Tiago’s borrowed body sprinted across the plain, screeching and flapping his arms in a useless bid to reach the sky.
His mother pursued him. “Box him in. Seth, to the right. Box him in!”
“I’m trying. Shit. How’d he get out?”
“This happens sometimes,” Ofelia hollered. “Some of them are just smart enough to flap their way out the door.”
Seth made a lunge for Tiago, missed, and skidded on the dew-slick grass. His freshly inked forked-tongue hexentat gave a protesting sting across his back. “Are you gonna help?”
“I am! I’m providing context!”
Tiago reached the base of a tree and uselessly hopped at its lower branches. He saw Seth coming, bolted the other way, and Annalise slide-tackled into his path. She caught him as he flopped forward over her, rolling with him and pinning him to the ground.
“Cuff him,” she cried. “Cuff him!”
Seth fumbled the Passkeys onto Tiago’s wrists. They jangled with Tiago’s mad, half-arrested flapping.
Ofelia was doubled over atop the carriage, her giggle fit high and piping. Annalise lay on the ground, one hand clamped around her flopping son’s ankle to keep him from sprinting away again, and joined in, wheezing with helpless laughter.
A grouse with its head twisted halfway off landed in her lap and sent her into renewed convulsions. That got Seth, too, who sat down and laughed with the al Ydris ladies, hoarse and breathless. A golden eagle flapped to the ground next to the corpse, tilted its head, and scowled at them.
“I’m sorry.” Annalise wiped at her eye and left a thumbprint of mud on her face. “I’m sorry, Sunshine. I know. It’s our fault. I—”
“GRAW,” Tiago cried, and she descended into cackling again.
The eagle shuddered; its feathers ruffled and lay flat again. With a panicky squawk it took to the sky. Its shadow streaked past Tiago, who sat up and held his shackled wrists up.
“Fuck you all,” he said. “Enjoy the grouse.”
“Thank you.” Seth lifted the carcass from the dirt as Annalise unlocked the cuffs. “Thanks, T. This’ll be delicious.”
“You really moved with that eagle at the reins,” Annalise said. “We all oughta take notes.” She shoved her neck forward and put on a birdbrained look. “New footrace technique.”
Ofelia snapped her book shut. “I’m not a huge fan of grouse. It tastes like liver.”
“You’re overcooking it, then,” Seth said. “I’ll show you.”
“Save some for me.” Annalise stretched her back out as she got to her feet. “I’m riding ahead to Fontana. Should be back by dinner, I reckon.” She dusted the dirt from her black breeches. “Bonfire tonight, y’think?”
“I’m game,” Tiago said. “What’re you doing in Fontana?”
“Gotta find someone to get a good look at that circle we found last night,” Annalise said. “Once we learn whatever they were doing, or thought they were doing, we’ll have the last piece of the puzzle.”
Now that she’d ducked the chance to be useful, Ofelia dropped nimbly from the carriage roof and joined them. “Surely you don’t need to go all the way to Fontana. Lisa knows enough to glean the circle, no?”
Annalise shook her head. “I want an expert.” Ofelia opened her mouth to reply—her mother bulldozed over her. “You’ll all handle fine without me for a few hours, right? Seth’s got dinner covered.”
Ofelia shrugged and carelessly tossed her book into the open carriage door. “I suppose I’m off to find some kindling, then.”
Seth felt the tingling prickle of eyes on him—Tiago was giving him a frowning examination. He wondered why, for a moment, and then realized with a flutter in his stomach the boy’s suspicion. His suspicion now, too. He approached Annalise as she rubbed Demetrius behind the ear.
“Hey,” he said. “You’re not doing this because of me, are you?”
She flicked the arms of her frosted glasses out. “Doing what?”
“Heading into Fontana to find an expert instead of putting Lisa on. Are you doing it because you’re… y’know. Worried?”
“Uhh.” Her sunglasses froze halfway to her face. “No, no. No, I’m just—using a Darkness can really tucker you out.” She put them on with haste. “And I already made a swap the other day for the gray feather. And Lisa, you know, she’s more of an applied sorceress than a hexologist. And, uh.” She sighed. “This isn’t convincing you, is it?”
“You don’t need to convince me,” he said. “I trust you. I’m the one who has to convince you, right?”
She sighed again and tilted her head back. The verdigris sky filled her glasses’ round reflections. “Now, what am I supposed to say to that? How did this conman I picked up turn out to be such a fucking gentleman?”
“May I ask about Lisa? A question? You don’t have to answer it.”
Annalise gave a hesitant nod.
“What is it about me that makes her sure, when you aren’t?”
She chewed her lip. Her eyes cast themselves down, at the body she shared with her sorcerous self, as if there was an answer there to be read.
“Is she just a hornier person?” Seth offered.
“She—well, that’s not wrong, I guess.” Annalise climbed into her black-dyed saddle. “I don’t mean to give you the brush-off on this, Seth, honest. I gotta think about it. You deserve a good answer.”
“Okay.” He stepped out of Demetrius’ path and put his hands on his hips. “Well, Tiago got us the meat, Feeli’s getting the kindling. I guess I’m foraging. Think there were some wild onions in those woods.”
Annalise brightened at his ready changing of the subject. “You planning something special, il Gutierre?”
“Way to a woman’s heart, right?”
She smiled at him. “Leave you to it, then.”
He watched her ride off toward Fontana and away from whatever might have been next between them. That was okay, he decided. There was just the one road, after all, for a Verdugo. And just the one destination.
Tiago stared askance at the cutting board. The knife practically blurred as it chopped the onion greens. “How the hell are you that fast?”
“Same way anyone’s anything.” Seth swiped the last few verdant rings from the edge of the knife and scraped the aromatics into a pile. “I had some hairy fucker yell at me, I nearly lost a couple knuckles, I learned.” He tipped the cutting board into the spitting skillet and inhaled the sweet, savory bloom.
Tiago sniffed appreciatively. “I might need to yell more when I teach you sword work.”
“Or grow more hair, maybe,” Seth said.
“I’ll consider it.”
Ofelia adjusted the pile of brush beneath the stacked wood and stepped out of the circle of stone. “Mother generally requires sign-off on use of the butter.”
“She’ll give it retroactively when she tries this,” Seth said.
Tiago produced a book of matches. Ofelia waved him off. “I have something for this now. Time to take it for a spin.”
She took a deep inhale, coughed, sputtered, and breathed out a gush of flame across the bonfire, which blossomed into eager life.
“Damn,” Tiago said. “I should’ve gone with you two. That scriber knows her work”
Ofelia spat onto the ground. “She’s a bullshitter. She said the taste would be fine. Ugh. I feel like I just licked a fireplace.”
“I can fix that.” Seth passed her a plate of delicately roasted grouse, smothered in gleaming sauce, made from butter and ramp and a pour of red wine he’d likewise obtain retroactive permission for, he was sure. “Try this.”
The al Ydrises took their places around the fire and tucked into Seth’s cooking. Tiago’s dark eyes shut as his jaw worked. “Fucking hell,” he murmured. “Fuck off, Seth. How did you do that?”
“Oh, this is good.” Ofelia licked her fork. “Why do we not force you into cooking all the time?”
Seth ate with them, to the clicking of cutlery and the crackling of fire amid a silence that he could finally describe as friendly, and felt a warmth that had nothing to do with the bonfire around which they sat.
Ofelia ensured her plate was clean before she set it aside. “I think that seals it, Tiago,” she said.
He nodded.
Seth took a final buttery bite and lowered his fork. “Seals what?”
“You saved my life,” Ofelia said. “You saved Tiago’s, as well. You happened to do it in the same day, which doesn’t have so much bearing on all this but which is rather remarkable. And this grouse is really quite amazing.”
“So we’re telling you something,” Tiago said.
“Something important,” Ofelia said.
Seth carefully placed his plate on the ground by the log he’d sat upon. The night drew in; when had it gotten this dark?
“And you can’t tell Annalise you learned it from us.” Tiago turned his face from the fire; half of it cast into shadow. “Maybe she’ll reveal it herself, sometime. Maybe she won’t. As far as Feeli and I are concerned, it’s time you were made aware.”
“Aware of what?”
“Of what you’re stepping into,” Tiago said. “The full context of the weird, sad life this family has led.”
”The story Annalise told you,” Ofelia said. “Of how she went to the Winter War and lost her light. It was us.”
“What was you?”
“She went to the front to escape execution for killing our father. And the story she tells is he got drunk and fell down the stairs. No.” Tiago shook his head. “It was us.”
Seth’s food had settled pleasantly over his stomach; now it churned.
“Annalise doesn’t like telling this to people,” Tiago said. “She won’t tell you about him; she thinks such things are best left in the past, and probably she’s right. But he was a nightmare, our father.”
“You know something about what that was like, I think,” Ofelia said. “Being raised by someone you fear. When a door opens or shuts too quick, you get this expression. Like you grew up with that sound as the herald of doom. And it’s far away, but you never quite shake it. Right?”
Seth nodded.
“He was drunk, yes.” Tiago ticked the truth off on his fingerpad. “And on the top of the stairs, yes. He was bellowing into the basement, calling Ofelia a stupid little whore, saying come back upstairs so he could blacken her other eye. Make them match. I thought to myself: wouldn’t it be wonderful to watch him fall? And I pushed him, and it was.”
He poked another log into the base of the bonfire as it crackled and sparked. He stared at it impassively.
“It was the first wonderful thing I’d ever seen.”
“He was lying at the bottom of the stairs.” Ofelia took the story over. It was as if they’d practiced it. “Broken and begging. And Tiago was kneeling over him, terrified of what he’d done. And I took hold of him by the shoulders—my brother, I mean—and told him: if Kevan ever stands back up, it will only get worse.”
“So we dragged him back up the stairs,” Tiago said. “The two of us. And he was calling me son. It had only ever been boy. Now it was son. Son, please. Son, I love you. Son, don’t. But I did. Twice.”
The fire danced in the inky pool of Ofelia’s eye. “We did. And then we pushed him a third time, to make sure.”
“And when it was done,” Tiago said, “and he was dead, I wept with relief. And when the hermandati came to take us away I was ready. I was ready to say it was me. Ofelia was ready to say it was her. Annalise took the fall.”
The wood crackled. In the distance a mockingbird warbled its amorous song. Neither al Ydris seemed eager to continue. Seth spoke up. “Why are you telling me this?”
“To explain why we’re here,” Tiago said. “What we’re here to do. Annalise is a Verdugo. And as far as her objective matches ours, we help her take heads. But that’s not why we went unlit, and it’s not our primary aim.”
“As much of a taskmaster as Tiago can be sometimes,” Ofelia said.
“We’re here because we have a responsibility.” Tiago turned his intense gaze from the darkened sky to Seth’s face. “To fix the woman we broke. I will never mourn for my father, but I mourn for her. We put her up in the Winter War. We are why she went in that hole and came out unlit. We can never give her back what she used to be. But what we can do, we will. We ruined her life. Now we need to un-ruin it. Somehow.”
Seth felt like he was being advanced upon with a broom again. He placed his feet carefully. Make space. “What does that mean about me? And her?”
“That is the question, isn’t it?” Ofelia turned her fork in place on its edge. “Tiago and I have been wondering, too. Whether you might be a partner for this endeavor, or a problem. We’ve gone back and forth.”
“And if I’m a problem I might fall down some stairs?”
Ofelia chuckled. “We just felt you should know our history, and our position. We can’t very well threaten the fellow who saved our lives.”
“And it wouldn’t be stairs, anyway,” Tiago added. “If someone needs killing these days, I have a sword.”
“Tiago,” Ofelia said.
“Ofelia,” Tiago said.
“Chiiildreeeen,” called a musical voice, from outside the bonfire’s glow.
The three of them turned toward it. A corpse lantern was bobbing down the road toward the carriage, held in the raised hand of a solitary rider. Lisa al Ydris beamed at them through the final dregs of day.
“Changed my mind,” she said. “You were right, Feeli. I really ought to just get that circle sorted myself.”
She slid from Demetrius and swayed into the firelight.
“Pass me a plate of whatever ambrosia our wonderful little thief has prepared.” She located Seth where he sat nailed to his log. She winked at him. “I do believe it’s going to be a long night.”