“Aye, sir. From our unit and all the others, except Captain Gonzalo and his men. They’re with the civilians at Suseph, I heard.”
Ramiro put on a brave face for the boy, but after the last weeks, this disastrous news only made him incredibly weary. He was wrung out and swept clean of any tears left to shed that their resistance was a few boys and a monastery with no monks. Heartbreak should be beating in his chest for the loss of so many friends and brother soldiers—all he felt was beaten. Ramiro almost couldn’t bring himself to ask, “Then who is here?”
“A priest and some injured, and the lady of course. She came last night. Go inside, sir. They’ll be happy to see you. I’ll take good care of your horse. The stables are empty . . . enough.” The hitch in the boy’s words ended with him dabbing at his eyes, and then sobbing, thin shoulders shaking through his shirt.
Of course. Dal spared nothing. His brother soldiers’ horses would be a target as well. All the caballos de guerra were dead. Sancha might be one of the few remaining in the world.
Ramiro glanced upward at the burning sky. How can this be allowed to happen? Soldiers expected to die for their charges, but not all at the same time. Not against an enemy that wouldn’t face them in the field of battle. So many brave men dead. So many innocents threatened. It wasn’t right. Wasn’t fair.
And what help did they get in return? What kind of god did nothing but send some impractical dreams?
However tempting, ranting and shouting useless curses would solve nothing, and there was the boy to console. He handed over the water skin.
“Sancha. Her name is Sancha. It’ll be all right, son. You’ve done well. They’d be proud of you and the others.” The boy nodded blindly at the empty words and stumbled off to the stables with Sancha. The mare let her nose hang over the child’s shoulder. Sancha would be the kid’s best comfort now.
In a daze, Ramiro went through the open doors into the shaded interior. Light spots on the floor showed where rugs had been removed from the tiles and wooden furniture taken by the Northerners to fuel their campfires. His boots struck hollowly, sending up the sort of empty echoes that came from abandoned places. The study to his left was dark, the shutters closed, except where they’d been pried from the walls. Only empty bookshelves remained—fastened to the walls and finished with stucco.
All the shutters had been removed in the communal dining room, letting in bars of sunlight from the thin arrow-slit windows. The monastery had been built with defense from bandits and others in mind, but there were also some levels of comfort here—or had been. Expensive wooden paneling had been pulled free, leaving unfinished walls. Upholstered furniture was slashed and paintings treated the same way. A depiction of Santiago sleeping under his miraculous tree was almost unrecognizable due to slits in the canvas. The bottom half of the wooden frame had been taken in haste, and Ramiro wondered for a moment, why not the whole thing? Other icons of saints were thrown in a corner. The smell suggesting they’d been turned into a privy and urinated upon.
Bile burned in Ramiro’s throat. He touched mind, heart, liver, and spleen as Santiago taught, but felt no relief. No matter how impossible he thought it, his enemy continued to find ways to bring fresh waves of hate from his heart.
He walked from one empty room to the next, sickened at the destruction. He considered calling out, but hadn’t the heart to break the stillness. This had been a wild goose chase. He would take the boys with him to Crueses or Suseph to find Captain Gonzalo. It would slow him down, but he couldn’t leave them here to go on playing resistance. They’d go as soon as he’d been through the whole building.
He paused. Was that a woman’s voice, distant and muffled?
The sound led him to the long corridor of monks’ cells, where the brothers would have slept. Doors hung open to reveal more emptiness, but the sounds grew into discernible words:
“Santiago, please don’t take him. God, not yet. We need him. I need him. Leave him to me, I beg of you.”
The teary pleading came from a room halfway down the corridor and wrung at Ramiro. He slowed, unwilling to intrude on such grief. One of the wounded soldiers must lie within.
“A wife needs her husband’s arm in times such as these. All my life I honored you, Santiago. Intercede for me now. Now and forever.”
Ramiro gasped. “Mother?” He tore to the door, then caught at the wall to hold himself up.
Julian lay on a narrow bed, his eyes closed and his skin waxen. His body covered by a thin sheet. His mother sat on the only other piece of furniture—a three-legged stool—with her head against Julian’s chest and her hands tightened on the sheet. A bowl of water, bandages, and a scattering of herbs sat on a wooden tray on the pounded-dirt floor.
“Mother.”
Beatriz looked up, revealing reddened eyes and wet cheeks. Her dark hair straggled from its normal neat dressing to hang about her face and shoulders. She always dressed more conservative than other matrons, in layers of stiff black fabric and lace, favoring an old-fashioned mantilla with yet more lace to hold up her hair and give her an extra foot of height. But now her finery was dusty and disheveled, something he never thought possible with his mother.
“Ramiro? Am I dreaming? You’re here.” She rushed around the bed and into his arms, clinging like a child.
“What happened?” he stammered. He was used to his mother’s normally cold hands, but now they were icy.
“Oh, my son. The battle,” she said between sobs. “A horse fell on him.”
“But he’ll be well. He’ll heal.” There had been such accidents before—broken legs, crushed ribs—it was a slow process, but the men most always recovered.
Beatriz shook her head. “The healer says . . . says his organs are . . . crushed. His spine, too. Father Telo has given the last rites. They don’t know how he survived the journey from the battlefield, but they had to get him away from the Northerners. They say there is no hope. It might be hours or days.”
Ramiro felt like a tree repeatedly stuck by the axe until the last fell blow rived it from its roots and sent it crashing to the ground. Loss after loss had beaten against him—his brother, his home, his friends, his place in the military, Claire.
Now the final strike came to destroy him.
Beatriz hurried around the bed to clasp at Julian’s limp hand.
“No,” he said weakly. “They’re wrong. He’ll get better.”
She brushed back Julian’s graying hair and stroked his beard. “I pray and I pray, but so far God hasn’t answered. But He brought you.”
“I came as fast as I could.” Ramiro couldn’t move. If only he’d known, he would have found some way to get here faster. Done more. Stayed instead of going to the swamp with Claire.
All the way here, he’d fretted about how he’d be received by his fellow soldiers after deserting them. How his father would meet him after disobeying his command to let Claire go alone. Would they turn their backs on him? Disavow him? Arrest and punish him? All the time knowing no matter what punishment his commanding officers saw fit, Julian would also be there and would forgive. His fears like the petty worries of an anxious child meant nothing now in the face of reality.
All taken away.
He had seen too much death lately for denial to persist. His father had the same shrunken look as his friend Gomez when the sergeant had dying.
“He did as I asked,” Beatriz said. “Your father stayed away from the fighting. He was on a hilltop—safe.”
“No one is safe anymore.” Bitterness burned Ramiro’s tongue. He’d come back in faith that the burden of stopping Dal could be laid on his father before he surrendered himself to justice. That Julian, more than anyone else, would know what to do. That the help cited in his dream must be the wily Alcalde.
Dust.
All dust. Like Colina Hermosa. Like Salvador.
Like his dreams of stopping Dal.
Like his family.
He dropped into a squat, hands pressed against his face. Im
pulses flashed through him. To run. To flee. To curl up and hide. To smash and pound something into oblivion. To drink until he forgot. To knock himself senseless. All were thoughts he grasped and let slip away as unsuited to a man.
“Ramiro?”
His mother needed him.
More. He needed this time to say good-bye.
He circled the bed and squeezed his mother’s shoulder, as he had the boy outside—an equally futile gesture, but the contact steadied him as nothing else could. With his other hand, he gripped his father’s limp one, noting the slash marks on Julian’s face and arms from the Northern demon god, Dal. Cuts already closed and scabbed over, healing on the outside while the man failed from within.
“How are you here, Mother? Were you at the battle?”
She looked away from Julian long enough to give him a thin smile. “Goodness no. Father Telo sent for me at Suseph. I shook off my guards and got here last night. Oh Ramiro, I’m sorry for your friends. You heard what happened?”
He gave a stiff nod, unable to talk about it. More than losing military brothers, they’d lost anyone trained to fight. That knowledge hung over them like a second deathbed in the room.
They waited in silence, listening to Julian’s breaths grow shallower and slower as the sun crept lower in the sky. Ramiro brushed away flies and sought desperately for what he wished to say, but fear shut his mouth. To say good-bye was to make it real.
And how Julian must be fighting death. His father never surrendered easily. Julian would hate this: to die without stopping the Northerners. To not finish the task he’d set for himself of saving their people. To give up was never his father’s way, even if it meant clinging to pain.
Ramiro choked back tears. Tears would keep him from hearing the ragged breaths that now came so few and far between, but he would not give in.
“No,” Beatriz said suddenly, choking on the syllable. “Julian, you cannot leave me. God, you can’t have him.”
As she broke into sobs, Father Telo bustled into the small room. The dark-skinned priest in his dark robes seemed as burly and as hale as ever, though his expression was grim. He brought a wet cloth in his remaining hand, as the other had been taken by the Northerners not long ago. He nodded to Ramiro in greeting like a veteran comrade, and Ramiro supposed in a way they were—Father Telo had given them the first information about Dal that Claire had put in her Song.
The Song that had summoned the real Dal to begin his killing.
Father Telo laid the cloth over Julian’s forehead. “The Lord has a plan for us all. Would that we could see it, my children. But never forget that our Lord will be there to welcome us all.” He put his hand on Julian’s chest. “May you see your Lord face to face. Standing in His presence forever, may you see with joyful eyes Truth revealed in all its fullness. Holy Santiago, obtain for this man the grace of perfect sorrow, sincere contrition, the pardon and remission of our sins. Welcome him to his new home. I would there had been time for me to know him better. His soul was as wise as his mind and his heart as big as your heavens.”
Beatriz collapsed against the bed. “Good-bye, my love. Now and forever.” She went still, and Ramiro prayed she’d fainted as that would be some relief to her terrible pain. Let her not witness the end.
Tears spilled from Ramiro’s eyes. He grabbed blindly at Father Telo’s hand atop Julian and clung to his father’s leg with his other. His father’s chest did not rise. “I love you, Father. Go without worry. We will save our people. That I swear.”
Dimly, he was aware of another entering the room. A round shape stood next to him and lent her strength by joining her hand to his so that three of them now touched Julian’s chest as one. “Cousin. I’m so sorry,” Teresa said. “Would that he be spared.”
Ramiro closed his eyes against the crushing weight pulling him down. Beatriz stirred and began sobbing. He clung to his grip on Telo and Teresa’s touch on him and looked deep into his heart, saying the words that came. “I wish him not to suffer anymore.”
Their joined hands rose and sank as Julian’s chest rose and fell.
“Look!” Teresa said. “Cousin! Lady Alcalde! Look!”
Ramiro’s eyes flew open. Beatriz had sat up. The wizened, sunken shell of his father’s body was changed. His flesh had filled out again. A normal rosy color touched Julian’s cheeks. His chest rose in normal breaths with no more rasping and wheezing. Without opening his eyes, Julian raised a hand and brushed off the cloth across his forehead, the way a sleeping man will brush at a fly.
“Blessed are we. A miracle,” Beatriz breathed.
Chapter 4
Claire treaded carefully toward camp, holding her shirt up to cradle a pile of blueberries in the fabric. A redwing blackbird trilled from a group of reeds to greet the morning before taking wing at Claire’s approach. Her sharp eyes picked up a suspicious patch of ground, and she edged around the small area of quicksand. Too many hidden death traps lay around the berry bushes. Almost as if the Great Goddess made the reward of food also a test of awareness.
Claire smiled and gave a skip. She was more than equal to that challenge, at least. As well as the trial of foraging for their food—even if she had to do it all on her own. After the night the Northerner soldiers attacked the tiny swamp village, the villagers had rightly or wrongly blamed the deaths caused by the Northerners on the witches. Even the healers had gone, forcing Claire to forage for food to feed them and for herbs to encourage Jorga’s strength. Having her grandmother back helped her forget the villagers’ fear of her—at least most of the time. The fright in their eyes still hurt. She supposed she should be grateful that the villagers had been too afraid to turn on them. Several of them had witnessed her killing the Northern soldiers with nothing but a Song and had no doubt thought twice. The Great Goddess knew she thought about it a lot. Because until that night, she hadn’t known Women of the Song could kill with magic.
Finding out she could stop hearts still left her queasy and uncomfortable in her own skin. She tried hard not to think about it.
She tiptoed into camp—glanced at the sleeping Jorga and Errol—and transferred the blueberries to a large sycamore leaf. The water from the skin bag was flat and smelled of animal hide, but tasted wonderful as it slid down her dry throat. She fed a few small sticks to the fire to get it going again, waited until the flames blazed high, then added bigger pieces of wood. The heat drove her away to sit beside Errol and Jorga. Her uncle even slept curled in a ball like a child. Oh, he did as she told him and watched her with large eyes, preferring not to speak, but he was otherwise small help in making sure they survived. He might be able to see into the future, but he was little use in the day-to-day.
The number of things yet to do today overwhelmed her. She must take the horse to clean water and find it safe grazing. Ramiro had informed her that, unlike goats, horses couldn’t be trusted not to eat poisons or gorge themselves sick, and she fretted about losing their only transportation to the point of making herself sick. She should dig more cattail roots to soak, then grate, for a nasty-tasting bread since they had no meat. Water needed to be boiled. They were low on dry wood. Jorga must be forced to walk or the old woman would never regain her strength. And worst of all, the longer they lingered here, the more impatient she felt about doing nothing.
Claire looked down to find Jorga watching with sharp blue eyes. “Soon, granddaughter.”
Claire blinked. Was Jorga reading her mind now? Had the Diviner of the Northerners done more than bring Jorga back from the dead? Had it given her new abilities? “What?”
“The Women of the Song meet soon. You must leave me and go warn them.”
“Oh,” Claire said with relief. “You’ll be ready to go with me in a few days. We can wait.”
“No, you can’t. This is more important than one old woman.”
Three nights ago, Jorga had been dead. One touch of the blood-colored weapon had closed death wounds, reknit flesh, and brought Jorga back to life as if the injuries had ne
ver existed—but left the old woman weaker than a newborn goat. For two days, Jorga hadn’t woken. When she finally did, her limbs shook like she had palsy, unable to support her weight. The shaking had gradually subsided, but the strength was slow to return. Jorga refused to quit her blankets, except for necessity.
Claire simply couldn’t leave her grandmother in such a state—not even to warn her people about Dal’s killing. And truthfully, she didn’t want to go alone to the annual meeting of the reclusive Women of the Song. Why would they listen to her about allying with the desert people? The Women of the Song had no love for men. They’d likely say the men got what they deserved and turn their backs.
“I’ll think on that,” Claire said. Despite her sense of urgency, she couldn’t bring herself to move on the issue. “If I can gather enough food for you while I’m gone. And maybe get you a shelter from the rain.” In truth, she didn’t want to think about leaving Jorga alone at all, but the old woman was stubborn when she got something in her head. Claire picked up a stick from the kindling pile and drew lines in the soggy ground, keeping her eyes down. Eventually, though, she had to say something.
“Grandmother, I thought our magic worked on minds and not bodies. That it was illusion and manipulation.”
Jorga grunted impatiently. “Who said otherwise, girl? That’s what I taught you because that’s how it works.”
“But when you were . . . dead, I used a Song that killed. That isn’t supposed to happen. You used the magic to convince Ramiro to harm himself, but you didn’t shut down his heart or keep his lungs from breathing. That’s controlling the body.”
Jorga sat up slowly, shaking out her hands and mumbling about death being healed but her rheumatism remaining just the same. “Girl, listen well, because I’m only going to say this once: that was of the mind. It’s not something we talk about, but deep in the mind, where we don’t know it exists, is a part of our brain that keeps hearts beating and air in our bodies. You’re kin of mine—you have the power to reach deep and influence places a person can’t control on their own.”
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