Chapter 23
Minerva
Throughout the day, I spent my energy on remaining as invisible as possible. I kept my chin low. I ate quickly at meals and vanished into my chores. Every look cast my way—by a cook, by Cosme—sent alarms rattling up and down my rib cage.
Uproar flashed through the del Valles at the loss of the captured spy, swift and white-hot.
It was all the liveried servants gossiped about as they flitted in and out of the kitchen during meals.
All the guards had been chastised thoroughly by Octaviana.
Three had been removed from their posts and whipped.
One spent part of the morning in the corner of the kitchen as a stable boy applied dressing to the lashings.
I caught sight of him as I was dashing into the kitchen to get a new feather duster for Sara—for a fleeting second, I thought there were pieces of raw meat on his back.
My stomach went sour when I realized my mistake—he was the raw meat.
And everyone whispered how lucky he was.
A fourth guard, it was said, had been shot.
The Viceroy, la senora told Cosme, would be sending replacements shortly. Replacements who know what to do with prisoners, she apparently said.
If anyone knew it was me, I would be in a cage by now—or worse.
I repeated this mantra to myself over and over as I tidied the living room alongside Sara and moved upstairs to turn down the bedrooms. I slowed my shaking hands as I dimmed chispa lamps.
The golden light within no longer enchanted me.
I turned my face away from the soft sparks illuminating the glass and the suggestion of butterflies’ wings.
I couldn’t help but wonder whose chispa burned within.
Monsters. Murderers. Ygnacio’s voice hounded me as I ascended the central staircase. It was not long before I stood at the door of the chambers of the del Valle I considered the most monstrous.
The hall was empty. The family were all below, including Leoncio. It was safe for me to go inside and dust around dead butterflies and skewered scorpions.
Yet I stared at the door handle, willing myself to open it and not moving.
“Finally, a moment alone with my favorite living creature,” a voice crooned to my right.
I jumped, broom held out defensively.
But it was only a ghost.
I relaxed. Ygnacio looked like a memory, or the afterthought of what a person ought to look like. His edges faded until they were transparent.
The one unchanged thing was his eyes: coal-black and burning with an uncanny carnivory that should have sent me stumbling backward.
Only a ghost, I repeated to myself.
A laugh unfurled in my chest, unhinged and ready to ricochet off the walls of the empty hall like a gunshot. I bit it back, but I still felt it transform my face.
It was the laugh of a girl who had lost her mind.
Ygnacio looked smug, as if he thought I was amused by his greeting.
“We have much to discuss,” he said. “What your brother said when I told him you would spy, why the insurgents are idiots, and what we should actually be doing to bring this house to its knees.”
A discussion? In the hall, with me talking to empty air?
“I can’t talk here,” I whispered. “Someone will hear.”
He gestured gallantly at Leoncio’s door, a no, please, you first gesture. The handle turned of its own accord. The door swung inward with a conspiratorial creak.
“You hesitate,” he observed.
Yes, obviously, I wanted to snap. But I heard Sara’s footsteps moving through Eugenia’s rooms down the hall. Even she would think twice about tolerating me if she caught me talking to an empty hall.
“I’ll watch your back,” Ygnacio said.
“You had better,” I murmured, barely parting my lips. I stepped into Leoncio’s suite with my cleaning supplies and nudged the door shut with my heel.
Ygnacio passed right through the door.
“Thank you for saving Arnulfo,” I whispered, pulling a feather duster from my tools and going into the bedroom.
“You should have seen his expression when he saw me,” Ygnacio drawled.
He made himself at home in the sitting room of Leoncio’s suite, lounging on an elegant velvet chaise. He folded his hands behind his head and gazed at the ceiling, his posture one of languid elegance. “He looked as if he had seen a ghost.”
“Ha.” There was more dust in here than usual, since I had fled before finishing my tasks the last time I set foot in Leoncio’s den. As I began my routine, it occured to me that I was waiting for him to speak. Ygnacio, I realized, loved an audience. An engaged one. Someone to listen to him.
The familiarity of our roles struck a note that hummed long after the music faded.
It was so like being in Senora Encarnación’s company.
Here was someone who had years to stew in their thoughts and opinions about how wrong the world was around them, and finally, when given a listening ear, they were filled with delight.
A delight that was almost childlike in its innocence.
Ygnacio gazed off into a corner of the room, pensive.
“I know, I know,” he said softly.
“What?”
He turned his face to me, as if only then remembering I was there.
“Would you be surprised to know I am not the only haunting in this house?” he asked.
“Surprised? No,” I said, pulling a clean sheet tight across the mattress. I might have other feelings, though. Apprehension. Wariness.
Dread. And no small amount of it.
“What if I told you they are hungry?”
The seven bracelets with seven knots on my wrist seemed so flimsy. The night beyond the house seemed to seep in through the windows, clawing at the lamps. I resisted the urge to brighten them. Would I ever be able to stomach a chispa lamp again?
I straightened and put my hands on my hips.
“Stop trying to scare me.” I was sweating slightly from the effort of stripping sheets and tossing them into a basket. “There’s no need to be a bully. I already promised to help you.”
After Arnulfo had fled, I sat in the kitchen with the other servants as we were briefed by Cosme about the morning’s events and sternly commanded to give him any information we had about the spy’s flight.
I twisted my hands in my lap. Not only from anxiety—though anxiety hummed through my body like a thousand hummingbirds’ wings—but from agitation.
My brother had come within a hair’s breadth of death. Because he was a Valbuenista. Because he believed that the Viceroy and the del Valles should not rule. Because of politics.
Arnulfo cared about politics more than he cared about having a roof over his head.
Even though we grew up in the same house with empty cupboards, a house empty of a mother, something in him had lifted his chin to look beyond his own bare plate on the table.
He and Armando both. He locked his gaze on horizons I had never been able to see.
I could never spare a glance away from Papá’s roving punishment belt.
I didn’t understand why he cared so much for a president whose rule did not help our family at all. There was so much I did not understand.
But there was one thing I knew for certain. One thing that rang pure and true through me when I saw him crouched in a cage in the slaughterhouse, his face smeared with dirt.
I did not want him to die.
I was not a Hound on Senora Encarnación’s elaborate board, eagle-eyed as I watched the moves of others, anticipating the perfect moment to attack.
But I did live in the bosom of the del Valle family, and I could be be a thorn in their side.
For Arnulfo, who could have more and better chances to protect himself if I sowed chaos among the Viceroy’s family.
For Senora Encarnación, who deserved better family than those callous turncoats and weaklings.
“I’m simply telling you the truth,” Ygnacio said, the coolness in his voice bringing me swiftly back to the present. “I have kin, in this house. They are my allies. When I am strong enough, I will free them to feed.”
“Feed,” I repeated.
“They grow”—he paused, as if listening to something far away—“impatient.”
“So open the chispa cupboard in the hall,” I said. “For you and them. But give me a hand before you do, will you? Unless you’ve grown impossibly lazy in your old age.”
To his credit, Ygnacio rose and followed me into the bedroom. He took the far side of the sheet I was struggling to put on the bed. The white cloth gleamed through his semitransparent hands as he straightened and tucked the fabric around the corners of the mattress, mimicking my motions.
“Chispa doesn’t work that way,” he said. “It must be fresh.”
His tongue rolled over the r with gusto. Frrresh. Like a ripened fruit plucked from a tree. Like Senora Encarnación turning husk-like and dry.
I shook out my shoulders to keep from shuddering. “I’m not killing anyone.”
Ygnacio straightened. There was a glint in his reptilian eyes that put me ill at ease. “I thought you said you wanted to be my weapon.”
“Yes.” I folded my arms across my chest. As if that could protect me from him. “And I am no dumb tool to be used however you want.”
“I never said you were,” Ygnacio said. He sounded defensive. “But I released your brother, and in return—”
“You wanted my help and I will give it the way I choose to give it,” I said. “Killing a few del Valles won’t change enough. I want to ruin them.” Because as long as they ruled, my brother would fight them, and they would hunt him.
I took the basket of linens into the sitting room. Brushing past Ygnacio felt like walking through a draft; I shuddered, but I was determined not to fear him.
He had power. But he seemed to need me, and that meant that I had power, too.
I set the basket down and began dusting around all of Leoncio’s poisonous trinkets and straightening books haphazardly cast around the room.
“So you’ve finally realized that your precious Senora Encarnación was a part of a family of monsters?” Ygnacio’s voice came from behind me.
I turned and jabbed the feather duster at him accusingly. “Keep la senora out of this.”
“She was no better than the rest of them and you know it,” Ygnacio countered, passing directly through the furniture to follow me across the sitting room. The mirror over the mantel needed polishing. I took a rag from my apron pocket and stood on tiptoes to begin.
I saw myself. My pale face and severe, tight plaits. Behind me, there was no reflection of Ygnacio.
Cold trickled down my spine.
“You don’t want to admit that because she was kind to you,” his disembodied voice said. “You’re willing to overlook what a villain she was.”
“It’s not that simple.” I polished the mirror harder. Dust motes flew into the air like irritated bees.
“Yes, it is,” Ygnacio said. “You can’t pretend that it’s principle that makes you want to bring down the del Valles after benefiting so much from their protection. You’re selfish.”
I whirled on him. “You barely know me.”
“I’ve watched you plenty.” Not a shred of guilt or shame crossed his face as he said this.
“Creep,” I snapped, and threw the polishing cloth into the basket with the other dirty linens.
“The Valbuenistas are principled,” he said, voice dripping with condescension.
“They have morals and values. That’s why they always fail.
They get caught up in trying to outperform and waste their energy nipping at each other’s heels.
But you? You’re self-centered. You don’t have grand ambitions.
They hurt your brother, and all of a sudden, it’s personal.
All of a sudden, you want revenge. That’s why you and I—”
The door to the hall opened.
I had taken too long.
My entire body froze. All but my heart, which skittered like a mouse trapped in a cage.
Slowly, I turned my face to the door as Leoncio sauntered into the room.
“Meet me on the fourth floor tonight,” Ygnacio whispered. “We have planning to do.”
Out of the corner of my eye, he vanished.
Panic rose acidic in my throat. The bastard. He abandoned me. I should not have trusted him.
The thought had not even finished unfurling through my mind when I saw Leoncio’s eyes widen. He dashed into the room, toward the nearest lamp, which he grasped with a shaking hand. He turned it all the way up with an eruption of gold so bright that I flinched.
He stayed there, unmoving. Eyes wide. Frozen, as if posed for a painter.
He didn’t approach me. He didn’t so much as look at me as I bent down and collected the basket of linens, as I braced it on my hip and took the duster in my other hand. His eyes tracked my movement as I walked to the open door, but they were not fixed on me.
They were fixed on something just beyond.
I shot a glance back over my shoulder as I stepped through the doorway.
Behind me hovered a dark shadow, thick enough to be a cloud, rumbling and roiling like a storm. No glint of color or bone suggested the hint of claws and teeth, but I sensed that they were there, waiting to be bared.
It escorted me out of Leoncio’s rooms, a genteel chaperone. When I closed the door behind me, it dissipated into the gloom of the hallway.
I readjusted the weight of the basket on my hip. A smile toyed at the corner of my mouth.