Chapter 2 Ignacio #2
Ignacio reached under the desk and pressed a nearly imperceptible button. For most of his life, he’d never known the hidden switch existed. He might never have known if his first and only love hadn’t told him of it right before she squished his heart under her shoe.
The well-greased mechanisms engaged, and the door to his father’s real office opened as quiet as the swish of a horse’s tail. His pulse quickened as he entered.
At the center of the circular war room stood a massive table with a detailed map unfurled over the glossy wood.
Figures in the silver-and-black regalia of Costa Mayor stood in a dense line far past the borders of Costa Mayor and into the northern territories of Dos Palos.
Father had marked X’s over landmarks. The markings might seem random. But Father’s actions were never random.
These X’s must have been other places where they had found whatever material General Keara and the Blackbirds had stuffed into their satchels in that village.
Ignacio’s eyes roamed over the map. The X’s were almost all the way to the farthest tip of Dos Palos.
Nearly the entire country had been overtaken.
This was possibly incriminating, but people in Costa Mayor had been taught to hate and fear people from Dos Palos for a dozen years. Without proof that the war wasn’t Dos Palos’s doing, Ignacio’s countrymen could only be glad to see the Blackbirds fighting so valiantly.
He needed hard evidence that the war had never been about protecting Costa Mayor from invaders.
That it was, in truth, the Blackbirds who had been chipping away at Dos Palos’s borders.
That thousands of lives had been lost on both sides because King Amadeo wanted to obtain whatever resources were in their springs.
Ignacio had to find something he could take without his father’s notice.
Correspondence with his generals or the king, notes about what lay beneath the X’s on the map…
something to give to the Defiant, which operated the one printing press in all of Costa Mayor that was ready to expose what was truly going on.
He thumbed through ledgers and notes. There was nothing there. It was as if his father didn’t even trust the walls of his own home with his sins.
Horse hooves clopped on the cobbled road outside. Ignacio paused. From within the hidden office, it was hard to decipher if the sound was close or a street over.
Did I get the days wrong? Perhaps Father changed his plans?
No. Ignacio was merely being hyper-vigilant. Father wouldn’t be back yet. And he preferred to use his motorcar. Their carriage hadn’t been hitched in years.
Either way, Ignacio didn’t want to be inside his childhood home any longer than necessary.
He strode over to the lone bookshelf. A broken hand mirror lay face up on the dark wood.
That wasn’t like Father, to keep around things of no value.
Ignacio’s gaze landed on a tattered spine tucked amongst the tomes.
“My stars,” he whispered.
Slowly, so as not to rip the fraying edges, he pulled out a small book.
The cover had been torn off, but Ignacio still remembered it clear as day.
It had been a vibrant drawing of two young men smiling before an inky-black locomotive.
Ignacio hadn’t seen this book since before his mother died.
She had read the peculiar fable to him on nights his father was away because Father loathed fantastical tales about the gods of old.
He claimed it was blasphemous to our true god, the crown.
Ignacio had thought this book had been lost to him for good.
Not a single shop in Costa Mayor sold such stories any longer.
If a work wasn’t in praise of King Amadeo, it was forbidden.
As were most vices, like alcohol consumption, gambling, and other illicit affairs, unless you were part of the court or the Blackbirds.
Dogs barked outside.
Ignacio quickly placed the book back. There was no time to reminisce.
He started for the desk but stopped when the rubbish bin caught his attention. The metal basket was filled with crumpled parchment. Ignacio quickly snatched a wad of paper from the top of the pile and flattened it.
His eyebrows flew up in confusion.
It was a flyer for a traveling circus. Carnival Fantástico.
He’d heard the name many times over the years.
Boys from school dared each other to climb the fences that lined the perimeters whenever it suddenly showed up outside of town, but the guards were good at finding anyone who hadn’t paid the entry fee.
Authentic magic was rumored to exist within the carnival.
His bunkmate at cadet training swore he saw a man fly there once.
Ignacio didn’t believe in magic, but there must have been something strange at play because the carnival was the one place the king and his men never touched.
Scratching his head, he flipped the paper over.
Héctor,
Please come and see me.
“Héctor?” Ignacio whispered. No one ever called his father by his first name. Even when his mother was alive, she used honorifics.
Ignacio grabbed a few more crumpled flyers and smoothed them out.
Héctor,
We need to speak.
Héctor,
We have business to attend to. Don’t be such a wet blanket. Come to Carnival Fantástico. It is magnificent indeed.
Héctor,
The carnival will be stopping near your home on the 16th of March. Will I see you then?
The sixteenth? Ignacio checked the clicking timepiece on the desk. That was tonight.
Héctor,
Don’t make me angry. I know your secrets. And I know who you wish to keep your sad secrets from.
Ignacio straightened his spine.
Secrets? What sort of secrets would someone in the carnival know about Father?
He grabbed the last balled-up flyer and opened it. His stomach plummeted to his boots.
A drawing of a hand mirror framed with flowers winked up at him. The words “We See You” were woven around it. But it wasn’t the sketch or the peculiar phrase that quickened his pulse. It was the familiar silvery-black ink with shifting hues of purple, blue, and gold.
“This cannot be,” he said. “It can’t be the same ink.”
Still holding the flyer, Ignacio stuffed the rest of the papers back in the bin and bolted out of the office.
He cut right, heading straight for his old bedroom.
He burst through the door, not caring who heard.
Ignacio wrenched open his armoire and dug through old clothes and dusty toys until his fingers grazed over a wooden box.
He yanked it out and flung open the lid.
Panting as if he’d run across the world, Ignacio gazed down at the items still perfectly placed inside.
Odd trinkets he’d been given or secretly collected.
Painted soda-pop caps. A photograph taken of his mother, the sepia tones doing little to capture the spark in her hazel eyes, the soft warmth of her dark brown skin.
Gingerly, he scooped up an old mint tin.
His thumb grazed over the initials he’d painstakingly scratched into the front only a few years ago.
His insides no longer fluttered like startled birds when he thought of the tiny notes he and Dovie had passed through the vents. Now, his insides soured with regret. Ignacio stuffed the container into his coat pocket. He wasn’t sure why. Perhaps he enjoyed torturing himself.
His eyes fixed on something at the bottom of the box.
He hesitated for a moment, then grabbed the folded letter that had nearly destroyed him.
He placed the box onto his old bed before unfolding the paper.
His vision blurred. But he didn’t need to see to know what it said; he had memorized every word of the letter.
They were practically tattooed on his soul.
But the ink? Could they really be written in the same ink? He raised the letter and the carnival flyer so that they were side by side. He blinked hard, then chewed on his bottom lip as he scrutinized them. The strange ink was identical.
His heart slammed so hard against his chest that he thought his ribs might crack.
There was no such ink in all of Costa Mayor.
He would know. In his desperation to find the author of the letter, he had gone to every stationery shop he could find, and no one had seen anything like it.
He had never thought to go to Carnival Fantástico and ask there. Why would he? Magic wasn’t real.
A door shut at the front of the house. Ignacio’s head snapped toward the hallway. Father’s telltale footsteps thundered like a war drum. He was moving fast.
Shit.
Ignacio stuffed the letter and flyer into his pocket and looked for a place to hide.
Though he took after his mother in coloring and demeanor, he was as tall as his father and nearly as broad.
And he had left his father’s secret office door ajar.
The second his father saw that, he would know someone had been inside.
There was only one option.
Ignacio ran for the window. Grimacing, he eased it up, hoping that the hinges had been recently oiled.
The window opened without a sound. He draped one of his legs over, followed by the other.
He swore. The tree that had stood outside his window for his entire life had been chopped down.
A piece of him broke at the mere thought.
But Father was still coming; he had to go.
Ignacio was only on the second story, but there were nothing but rosebushes to break his fall.
The floorboard on the landing step gave a recognizable creak. Father was not twenty paces away. There was no choice but to jump. His father’s boot squeaked against the polished tile. He was ten paces from the door.
Ignacio pushed himself off the ledge.
He clamped his mouth shut to hold in a hiss as angry thorns tore at his clothing and dug into his skin.
From above, the comandante’s voice roared.
Guards raced out of their small post near the front gate and barreled into the manor. Ignacio bolted from the bushes the second the area was clear and ran as hard and as fast as he could.
And he would not stop.
Not until he reached Carnival Fantástico and found out who wrote these notes to his father. And how in the hell they had access to the same ink that had once been used in the letter that shattered his heart.