Wild Beauty

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  Inside, the ball had been left behind in scraps. Shoes had been cast off. Half-full glasses sat abandoned. Flowers, taken from arrangements to be tucked into hair or pinned to lapels, had been discarded. Lost beads and buttons freckled the floor and tables.

  All the guests had gone. Reid had probably passed out somewhere.

  Fel would wake him up.

  He now understood why Reid’s touch had felt as uncomfortable as hands wrenching his wrists. Why he had shuddered away when Reid set a hand on his back.

  Reid would answer for the things his family had done, and then covered over.

  Fel looked for him on the first floor, then the second, stopping at the room Reid had claimed as his study.

  Reid was not there, not passed out on the desk or on the leather-covered chairs.

  Light from the hall showed the desk, messy with letters.

  The paper looked so heavy, so woven, that Fel could not help picking up the leaves.

  He sifted through them, the handwriting of rich men declaring that they wanted their own estates to have grounds like La Pradera.

  One referred to how his wife would love to have a rose garden like the one here, screened in by wooden lattices.

  Another mentioned the wide flowered valley, calling it a sunken garden.

  A third included a last line that Reid should stay in touch when you start sending them out.

  Sending them out. Like the Nomeolvides women were books. Like they were things to be possessed, given away and returned.

  This was why Reid had wanted so badly to impress them, why he’d made Estrella perform in front of them.

  He wanted to interest everyone watching.

  Estrella had thought Reid just wanted a favor.

  She had no idea he had turned her into an advertisement.

  Fel backed away from the dark-polished desk.

  The Nomeolvides women had worried over what Reid might do with La Pradera. He’d heard their worried whispers that princesses would start saying their vows in the courtyard of blooming trees. Presidents’ sons would hold their eighteenth birthday parties here just because girls would love the flowers. They’d worried that Reid would take the enchantment of this place and turn it into a spectacle.

  But Reid planned to send the Nomeolvides women to other estates. He would order them to wealthy family’s houses, where their skirts would skim unfamiliar ground and they would press their hands into dirt they’d never touched. Men they did not know would tell them where to grow crowns of spring buds.

  Reid could send them out to every rich man who wanted them, and always call them back to La Pradera. They could never get free from him, because this place held them. Running from Reid meant running from this place that held their lives. If the ground sensed them fleeing, it would strike them down.

  Fel’s lungs tensed as he thought of Estrella, her hard, gasping breaths, the pollen and blood on her sleeves. He wondered if Reid sending them out would bring the same wrath down on them, and his chest grew tighter, like a cramped muscle. He worried the same thing he’d worried when Estrella led him through the dark.

  Would the land know? Would it understand that these women didn’t want to leave it, that it was only on Reid’s orders?

  Another question spun through him, a worse one.

  If Reid made them draw up flowers on someone else’s ground, would La Pradera grow jealous and vengeful? Would it hate them for sliding their fingers into different earth, and kill them for it?

  “What are you doing?” a voice came from the doorway.

  Reid still looked a little drunk, blurred around the edges. But when he saw the papers in Fel’s hands, the air around him crackled like the sky before a lightning storm.

  Fel’s best chance was playing startled, lost. He dropped the letters. He held his hands out in from of him, showing his palms, proving he wasn’t trying to pocket anything on the way out.

  But when Reid came forward, when he grabbed him, it choked the words out of Fel.

  He knew better than to speak. He knew the way to survive rich men was to seem harmless and stupid. Reid would give him some rough lecture about touching things that weren’t his. Maybe he’d strike him. Then he’d shove him out of the room.

  But Fel could not keep his lips still.

  “They’re not your property,” Fel said, spitting the words out. “None of us are.”

  “You’re going to mind your own business,” Reid said, his voice low, reasoning. “You’re going to walk away.”

  “Did you even think about what this could do to them?” Fel asked. “Leaving could kill them.”

  “You’ve seen them in town,” Reid said. “Did it kill them? Try thinking next time you talk.”

  “This is different,” Fel said. “You know that.”

  Reid tightened his grip. “And you don’t know anything.”

  “I know you can’t do this. They won’t let you. I won’t let you.”

  He tensed for Reid to hit him.

  Reid got behind him, setting his forearm against Fel’s throat.

  “Say it.” Reid set his arm harder against Fel’s neck. “Say you don’t know anything.”

  The pressure against his throat built until he felt it in his forehead. It raked through his hair.

  “Just say it,” Reid told him, “and we can be done here.”

  Fel kicked back at him, catching him in the shin hard enough that Reid stumbled. Reid came at him again, and Fel drove his hand into Reid’s jaw, hard enough that he felt the backs of his own knuckles splitting.

  The Briars had already decided the loss of him and his brother were no more remarkable than misplaced slips of paper. Whatever the Nomeolvides women had done, he would not let Reid do this to them.

  Fel would give the grandmothers the truths he had found on those heavy pieces of linen parchment.

  He grabbed the sheets he’d let fall. He took them down the stairs, the inside of his rib cage hot with these things he needed to tell.

  Reid caught up with him. He threw him down in the lightless gardens, hitting him so his chest clenched and he gasped to breathe.

  The papers fluttered from his hands. He hit back, catching Reid in the stomach and the side. But for every strike, Reid returned a harder one. Every blow darkened the edges of his vision like an old photograph.

  Fel kicked at him again. But the edges of him were going numb. His eyelids. His fingertips.

  Gasping at his next breath paled the sky and made it seem close, like the moon was a chandelier in the center of a room.

  Fel tried wrenching out from under Reid’s hold. He was losing the feeling of his own body. He shut his eyes, trying to get a full breath. Through the blunt pressure of Reid’s fists, only thin threads of air made it down to his lungs.

  There was more will and rage in him than his body could use. It vibrated out of him. The flowering trees all arced toward a center point in the sky like the asterisk in a star marble.

  Fel tried bucking out of Reid’s grip. Reid twisted his arm, sending a rope of pain up to his shoulder.

  Reid forced him back down, and Fel landed against the earth.

  Blue petals brushed his skin. His hands found borraja. Forget-me-nots grazed his neck.

  Estrella’s ocean. Her sea of flickering blue.

  The petals crushed under him. But beneath their soft blue, the earth didn’t harden into solid ground against his back.

  The earth gave.

  Fel bucked again, throwing a shoulder up toward the sky. If he could move fast enough, just once, he could break Reid’s hold.

  But the earth was pulling him, taking him. It was folding him into its dark ground.

  It stirred. In the flashes of opening his eyes, Fel caught the ground whirling and spinning around him. It moved in currents. It shifted like wide ribbons of water, glinting like the moon and sun off a river. A storm, but it did not rise. It stayed low on the ground. He could hear its faint thunder, how it tunneled deeper underground.

 
He tensed against Reid’s grasp.

  With the last will he had in him, he reached up toward the light.

  But then the ground spoke.

  Don’t fight, it whispered, not in La Pradera’s voice but in his brother’s. I’ve got you. I’m not letting you go.

  He felt it in his own body, as though his skin was turning to shale.

  Waves of earth tumbled over Fel. The current broke over his body, weighing him down. The rivers of ground folded him into their countless grains.

  The storm bound him and covered him. It took the blood on his knuckles and the glowing band on his wrist. It held him so close it was teaching his body to become the ground. A ribbon of earth, thick and heavy, slid over his eyes, so he could not have seen even if he could open them.

  The current shifted again. He sank as fast as if he’d plunged into water. He fell into his brother’s voice, telling him he would take him into the earth to save him. I have you. You’re okay.

  Then he was nothing but ground.

  TWENTY-NINE

  He knew.

  You took the truth and you made it into flowers.

  He had felt the pull of her heart on his, the dangerous force of a Nomeolvides girl falling in love, and he had hated her for it. Worse, because the same blood that crafted this land into flower beds, the blood that made a jagged ravine into a sunken garden, was death to their lovers.

  That was the only way she made sense of it, him turning on her as fast as the wink of a firefly. And now, hours later, she woke up screaming, feeling like her heart was crumbling to ash in her rib cage.

  She was the same as so many Nomeolvides women before her, feeling the loss of their loves like their hearts were rounds of coal, glowing hot and then burning out so fast they felt cold. It was the way they knew. Their lost loves took a little of their own hearts with them, and they felt it tearing away.

  Estrella was a spirit outside her body, outside the chiffon shell of the dress she’d fallen asleep in. The darker blue stains, the evidence of his touch, felt damning.

  Dalia held Estrella like she was having a nightmare.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered. “It’s okay.”

  But the center of Estrella turned to a worn-out peony, falling to a hundred petals.

  She had loved him to his death.

  She broke from Dalia’s hold.

  She found his things as they’d been.

  The shoes he’d cast aside for one night in favor of the polished ones Reid had told him to wear. The undone laces stared up at her, a reminder that if he’d left, he would’ve put his plain shoes back on.

  And the different-color figurines, a herd of winged wooden horses crossing a shelf. These he would have taken with him no matter how fast he’d left. But they were here, colors bright, paint cool from how long it had been since the warmth of his fingers had touched them.

  He hadn’t run from La Pradera.

  If he was gone, this was hers. His vanishing was hers.

  It didn’t matter that he’d gotten enough sense to run from her. Her teeth had already been in him. Pulling away had just dragged them through him deeper, hurting him worse.

  She took this understanding into her. It spread through her as she held those painted wooden horses in her hands, these things he never would’ve left behind.

  Her cousins crowded around her, telling her they’d look for him, he had probably just gotten lost. He would come back.

  But she knew. The turning at the center of her, that feeling of embers going dark, told her. It flared and stung, and then she was screaming into her hands. She screamed into the horses’ small bright bodies, into their rounded wings, because her heart was too dry and wrung out to let her cry.

  They screamed back to her. They spilled onto her skirt, catching in the folds like her dress was a small, bright sky. Held in their colors and screams was the low thread of Fel’s voice, slipping from her like the beads of her necklace sliding underwater.

  She had killed him. She had been the second Nomeolvides girl to love him out of existence.

  In this family, broken hearts were passed down like lockets. And Estrella had been enough a fool to think she could refuse the one meant for her simply by not opening her hands.

  She had loved him until there was nothing left of him.

  Her cousins found her down here, kneeling on the floorboards. Their mothers recognized her screaming. Their grandmothers nodded from the hall, a shared sadness and understanding across their faces.

  Sorrow was a family heirloom, written into their blood like ink on a will.

  The words that had been waiting in Estrella’s mouth needled her. If she did not let them off her tongue they would cut her, so she opened her mouth and let them go, those sharp, glinting things.

  “I am poison,” Estrella said, the last word raising her voice a little louder, like an anthem.

  Poison.

  THIRTY

  He was not alone here in the dark.

  Fel reached out toward a voice that sounded a little like his own but deeper. Surer. Certain as a call across water. Fel remembered that voice. He had carried it with him.

  We’re gonna raise horses one day, you and me.

  His brother.

  They were two brothers again, a man and a boy. The boy knew the man’s dream of working with Andalusian horses, held close even here. He tasted the burnt sugar of the figs his brother loved when they could find them growing wild. He felt the blood and calluses made on their hands, their fingers turning rough alongside each other’s.

  Fel hovered in the same living and not-living space he had come from before Estrella found him. But there was enough of him that he and his brother could pass back and forth memories of a world their mother and father had sent them away from.

  Cutting wild asparagus with their father’s knives.

  Slipping the lacy shells of red macis from between nutmeg seeds and their fruit.

  How their grandmother left behind not just her recipes for pomegranate-orange-blossom water and pickled lemons, but her sadness that one day Fel and his brother would have to leave the place they had been born.

  Adán. The name spun through what was left of Fel.

  His brother’s name had been Adán.

  Adán had saved him, pulling him back into the ground when Fel thought Reid might kill him. Adán had drawn him back into the dark and the rush of voices.

  It wasn’t just them. There were others down here.

  They were the bodies and spirits taken into the ground. These voices carried the scent and color of where the land had pulled them into its earth. Flowering branches or bare boughs depending on the season. The perfume of roses at midnight or lilies at dawn. The tiny leaves and thread-thin stems of cut hedges. A slope of jacaranda and magnolia.

  But Fel had not been taken by these vengeful gardens. Not like they had.

  He was one of the first men dead. He had gone into this ground long before Nomeolvides hands ever touched it. The truth he had died to and come back from went deeper than their fingers could reach.

  These were voices that brought with them the heavier smells of iron and limestone. They carried metal and salt from both earth and blood. This was the bitter growth of a story untold, kept underground.

  Fel and Adán and the other men left here had been forgotten. The bodies of named men, men who had died with them but who were more likely to be missed, had been unearthed from the dirt and rock. But no one searched for Fel and Adán and the forgotten men. The foremen found the bodies of men they considered worth looking for, and left the rest.

  Fel and Adán and those left here were the unnamed, the unaccounted for, the unlawful. They were the ones who carried forged papers. They ones left off role sheets because they were not worth the trouble to write down.

  They were the ones sent into the bed depths so thick with dust they could barely see. It burned their lungs, and at night they coughed it onto their mats along with sprays of blood.

  They were th
e ones lying about their ages, and the foremen knew it. But because they needed men who could be paid little, they handed them scrapers and picks, shovels and wheelbarrows.

  The Briars wanted the deposit fast, the foremen told them. So they sent Fel and Adán and other unnamed men into stretches of the mine floor jagged with faults and slips and fractures.

  If there was going to be a fall, the foremen said, they’d have warning. They’d get them out fast enough.

  Fel and Adán believed them because they had to. Because they were brown-skinned men who could find no other work, and if they did not believe the foremen, they would go back to starving.

  But there had been a fall, an endless river of rock and earth rushing down toward them, and it had killed them. Then it had been lied about, made into gardens. The Nomeolvides women had no idea that the ravine they made into a valley of flowers had been a quarry.

  And a graveyard. The Nomeolvides women had planted flowers in places men had died.

  Armed with the blur of half remembering, he had hated Estrella, hated all of them for it. But none of them had known. He understood that now, the things he had not realized finding him in the dark.

  They had been complicit in covering this over, and they had no idea.

  The land had become vicious, and hungry. It did not care that the Nomeolvides women did not know. It held them responsible for turning death into gardens. It demanded their tears sown into its ground like seeds. It drew their lovers into hills and hollows. It took from the women who spent their lives kneeling in this earth.

  They covered the death of so many men, the fall that had happened here, all blood and rock and dust. They had silenced the land with arbors and flowering trees. They had hidden its story with countless bright petals. And La Pradera made them pay for it. It took any man they loved. In making this land beautiful, the Nomeolvides women had also made it ravenous. Wrathful.

  Bloodthirsty.

  This land had seen so much death that by the time the Nomeolvides women spread their petals over it, it had grown a taste for it.

  What still existed of Fel wrung out with all the things his brother would have taught him. How to keep the flint shell of his heart from cracking before he was ready. That being forbidden a thing would only make him want it more, but sometimes it was easier not to want something if he knew he could never have it.