected, a welcome reprieve from the glaring day outside.
“Close the door behind you,” comes a soft, melodic voice. “The herbs prefer it cold and dark.”
María obeys, and is plunged into a disorienting wall of black, a shadow so thick it leaves her briefly blind. She blinks, and as her eyes adjust she can make out the bundled sprigs that hang from the ceiling, the variety of jars and pots shelved along the walls, a pale mortar and pestle sitting on a low table.
The place smells damp and dry at once. Sweet and citrus, spiced and earthy.
It smells like the stone floor of the western alcove, like the tincture brewed by the cook at the inn, like a palm full of cherry pits.
“Can I help you?”
María turns, and there she is.
Not a stranger, but the woman she met all those years ago. Her veil tucked up, revealing the smooth, pale slopes of her face, the sharp point of her chin, fair hair falling in a plait, and eyes a shocking blue.
Ten years, and María begins to doubt herself, to wonder if her memory is flawed.
Because the widow has not aged.
Of course, some wear the time better than others, but they wear it still. Not her. She looks the same. Exactly the same. As if the years have made no mark at all.
“What brings you here?” asks the widow, and it takes María a moment to realize she means to the shop, and not to her.
She considers, trying to gauge whether the other woman can be trusted. After all, she has witnessed the city’s taste for gossip.
“A tonic,” she says, touching her stomach.
“Ah,” says the widow. “Are you hoping to get with child, or get rid of one?”
María cannot hide her surprise. She has never heard anyone speak so boldly.
But the other woman only shrugs. “Children can be a blessing, in the right bed. And a kind of sickness in the wrong one. Don’t worry, I am known for my discretion.”
María cocks a brow. “If you are known for it,” she says, “are you really so discreet?”
That earns a smile. And perhaps it is the knowing twitch of the widow’s lips, or the steadiness of her blue eyes, or simply the dimness of the shop that draws out the truth.
“I am not with child,” says María. “And I want to stay that way.”
The widow shows neither judgment nor surprise, simply says, “Very well,” and rounds the counter, taking the mortar and pestle with her. She collects a variety of herbs and oils from the shelves on the wall, and María realizes that her gloves are gone, her hands long and thin and lovely, and so pale they seem to shine in the low light as she fixes the tonic. She seems content to work in silence, but María cannot hold her tongue.
“You know,” she says, “we’ve met before.”
The widow’s hands keep moving, but she glances up, a small groove between blond brows. “Are you sure?” she asks. She holds María’s gaze, and her lips twitch again, as if toying with a smile. “I think I would remember you.”
María is surprised by the heat that rushes to her cheeks. “I was much younger then.”
“Ah,” says the widow. The pestle grinds against the mortar walls. The widow tips the contents into a small, dark bottle, closes it with a cork.
“But you have not changed.”
Again, that almost smile. Those blue eyes trail across her face. “What is your name?”
And she knows she should claim her husband’s mantle, announce herself as the Viscountess Olivares, but the only name that rises to her lips is the one she would have given all those years ago.
“María.”
“María,” echoes the widow thoughtfully. She rounds the counter, stopping only when they are close enough to touch, then holds out a hand, and María is already reaching for it when the widow turns her palm up and says, “the price is three reals.”
María blinks, recovering her senses. She is not permitted to carry her own money—there is no point, insist her husband’s parents—but she has taken to skimming coins from the countess’s purse whenever she finds it unattended. Now she draws the reals from her dress pocket and sets them in the widow’s waiting hand, startled to find the skin so cold.
Like a compress on a fevered cheek, and yet, María feels herself flushing.
Just then, the door swings open, sending jagged light into the darkened shop, followed by the countess’s rasping caw.
“María.”
She turns, and the widow withdraws a step, into the deeper shadow of the counter. The countess does not bother coming in, simply stands there on the threshold, clutching at the baroness, who looks ready to divest her burden.
“Come, María. I am tired.”
The widow slips the small dark bottle into María’s hand. “It does not keep well,” she says, lifting her voice so the countess will hear. “You’ll need a fresh batch every fortnight.”
As María clutches the tonic, she hears the words for what they are. An invitation. She turns toward the door. Sunlight burns at the threshold, the day beyond still hot. She wants to linger in the dark.
The countess waits, impatient, but María glances back. “My thanks . . .” she says, trailing off because she never learned the other woman’s name.
The widow has begun sweeping the dregs back into the mortar on her table. She pauses and looks up from her work, those blue eyes like chips of sky.
“They call me Madame Boucher.” The smile breaks free at last, revealing a wolfish point to her longest teeth as she adds, “But you may call me Sabine.”
María cannot wait a fortnight.
The countess sucked her teeth at the request, muttered about spending time on tonics that would only go to waste while Andrés is still away. But then her husband sent word that he would be back in León soon, and thus the old hag gave her leave to come again.
And so María steps into the welcome dark a second time.
The widow, Sabine, does not look surprised to see her, but she does look glad, rising from the table where she was bent over her work.
“María,” she says, the name easy as an exhale. It is the first time in her life she has enjoyed the sound.
Sabine glides toward her, hand reaching not for the empty bottle María was about to offer, but past it, toward her shoulder, her throat, her cheek, cool bare fingers resting on warm skin.
“I remember now,” says the widow, meeting María’s gaze, and she doesn’t realize a strand of copper has escaped her scarf until Sabine twists the lock around her finger. “The child in the woods, blithely plucking poisoned blooms.” Her hand lingers, the curl twisted like a ring. “How long ago was that?”
“Ten years,” answers María.
“So many?” asks Sabine.
“And yet,” says María, who has thought this week of little else, “you were a new widow then as well.”
Sabine’s palm dips, the hair abandoned as she plucks the empty bottle from María’s hand and turns away. María wonders if she’s angered her, but when Sabine glances back, there is amusement flashing in her eyes.
“Two kinds of women have leave to wander through this world alone and unmolested. Nuns, and widows. And I am not close enough with God to be a nun.”
Sabine taps the empty bottle thoughtfully against the table. “No. I did have a husband. Once.” There it is again, that flash of teeth. A smile so slight and yet so dazzling that when María sees it, the ground seems to pitch downhill. She finds herself leaning forward, the urge to follow, or to fall.
“How did he die?” she asks.
The widow’s smile widens. “Slowly.”
Sabine. Sabine. Sabine.
María finds herself holding the name, like a cube of sugar, on her tongue, in the days between their meetings. Dwelling on how strange and sweet it tastes.
Sabine Boucher.
It is French, she tells María on her next visit—to think, her brother Felipe was right, all those years ago—and yet, there is hardly any accent to the widow’s speech, her Spanish crisp and clean.
“All things wear smooth in time,” she says by way of explanation, though she does not look old enough to have such wear.
Sabine. Sabine. María finds cause to say the name aloud as often as she can. On the third or fourth visit, she finally admits how much she likes the sound.
“María is a lovely name,” counters the widow.
To which the younger woman only snorts. A short, derisive sound. “My mother told me once that it means bitter.”
Sabine plucks a stem of lavender from its bundle, twists the sprig between her fingers. “It also means beloved.”
María wrinkles up her nose. Perhaps, she says, but she has never liked it. It is so commonplace, so plain, like starched linen when she dreams of silk. She hates the way it sounds in her mother-in-law’s mouth, like a sharp tug on a short chain.
Sabine looks at her kindly. “A name is like a dress. It might be by nature pretty or plain, but it is the person wearing it who matters most.”
María considers, looking through a jar of herbs. Studying the face beyond. “If names are dresses, mine simply does not fit.”
“So take it off,” says Sabine blithely, handing her the lavender as if it is a torch. “Who would you be? What name would better suit you?”
María brings the dried flower to her nose. To that, she has no answer ready.
But she will think on it.
The summer drags itself over coals.
The day is blistering, the city baking in the August heat, and for once, María has not had to orchestrate her escape. The countess declares she cannot endure the sun and has skipped the market, preferring instead to soak her feet and hear the gossip in the comfort of her home. María would surely have been forced to stay and keep her company if not for the widow’s gifts. Last time, she returned with a tonic to ease the countess’s headaches, another to help the ever-restless count sleep through the night, and so they’ve deemed these visits a suitable pursuit.
Of course, María is not allowed to go alone. She is sent in the company of a maid, a makeshift jailer, but it’s shockingly easy to buy an hour’s peace with coin and threats, and she came armed with both.
The dark shop welcomes her when she arrives, and so does Sabine.
“Come,” says the widow when María produces the empty tonic bottle. “I will show you how to make this batch yourself.”
María recoils slightly at the prospect, not because she doesn’t want to know, but because it feels like a door threatening to close.
“Surely that is not good business,” she says, trying to make her voice light, playful even. “After all, if you teach me, I’ll have no need to visit your shop.”
No need, she says, when what she means is no reason, no excuse. When what she wants to say is that these stolen hours have been some days a saving grace, and others the only thing that keeps her from stepping off her in-laws’ slanted roof.
Sabine purses her mouth in disapproval. “Knowledge is power, María. Never turn it down. Besides,” she adds, cupping the stone bowl, “no one else needs to know what you do. It can be a secret, shared. Now, fetch me the jar of nettle from the shelf behind you.”
María turns to the wooden ledge, and frowns. There are a dozen jars of herbs, their names written in a quick, sloped hand. She studies them, as if the curved lines will arrange themselves to sense. They don’t.
“You cannot read?” ventures Sabine, appearing at her elbow.
María’s jaw clenches. “No.” A simple word, when the truth is messier. She’d broached the subject with her in-laws over supper, more than a year before, when the boredom reached its peak. She had been eyeing the books in the count’s study for some time, in hope of a diversion, had even anticipated the shadow that crossed the countess’s face, and quickly said she wished to learn so she could teach her children. Even touched her stomach for good measure.
To María’s surprise, the count himself agreed to teach her.
But every time she went to meet him in his study, his hands began to venture from the page and purpose to her arm, her back, her waist. He’d lick his lips as he sounded out the letters. Sniff her hair as he leaned close.
When the man’s wrinkled hands began to wander farther south, she’d abandoned the pursuit.
“I wanted to learn,” María says now, glaring at the apothecary shelf, the labels nothing more than mocking curls and crosses. “But I lacked a proper teacher.”
“Well then,” says Sabine, reaching past her to pluck the nettle from the shelf. For a moment they are as close as cloth, draped together in the dark. The widow’s breath a cool whisper on the back of María’s neck. Her mouth, inches from her skin.
“Let’s see if I can help.”
María is not a patient pupil.
Her temper is quick to burn, and hard to quench.
Sabine makes her draw letters in a layer of fine sand, again and again, until she knows their shapes, before slowly stringing them together.
“What a cursed venture,” she hisses more than once, slashing her hand through the sand with such force that it goes everywhere. A cloud, raining silent on the wooden floor. But the widow only produces more.
Week after week, the lessons little more than snatches, her annoyance clashing with Sabine’s persistent calm, until slowly, somehow, the tangled letters become sounds and the sounds take shape.
She sounds out the letters on a label.
“. . . me . . .”
Wills it smooth.
“. . . ro.”
María blinks, as the sounds become a word.
“Romero.”
Rosemary.
She thrills in recognition. It is like finding the keys to a locked door in your house, discovering a whole new room beyond.
Sabine cups her pupil’s face, delighted. “You have such a quick mind.”
María blushes, brief and hot, then scoffs, and slumps, frustrated, back into her chair. “At this rate, it will take a lifetime.”
“There are worse ways to spend a life,” says Sabine, still looming over her.
María lets her head fall back, looks up into the widow’s peculiar eyes.
This close, they are not an even blue, but shot through with silver light, somehow bright despite the darkened shop. Only a foot of space between their faces, and it has never felt so far, so close. For a moment, María thinks of Ysabel, head bent over hers in the western alcove. But she suspects that if she reached up now, to touch the widow’s cheek, the other woman would not pull away. Not even if her fingers drifted, if her thumb slipped across the widow’s lips, soft and petal pink.
But the moment passes, and María does not reach.
Her fingers twitch, but stay against her dress. Sabine withdraws, and María is left feeling strangely winded.
The hour is almost up, and she knows that she should rise and go, and leave the widow to her work. But the fact is, she does not want to. So she lingers, lets her eyes drift closed, savoring the fact the summer heat has broken, the shop stones cooling in its wake.
Soon, the room fills with a strange new scent, warm and woody.
María glances toward Sabine, finds the woman stirring a mixture in a small bowl balanced atop a flame, the heat contained within a metal dish. Watches as she pours the contents, which are dark and thick as pitch, into a little cup.
Sabine returns to the table and places the cup before María.
“What is this?” she asks.
“A reward,” says the widow, “for your resilient study.”
María considers the mixture. It is the color of polished wood, the thickness of tallow, and according to Sabine, it is called chocolate.
“It was a gift,” she explains, “from a grateful patron.”
María nods at the single cup. “Surely we should share.”
But Sabine only shakes her head. “It is too rich for me,” she says, a little sadly. “But it would be a crime for such a gift to go to waste. Go on,” she adds, and then, a little softer, “I want you to enjoy it for me.”
María lifts the cup to her lips and takes a sip.
The liquid rolls over her tongue, at once bitter and sweet, thicker than wine and thinner than fruit, and her eyes slide shut as she holds it in her mouth, savoring the taste.
It is unlike anything María’s ever tried. It coats her tongue, and the flavor lingers in her throat. And yet, as soon as she has swallowed, she wishes she hadn’t. It is gone, and she is left not satisfied, but wanting.
When she finally opens her eyes, she finds Sabine watching her with rapt attention. Her teeth prick at her lower lip.
“Well?” she asks, eyes blazing in the shop’s thin light.
And what can María say? In that one sip, she has drained the little cup. She would gladly have another. She would have it with every meal. Every day for the rest of her life. And it would still not be enough.
“If I had this,” María says, “I would drink nothing else.”
Sabine’s mouth splits into a shallow smile.
“Strange, isn’t it?” she says. “The more you taste, the more you want.”
“Are you ever lonely?”
It is late autumn now, and they are sitting together at the wooden table in the shop, María straining long-steeped herbs under Sabine’s unblinking gaze. She has grown used to the widow’s company these past few months, to her startling beauty and her cool touch, to the heat it stirs beneath María’s skin, even to the strange way the world tips when she is near. To her own freedom, the loosening of her restraints, when she is in the woman’s company.
But the widow’s stillness is unnerving.
María herself has always been restless, some piece of her perpetually in motion. A bobbing thigh, a rolling wrist, her hands, her head. But when the widow is not crossing the shop, or making a tonic, she is a statue, only her blue eyes marked by life. And even those sometimes seem fixed on something far away, miles beyond the darkened shop.
But when María asks if she is lonely, Sabine blinks, and returns to herself.
“What a strange question.”
“Is it?” she asks. “You are a widow. You are alone.”
Sabine sits forward, elbows on the table. She laces her fingers and rests her chin on top, a small gesture that transforms her entire face, makes her seem suddenly girlish, young.
“One can be alone without feeling lonely,” she muses. “One can feel lonely without being alone.”
María twists a cloth bundle over a bowl, watches the tinted oil drip.
“Have you never thought of remarrying?” she asks. “Or taking a companion?”
Sabine cocks her head, a coy smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. “Who says I have not?”
Jealousy runs like gooseflesh over María’s skin. She forces out a brittle laugh and says, “I envy your freedom.”
Sabine doesn’t laugh, only holds María’s gaze. “There’s no need for envy, when you could have it, too.”
“I doubt my husband would agree.”
Husband. A word bitten like a loose thread between her teeth. As the days have grown shorter, Andrés has returned, and this time it seems he means to stay the winter, in her room. In her bed. But something has shifted.
Her beauty has begun to make him angry, her figure now an insult. Where before he looked at María with hope, now he eyes her with impatience, as if she’s nothing but an empty vessel he has not yet managed to fill.
And he is nothing if not determined.
His efforts have taken on a painful frequency. María occupies herself by silently reciting the ingredients in her tonic, spells them in her mind, letter by letter, until he’s done.
“You could give him a child,” Sabine suggested thoughtfully, several weeks before, “one, to put his mind at ease.”
But María’s stomach clenched at the suggestion. She fought the urge to scream, and simply shook her head. “It would not be enough,” she said, and she knew it was the truth. “They are hungry people. They will breed me until I die. In the childbed or otherwise wrung dry.”
Now she shifts in her chair, wincing at the steady ache between her legs, and across the narrow table the widow’s girlish demeanor drops away, replaced suddenly by something older, ancient. It is uncanny, how little Sabine changes, and how much.
“Have you heard?” she says, a hollow in her voice. “There is a sickness sweeping through, a few days north. A plague, they say. Perhaps it will make its way to León.”
María has often glimpsed the morbid streak buried in the other woman’s humor. Still, it takes her by surprise. Talking of plagues as if they are poor weather.
“Who knows?” adds Sabine with an airy shrug. “Tragedy could yet befall your husband.”
“As it did yours?” counters María.
Months spent in each other’s company, and yet Sabine has told her nothing of her life before. María is hungry to know more, but sure enough, the question is met only by that enigmatic smile.
Sabine sits up a little straighter. “Of course,” she says, scanning her shop. “There are other ways to make one’s self a widow. Not all of them rely on chance.”
Her blue eyes burn when she says it, and María thinks of the day the widow left Santo Domingo, all those years ago. The day after señor Baltierra died in his sleep.
It would be a lie to say she’s never dreamed of killing Andrés.
At night, when he sleeps and she cannot, she has taken to letting her mind wander, her imagination conjuring the ways in lurid detail. Knives buried in soft skin, bodies thudding down the eight short steps, fire catching on the curtains, spreading room by room.
No, it is not a question of whether she is capable; María has never doubted that.
But what would it gain her? What would she be left?
Humor dances like light again across Sabine’s face, and María realizes—she is joking. Of course she is joking. And why not? There is no harm in jest.
“I would make an attractive widow,” she muses.
“Without a doubt,” says Sabine.
“But gray has never been my color. An emerald green, perhaps, or plum.”
“The shade of mourning doesn’t matter,” says Sabine, rising from her chair. “What matters is that you would be free.”
“Free,” echoes María, the word heavy on her tongue. “To do what?”
Sabine strolls to the wall, runs her fingertips along the jars. “Free to live as you please. Be who you please. Take what you please.”
Her hand stops at a vase filled with dried flowers, petals the soft white of eggshells.
“That is the best thing,” Sabine says softly, lifting a flower from the bunch. “There is no one to stay your hand. No one to tell you no. If you see a thing you want . . .”
Her fingers vise shut, crushing the fragile bloom.
“It is yours.”
She dusts off her palms, and when she turns back to face the table, María sees the look on her face and understands. This is not a game. The widow is not joking. A shadow has crossed her cloudless eyes, drawn hollows in her cheeks.
“I am growing tired of León,” she says. “I do not think I’ll stay much longer.”
María feels the ground beneath her tremble.
No, she wants to say. I won’t allow it. You cannot leave me here, with him.
She catches the words before they spill out, but Sabine seems to hear them all the same.
“You could come with me, when I go.”
Something lurches inside María. The way Sabine says those words, as if it’s all so very simple, only a matter of saying yes, makes anger rise like bile in her throat, bitter and hot.
“That isn’t funny,” she snaps.
Sabine eyes her levelly. “It isn’t meant to be.”
María grits her teeth. It is all well and good to play, to dream, but she has let it carry her too far. What was the point, of her imprisonment, her suffering, if only to shed it, run away, with nothing?
“Tell me,” she seethes, “is this before or after we murder my husband?”
Sabine gives her a pitying look, and María cannot stand it anymore. She rises to her feet, decides that she has stayed too long. Andrés will be waiting.
She heads toward the door, but for once, Sabine follows in her wake. “You are too young to be so discontent.”
Just as María reaches for the handle, she feels the other woman’s touch, one cold hand coming to rest on her shoulder, the other sliding around her waist. Sabine’s body, flush with hers, her smooth cheek against María’s own. The two of them momentarily tangled, bound.
Her hand comes to her stomach, finds Sabine’s fingers, splayed against her front, questing. Laying claim. So many nights, María has dreamed of this touch, hungered for it. Now, she fights the urge to lean back. To let the gray fabric swallow her.
If you see a thing you want . . .
“All you have to do is ask,” whispers the widow.
And then her hand is gone, and María feels herself being nudged forward, over the threshold, and back into the street.
Andrés is waiting in the hall.
The floor is made of stone, and yet María imagines she can see the line he’s trod with pacing.
“There you are, my wife,” he says curtly.
His gaze goes straight to her hair, and María realizes that in her haste, she left the shop without her scarf. Or her tonic. She swears softly to herself, even as she paints a breezy smile on her face and says there must be a storm coming through. The wind came up so strong it tore the scarf away.
His eyes go past María then, to the maid who has appeared behind her, the one who was assigned to chaperone, and she resists the urge to turn and glare in silent warning at the girl. She resists—and so is left to guess at what Andrés sees there, before he takes María’s arm and leads her into the house.
At supper, the loudest sound is the cutlery as it scrapes against the plates.
María picks at the charred corpse of a small quail. The food is to her in-laws’ taste, which is to say it is both bland and overcooked, proof that money does not buy a palate.
The count and countess tend to eat in silence, but her husband usually prefers the sound of his own voice. María knows her contributions are not needed, and so her mind makes its way back to the apothecary. Because of that, she doesn’t notice how little Andrés has been speaking until they are on their way upstairs, and his voice cuts through her thoughts.
“You spend too much time with her.”
María blinks. “With whom?” she asks blandly.
He lets out an impatient huff. She has clearly not been listening. “With the woman in that shop.” It’s not the first time he’s made mention of Sabine—there have been offhand remarks—but there is a stiffness to his shoulders, a shadow in his look.
María feigns indifference. “She is a widow, Andrés. A pious one at that,” she says, though her husband turns his eye to godly things only when it suits him. “Besides,” she adds, “I do not do it for myself. It is for us.”
Us—a word that makes her wither, almost as much as the weight of his meaty hand on her too-flat stomach. His expression darkens, and she feels the stairs beneath her turn to glass. One step, the difference between shattering and safe. His hand is hot, and horrible, and María wonders when the road she chose veered so badly off its course.
Two kinds of women have leave to walk through this world alone and unmolested.
María’s other hand goes up, and comes to rest upon his cheek, the coarse hair scratching at her palm as she turns his face to meet hers.
And I am not close enough with God to be a nun.
Andrés looks at her, through her, as if she is a common thing. As if he did not worship at her feet the day they met. As if she did not make him bow with want.
I was meant for more than this, she wants to say. Instead, she smooths her own features, tamps down her disgust, summons a wife’s obedience.
“If you disapprove,” she says, “then it is done. I won’t see her anymore.”
He nods, expression softening. Good. Let him think she is a horse that has finally been broken.
“Come,” she says with a placid smile. “Let’s go to bed.”
He snores beside her like a beast.
María lies awake and marvels at how easily sleep takes him. How heavy. He has jokingly said, more than once, that he slumbers like the dead. Now she imagines tipping a vial of milky poison between his sleeping lips, listening to him quiet, the measure of his heart winding down, the steady knock slowing to a crawl and then at last, a stop.
Imagines the silence that would fill the room.
She rises up onto one elbow, fingers the ruby at her throat as she studies her husband’s sleeping face, tries to conjure fondness.
And waits.
Waits, until she’s sure he will not wake. Then rises in the dark, pulls a robe around her gown, and opens the window. She steps out in slippered feet, edging along the sloping roof the way she has a dozen times in daylight. María eyes the drop, and perhaps it looks shorter in the dark, or perhaps she simply doesn’t care.
She jumps.
Jumps, and falls, weightless for a single, exhilarating breath before the world catches up. Before the ground catches her. She lands in a crouch on the street below, bones shaking, but unbroken from the force of the fall.
María stands, and looks up at the roof again, in wonder.
It was not such a long way after all.
How strange it is to walk alone at night.
During the day, the streets are cluttered with bodies and carts, and she struggles to navigate the crowded market, cocooned within layers of dress and veil.
But now, by dark, the air is crisp and cool, the city emptied, and quiet, having long drawn in its limbs and gone to sleep. María savors the breeze as it slides through her loose hair, finds the seams of her robe, grazes the gown beneath, and wonders if this is what it tastes like—freedom.
When María reaches the apothecary, no candlelight seeps beneath the door or around the shuttered window’s edge. She knocks, certain that the widow is asleep.
No answer comes.
María clenches her teeth as her mind turns over what to do. Now that she has made her choice, she cannot turn around, cannot climb back into her husband’s bed, cannot stand another day inside that gilded cell. She knocks again, presses her ear against the wood, listens for sounds of life within, and hears nothing. Nothing. Until—
“María.”
The widow’s voice, not coming from within the shop, but on the street behind her.
She turns, and finds Sabine standing, fully dressed, an empty basket on one arm.
Her widow’s veil is gone, and the moonlight glances off her pale hair, turning the blonde to silver. It is an ungodly hour for either woman to be out, and yet, while María’s whole body is humming, tight as strings, Sabine looks perfectly at home in the dark.
The widow steps past her and opens the door.
The darkness is deeper in the shop. Thick as smoke without the help of moon or lantern. María waits for Sabine to light a candle, but the other woman moves around the space as if she can see every line and shape. María’s own eyes refuse to adjust. She blinks, and blinks, but all she sees are shadows. Shadows—and Sabine.
“I’ve changed my mind,” declares María.
Sabine comes close, reaches up and winds a lock of copper hair around her finger. “I guessed as much,” she murmurs. Then, “What do you want?”
María frowns. “You already know.”
“I want to hear you say it.” There is a velvet lining to her voice that makes María flush. “Tell me.”
And it is not so hard to shape the words, she has been thinking them all night.
“I want to be free,” she says. “By any means.”
It is like laces being loosened. At last, she feels like she can breathe.
Sabine leans in, then, so close María thinks she means to press her lips to hers. But at the last second the widow stops, their mouths a breath apart, her words a whisper in the space between. “Do you trust me?”
It turns out, it is an easy thing to tell the truth.
“Yes.”
In the heady dark, the widow’s smile shines. And then she’s gone, stepping past as if to fetch a bottle from the shelf. By memory, María finds her way to the table, grasps at the back of the chair and waits, wishes there were light, so she could see how the poison’s made.
But too soon, Sabine is back, and close enough to whisper in her ear.
“Do not be afraid.”
María doesn’t understand, not until she feels the bright and sudden stab of pain.
Her hand flies to her neck, thinking she’s been cut. But instead of a blade, or ragged wound, her fingers find soft hair, the widow’s head bent against her throat.
And yet, beneath that softness.
Something violent, sharp.
A searing heat spreads across María’s skin, up like branches, down like roots, and her pulse starts thudding in her ears. She panics, and tries to free herself, driven by a sudden, primal need, a certainty, old and animal, that she’s in danger. But before she can force Sabine away, the widow’s arms have closed around her, soft but firm. A cage.
María struggles, but Sabine might as well be made of stone. Her teeth—that is what it is, her teeth—sink deeper still into María’s throat, and she feels something crack inside her from the force. Her head begins to spin, the air around her filling with the metal scent of blood.
Now the pain subsides, becomes a heavy ache, and as it does, María feels the strength leech out of her. She fights against the spreading weakness, a losing battle as her head begins to spin, her heart a dying animal, kicking useless at her ribs. Her pulse falters, seems to lose its rhythm in her chest.
Do not be afraid, the widow said. But for the first time in her memory, María is.
Because she does not want to die.
She cannot die.
She—
Her heart skips, and stumbles, the world receding with its tripping steps. A flat black darkness is sweeping in, and in that dark, María sees her short life unspool.
She is a skinny girl on a stable roof, spitting cherry pits over the side.
She is watching caravan after caravan go by.
She is sitting by the hearth while her mother twists bridal knots into her hair.
She is stretched in an alcove, and sitting silent at a wedding feast.
She is a small flame, smothered before it has a chance to burn.
María sees it all unravel, and her anger rises at the meager sum of it, and at its sudden ending.
By now the pain is gone, and María can feel the moment Sabine’s mouth finally lets go, when teeth slide free of skin.
It is like the last string of a puppet being cut. The last ounce of strength goes out of her. Her legs buckle. She would fall, but Sabine is there to hold her up. As if she weighs nothing.
Sabine, who turns María in her arms.
Sabine, whose lips are dark now, blood trailing in ribbons down her throat.
Sabine, who smiles, teeth stained red, as if she has not just killed María.
Sabine, who now touches her own neck, drags a nail over the skin, which parts, blackish blood welling as she holds María close, and tells her, “Drink.”
Drink, she says, as if it is a cup of chocolate.
Drink, she says, and María does.
The widow’s blood spills across her tongue, sweet, and strange, and slightly rotten, turned with loam, and leaf soil, honey, and ash. And as it rolls down her throat, her pulse recovers in her chest, reclaims a slow but steady beat. Her legs grow strong enough to hold her up. Her mind begins to clear.
“Enough,” Sabine says gently, stroking María’s hair.
But it is not enough. She bites into the widow’s throat, and the blood, which had begun to slow, now courses faster. One cold hand presses against María’s chest.
“Enough,” says Sabine again, and this time there is an edge of warning. The word rolls through María with surprising force. But it does not hold a candle to her thirst. She feels hollowed out with hunger. And so she drinks, and the blood fills her mouth, blooms inside her as it spreads.
“Stop,” hisses the widow, but María doesn’t want to.
Her teeth stay locked against the other woman’s throat, and now Sabine is the one struggling against her, locked inside the cage of her embrace, and she is strong, much stronger than María was, but with every passing beat, María steals a little more, until she can taste it in the widow’s blood, the fear she felt moments before.
María doesn’t stop.
She drinks, until the widow weakens, sags.
Drinks, until the blood stops rising to her lips.
Drinks, until Sabine goes stiff, then still.
Drinks, and does not realize the body in her arms is dead until it breaks. Crumbles between her fingers, crashes soundless to the floor.
She startles, then, as if from sleep. Stares down at what’s left of Sabine Boucher. The shop is not as dark as she first thought, and moonlight finds small fissures, glances off the ash that was the widow’s skin, the silver strands that were her hair, the gray cloth of her dress, which has fallen in a formless heap, mingled with the rest.
She reaches up to touch the torn skin of her throat, ruined by the widow’s teeth, only to find the gash is gone, the skin already closed. She marvels, does not understand what’s happened, or what’s happening. Only knows that death was close enough to touch, and then cast off.
And yet, she doesn’t feel truly rid of it.
María sits on the floor beside the widow’s remains, and feels a moment of—not of regret, but disappointment. At being left, even though she knows it was her doing.
She knows, as well, something is wrong. No, not wrong, just—strange. Out of place. As if a piece of her has been ripped away, but something new has grown up just as quickly in its wake, so that she doesn’t feel the absence.
Something new, and yet familiar, some version of her that has been buried for a long, long time, and has at last been watered, tended, given leave to bloom.
She reaches out and runs her fingers through the ash.
Knows she should feel horrified.
But as she rises to her feet, all she feels is hungry.
María looks up at the Olivares house.
The window she climbed out of, the pitched roof she crossed, the place she dropped, and feels no desire to go back the way she came.
Instead, she strolls up to the door and knocks.
Despite the ungodly hour, she swings the iron ring against the wood, shattering the quiet of the house. The servants are roused first, of course. She can hear them scurrying about like mice inside the walls. Then the door swings open, and what a sight she must be, their viscountess, standing on the wrong side of the threshold, dressed for sleep and stained with blood.
Their eyes go wide with panic—how strange, that she can almost taste their worry, like sugar on the air—as they usher her inside, asking her what happened, is she hurt, where has she been?
“It is nothing,” she says, and it’s the first time María has spoken, since the widow, since the bite, since the hunger and the ash. Her voice is hers, and not, loud, and not, strange, and not. Calm, and not—stitched with a giddy thread.
She brushes the servants away and climbs the stairs as if nothing is amiss. As if she has not been buried and born in the same night. In her room, she finds Andrés, already on his feet. Half-awake, confusion painted on his face.
It quickly turns to rage as he takes in the open window and his disheveled wife, standing in the doorway and not beside him in the bed.
“What have you done?” he demands. “Where have you been?”
She shrugs, and says it doesn’t matter, delighting at the anger that sparks across his face. He grabs her arm, and yesterday his grip would have been hard enough to bruise, but now it feels like nothing, and María simply watches, curious to see what he’ll do next.
He’s spitting venom now, calling her a whore, saying he will teach her what happens to an unfaithful wife, but his pulse is louder than his voice, a drumbeat smothering the rest. It is all she can hear. He drags her, roughly, to the bed, pushes her down and climbs on top, and that is when the moment turns.
She turns.
Rolls, and is on top, her red hair loose and pooling like a curtain around them. Lovebirds locked within their nest.
“Esposo mío,” she coos, the slender fingers of one hand curling round his wrists, pinning them over his head. Andrés stares up at her, furious, perplexed. He is twice her size, but it doesn’t matter now. In the intervening night, he has grown soft, and she has turned to stone.
And now, in her hand, he is bruising.
“María,” he gasps, calling her by her name—at last, little as she likes it.
She can feel the blood pumping in his veins, can see it at his temple, in the thicket at his throat. Her mouth begins to ache, and she grabs his hair, the way he did hers so many times, yanking his head back to expose the column of his neck. His life, right there, beneath thin skin, so close. Her teeth prick her bottom lip, and the air begins to taste like fear.
His, of course, not hers.
She has done away with that. Left it in the ashes of the widow’s shop.
“María,” he pleads again, and all she can think is that she’s always hated that name. How it has never fit. And then she remembers what the other woman said, about being free to live as you please. To be who you please, take what you please.
If you see a thing you want . . .
And she has, hasn’t she? Turned it in her mouth a hundred times, just to savor the sound. So as María’s husband begs his wife to stop, she leans low and lays her face against his so they are cheek to cheek.
“María is no more,” she whispers in his ear. “My name is Sabine.”
Right before she sinks her teeth into his throat.
His skin breaks like ripened fruit, life spilling across her tongue, flooding her mouth, and if the widow’s blood was bread, then this is wine. Bright and dizzying and sweet.
The viscount thrashes, bellowing in rage and pain—how strange that she can taste them both, right there in his blood—but she has heard enough of Andrés Olivares. She wraps her hand over his mouth, and drinks, and drinks, and as his heartbeat slows, her own begins to quicken, or so it seems.
She doesn’t yet know that her own heart has ceased to beat. That what she feels now is nothing but an echo of a stolen pulse, a rhythm borrowed for the time it takes to drink. That as quickly as it ends, she will be raked by thirst again, not only for the taste of blood itself, but for the drum it beats inside her.
She doesn’t know.
All she knows is that, at last, she feels alive.
Andrés has gone limp beneath her. She stares down at his corpse.
“Who is the empty vessel now?” she asks as she climbs off him, the pulse already dying in her chest.
She passes an iron lamp, candles burning in their posts, and tips it over, watches the fire meet the rugs and catch. Takes a lantern and trails the flame against a tapestry, sets it to the edge of a portrait.
The count appears, his hair askew, his face a mask of shock and fear. She knows she must be quite a sight, hair loose, and crimson spilling down her front.
“María—”
She presses the old man back into the wall, and smiles, showing her sharpened teeth. “Not anymore.”
His blood tastes like arrogance, like greed, his pulse barely a flutter in her chest.
How disappointing.
The countess stumbles from her room, pawing down a wall, squawking for the servants who have already fled. Her son’s wife, his murderer, his widow, stands and watches the countess reach the edge of the stairs, watches her trip, and fall, crashing down, only to shatter at the bottom.
Eight steps, it turns out, is enough to break a neck.
The fire spreads, licking the stone walls of the Olivares house.
And just like that, her old life burns.
By the time they put the fire out, she will be gone.
By the time the city guards search the ruined house for corpses, and find the young viscountess missing.
By the time the family’s bodies are buried, and the servants who fled begin to talk.
There is no point in lingering.
No, she has had more than enough of León.
The stable door is locked, but one swift push and the wood splinters around the iron, a second and it gives. She takes her husband’s horse, since he won’t need it anymore.
The massive mount stands in the farthest stall, but when she reaches out to pet its neck the beast rears back, as if she’s holding a hot poker. Its eyes go wide, a feral panic taking hold, and she withdraws her hand, marvels at the way it knows, when Andrés didn’t. Knows what she now is, and isn’t. Knows enough to fear. Perhaps the horse simply smells the blood, but she thinks it senses something else—violence, danger, death.
Either way, it stomps its hooves, warning her away, and so the woman who was once María—how easy, to cast the old name off with that old self—abandons the horse and the stable and the burning house.
And Sabine never once looks back.
