Chapter 24
Ygnacio
Night cloaks the house with slumber. I wait for Minerva on the fourth floor. I can’t identify this feeling that makes my feet want to pace as I wait. I can’t be worried.
It’s simply strange to me that I now rely on someone vulnerable. What if the del Valles discover her creeping through the dark house? What if they discover her spying? They would shoot her, and that would be the end of it.
It would be my fault, wouldn’t it? Would I then steal her life with greedy fingers, burn through it like kindling, and then fall into a drunken, exhausted slumber, twitching until hunger animates me once again?
Nausea flutters in my throat at the thought.
It is not life that I steal. It is a half-life. A pale imitation. Not the kind of life Minerva has.
She should protect it more closely than she has.
I feel more than hear the quiet footsteps approach. Tap, tap, tap, like the footsteps of a mouse. To the third floor, then to the door that leads to the fourth.
The footsteps come up the stairs, then a dark head crests through the floor. Her faces rises like a moon, yellow and full, in the light of the candle that she holds before her. She approaches. Her eyes find me in the dark. When they fall on me, an odd sensation unfurls in my chest.
“Do you want to sit?” I offer stupidly, grasping for something to say that will drown out that feeling.
“Where?” She steps closer to the once-gilded sarcophagi of old. “Not there, surely.”
“No,” I say. I used to know how to speak to people. My voice is a stiff limb, jerky and achy with disuse. “There’s the floor. That’s it.”
She shrugs, uninterested in the prospect. She runs a finger along the smallest of the sarcophagi, dragging a path through the dust.
I can sense my kin shifting in sleep at her touch. The chispa that burns beneath the pad of her finger. A soft rumble emanates from the sarcophagus.
“Careful,” I warn.
She snatches her hand back.
“Is one of these…yours?”
As if the del Valles would spare such expense—any expense—to inter the body of a common laborer. “No,” I say flatly. “They dumped me in a pit out behind the house. Just like the guard they shot.”
Minerva’s head jerks up at this, her lips parted. It is the truth, but perhaps it is a shocking thing to say, now that I reflect on it. Years have blunted me to it.
“So…whose are they?” she wonders.
“In life? I have no idea,” I say. “We found them while digging the foundation of the house.”
“In life,” Minerva repeats. “And…in death, who are they?”
“My kin.”
She takes a full step back from the sarcophagi. She sinks to the floor, white nightgown settling around her knees as she puts the candlestick on the floor next to her. Its reflection in her eyes glimmers like chispa over dark water.
I sit opposite her, crossing my legs to mimic hers. Sitting opposite a living person fills me with a sweep of grief so swift it feels like a strike to the face.
Why am I not alive, like her? Why am I not alive with her? And if I cannot be, why am I still here, trapped, forced to watch the living but never growing close enough to touch them, forced to be cheek by jowl with death but never to know its peace?
“Why do I keep dreaming about them?”
It has not escaped my notice that she sat in such a way that I have my back to the sarcophagi in question, and she has her back to a wall.
“Coffins scare the living,” I say, filling my voice with gruffness to cover how ragged it feels. “I would be foolish not to use such an easy prop.”
“You use them?” Her expression is all accusation now, her dark brows rising pointedly. “You. You change my dreams?”
I try to make my shrug look smooth, or at least nonchalant. I am not sure I succeed. “I realized many years ago that I could drift into the minds of sleepers. I could see things that they concealed from the living during the day. I could shape things, if I wanted.”
A delicate tremble seizes her shoulders.
I’m taken aback by the defensiveness that flares in my chest.
“I’ve done what I must, trapped in this place,” I counter. “How else could I get the chispa I needed to make this torment bearable?”
“There are bottles upon bottles of chispa in the storage closets,” Minerva points out.
“I told you, it’s not the same,” I hiss. “You have no idea what this is like.”
I bristle at the way she’s looking at me. There’s a measure of delicate disgust, a measure of curiosity, and a measure of what might be pity, if I looked at it closely enough. I don’t. I lift my chin and fold my arms over my chest.
“No, you’re right,” she says. “I don’t know. I think I’d prefer to keep it that way, which is why I won’t go running around murdering del Valles left and right.”
“I am wounded by your lack of faith in my subtlety.”
This provokes a soft ha. Her face transforms with amusement. “I struggle to think of the way you approached me in the garden as subtle.”
A fair point. “I have a flair for the dramatic,” I say. “Death would be unbearably boring otherwise.”
“What were you trying to do?”
I shrug. “Get you to slit Leoncio’s throat in his sleep.”
Minerva’s mouth drops open. “If I had done that, I would have been thrown out of here,” she says, voice low and thoughtful. “Or actually killed. And then…consumed?” Her eyes narrow as they measure my reaction to these words.
I make a nonchalant gesture. She is correct—no reason to hide that.
“You are absolutely vile,” she spits, and her tone makes me think she actually means it. “That is as good as murdering both me and Leoncio yourself.”
“It is not,” I snap. I don’t want her to think that I am a murderer. “I seek justifiable revenge.”
“So what makes it acceptable when you kill people and not when they kill people?” she says.
“Killing is a game to them,” I say, leaning forward as my voice grows heated.
“Do you know how easy it was to convince Leoncio to poison Encarnación? How fun he thought it would be to watch her twist and writhe like an insect pinned beneath his magnifying glass? It was effortless.” Minerva’s expression transforms with disgust. Let her know how wretched Leoncio del Valle is, how he is but one branch of a rotting tree.
“I am taking back chispa that was stolen from me. My life was stolen from me. My whole family. My whole world.” I lean back.
“They consumed us, and so I consume them. If you had seen what I saw, and what I have seen in the many years since, you would want them all dead.”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Senora Encarnación always made it sound like the worst thing for a del Valle was to be without power. That powerlessness was worse than death.” She pauses, toying with a loose thread from her nightgown.
She rips it off and pulls it between her slender fingers.
I watched those fingers push pieces across Senora Encarnación’s Mice and Hounds board, her moves hesitant.
It seemed as if half the time playing was spent sweeping the tiles away and resetting the board after the crone trounced her once again.
It’s as if we set a board between us now, shunting pieces back and forth.
“I want them to be powerless,” she says. She collects Mice pieces in a corner.
“So: dead,” I counter. I set Hounds on the board. I played this game in life—though it went by another name—and have watched it over and over again in death. I know the sure way to win.
Minerva rolls her eyes.
“Dead might be too easy,” she says. “The papers say hundreds of people have been disappeared. Leoncio and Eugenia say they’re in prison or dead. Armando…my brother,” she adds, “he’s dead. He thought…”
The sentence wanders off into the dark and dies. I hear the imaginary click of tiles against one another in my mind as she considers where to place them down.
“He and Arnulfo always said that…damn it.” She breaks off, throwing her hands in the air in frustration. “Now I sound like them.”
“Fatal idealism is what I would expect of a Valbuenista,” I say. “Not you.”
“I suffered under el Presidente,” she says hotly, arguing with the specters of dead and absent brothers.
“We had less money, Papá drank more, and then he beat us more. Life was better before the Viceroy fell. And then life was even better when I was living with Senora Encarnación in Casa Azafrán. So why do I feel this way?”
“Because they’re evil,” I say. “They’re murderers.”
“Then you’re evil, for what you did to Senora Encarnación with Leoncio,” she shoots back. “You murdered her.”
Am I sure that all her pieces are Mice?
“So what about you?” I snap. “You ate at her table. I bet you happily accepted the wages she paid you. You said yourself that you benefited from her protection, and that life was good in her house. Where did her money come from? What did her family do to become as wealthy as they are? Does ignoring all of that make you evil?”
“No, that makes me desperate.” Her voice is venomous now. “It makes me pathetic. It makes me a small person who makes small choices to save her own small hide from getting skinned.”
“And yet look at you now,” I counter, gesturing expansively at her.
“You think you’re a Mouse on this board, but you’re nestled in the very heart of the del Valle family.
You could poison them all. Steal a knife and slit Cirilo’s throat when he comes back from the Capital.
Do you know who he is? He’s the general in charge of La Fortaleza.
He’s the one who decides who disappears.
And he’ll be right at your fingertips. If you act, your choices will matter.
Or they certainly could, if you wanted to accept that you’re a Hound ready to attack. ”
“Now you sound like the fatally idealistic Valbuenista.” She lowers her head into her hands and looses a deep, exhausted sigh. “All I want is Arnulfo to be safe.”
“I have a few ideas about how to ensure that,” I say.
She doesn’t even lift her head. “Killing a few del Valles will get me nowhere,” she says. Weariness weighs heavy in her voice as she straightens. “Knowing Arnulfo, he’ll keep fighting until democracy is reinstated. The only way to keep him safe…would be ending the war.”
Now she lifts her head. Something has ignited in her, something that crackles with perilous idealism. It is far, far too Crow-like.
“Could you carry a message to Arnulfo?” she asks.
“No,” I say. “Don’t go down that road. I decided to like you because you’re selfish like me. Because you’re pragmatic. Don’t—”
“I want him alive,” she interrupts, and that’s when her voice cracks and splinters.
“I don’t care about presidents or votes or who owns the chispa mine.
I care about him. I can’t—I don’t want to be alone for the rest of my life.
” Her voice thickens; her shoulders curl in, but she squares them firmly as she continues.
“What would you do? If there was only one person who mattered, and they kept throwing themselves into danger? A danger you were in a position to do…to do something about?”
In my mind’s eye, I see her clearing the board and flipping Mice into Hounds.
But then those hands become my sisters’ hands, and for the first time in a long time, I feel the brush of their fingers against mine.
I can hear their voices calling my name, growing fainter and fainter until they vanish into mist.
I think of soldiers, of guns and blades, of explosions and falling stones. I think of what death looks like, and before I can stop it, my mind conjures Minerva’s chispa flaring hot with the spark of a fatal wound, a sun’s last burst of devastating light before—
Minerva rises and begins to pace back and forth—though she is mindful of never turning her back on the sarcophagi. She pauses. Assesses me pensively.
“Don’t you want revenge on the del Valles?” she asks.
She’s baiting me now. She wants me to go along with whatever plan is flying together like a gathering storm behind her eyes. “You don’t know anything about war,” I say. “It’s hard and dirty. It’s long. It’s not won with battlefields and heroism and over by dawn.”
“Then how is it won?”
Memories populate my mind: the Viceroy filling this house with his men, plotting into the night, ash from their cigars falling thick as the night thinned. “Backroom deals. And should that fail: hidden pistols, bottles of poison.”
Minerva’s laugh is half-hearted. “It always comes down to death with you, doesn’t it?
“I have little privilege to think of anything else,” I say darkly. “Likewise for my kin.” I nod at the sarcophagi. “Can’t you hear them?”
All these Hound tiles on the board, and still Minerva represses a shudder at that. Good. She might be flirting with fatal idealism, but her smarts will win in the end.
“Are they going to eat me?” she asks in a small voice.
“No,” I say. “I won’t allow that.”
“But would they?”
“Left unfettered?” I rise to my feet. “They would dive into your mind and drive you mad. Leave you a husk. So empty and broken that not even your ghost survives.”
Perhaps I expected her to shrink away from that. I was wrong. I have been wrong about her from the moment she stepped into the house. Mouse, I thought; small, I thought. Seven knots on the wrist; a knife to the throat. A self-preserving, selfish maid deciding to bring down a dynasty.
Flint sparks across the board as her tiles flip to Hound.
I wonder what the del Valles slumbering throughout the house beneath us would think if they saw this side of her. If they felt fear, they would be right to.
“Now that,” she says, “that gives me ideas.”