The Stars of Heaven

by Jessica Dall

  Because I can’t save anyone else. Because I can’t take this much death on my soul. “Because I care about you.” She moved toward him once again. “I don’t want to see you locked in here for the rest of your life. Or worse. This is treason, Luís. Do you want to lose your head over some misplaced loyalty to people you don’t even truly like?”

  Luís went silent for a long moment, his eyes searching her face. “What are you saying I should do, Cecília?”

  She swallowed but pushed forward. “If you testified about what you know—”

  “I don’t know anything!”

  “You know Graça was in those rooms. You could corroborate her—”

  “You want me throw all of my friends into a noose to save my own neck?”

  “If they’re guilty, yes.”

  “They’re not!”

  Cecília clenched her hands tighter to stop them from shaking. She had told Tio Aloisio that Luís wouldn’t testify. He was too loyal, and he wouldn’t lie to save his own neck. Unlike some people, her mind taunted her.

  But if I can save someone, just one person... Maybe, just maybe, she would be able to live with herself. She took a shuddered breath. “The first minister said if you testify, he’ll see you’re rewarded. You could fully get your title. No more whispers about illegitimacy. We could marry...” Even in the building desperation, offering that made her trail off, the uncertainty mixing into everything else.

  The way Luís was staring at her—some mix of confusion and disgust—didn’t help any. “The first minister.”

  Cecília nodded, tensing to keep herself from squirming. “You know he has the ear of the k—”

  “Are you...? Do you...? Do you report to him?”

  “Everyone’s been questioned. I was called before the—”

  “Cecília, do you report to Senhor Carvalho?” He enunciated each syllable as though fighting them through a locked jaw. She hesitated a beat too long, and the confusion evaporated, leaving nothing but disgust on Luís’s face. He turned away from her, moving to look out the window, his back to her. “You can go.”

  “I’m trying to help you, Luís,” she said in a rush. “If you’ll just testify—”

  “Leave!”

  “Luís, please...” Her insides squirmed, a rush of heat pounding through her veins as though her body could already feel hellfire building under all of them. The last thing she could possibly attempt flew out of her mouth before she could stop it. “Please. I love you.”

  Liar.

  Luís’s shoulders tensed at the proclamation, but he didn’t turn around. “Pray for us, if you want to help, Cecília. Or pray for yourself.”

  Us. The word sat heavily in her chest. He had picked his side as much as she had picked hers, and as resolute a man as he was, it would truly have taken a miracle to change that decision.

  Misericorda. Misericorda de Deus. She sent up a short prayer for mercy, even if she was far past deserving it, then nodded. “I will. I’ll pray for you. For everyone.”

  “Thank you,” he said, his voice tightly cordial.

  Fighting off the new waves of nausea, Cecília turned back to the doorway and stepped through so the guard could lock the door behind her. She kept her head high and silently followed the man back down the tight staircase and out the front of the prison. She would pray for Luís, for Francisco, for all those arrested. She would even pray for Senhor Carvalho and Tio Aloisio. Whether it would help, though, she couldn’t say. She would likely have been on her knees until Judgment Day if she started praying for all of the souls who needed saving—and after all she had done, she wasn’t certain anyone in Heaven would ever listen to her.

  THE TRIALS WERE OVER so quickly that Cecília had to wonder whether the defense had been allowed more than a day to prepare their cases. Blessedly, Senhor Carvalho hadn’t asked her to do anything else for him as sentences for the plotters fell into place. She kept silent. Quietly celebrating the Nativity, Holy Innocents’ Day, the Solemnity of Mary, and Epiphany, all as if nothing was wrong, was likely damning enough. She didn’t need anything more on her immortal soul.

  Tio Aloisio watched her as the carriage rolled along to the field in Belém, where a new scaffold had been built just for the occasion. Blissfully, he didn’t attempt to strike up a conversation. There had been enough shouting when he had told her she had to attend. With no choice but to obey, she had dressed and gotten into the carriage that morning. There was no need to discuss it at that point. The less she had to think, the better.

  He finally spoke as the carriage began to slow. “Try to smile.”

  Cecília snapped her head toward him. “Smile?”

  “These are traitors. They don’t deserve our sympathy.”

  She looked away from him, keeping her thoughts to herself.

  “Cecília.”

  “I know why we’re here,” she shot at him. “I came. I’m not fighting it. What more do you want from me?”

  “You can’t cry for him. Not here.”

  The carriage rolled to a stop, and Cecília tossed the door open, not waiting for the driver. Compared to what some of the noble houses were facing, the Vilhenas were lucky—highly ranked enough to avoid a torturous death, yet not so important as to be made an example of. Most of the women had even been given a stay of execution, their sentences commuted to exile. That didn’t mean watching a blatantly innocent man hang—watching him hang with a smile—would be any easier.

  Did you want to hang, Luís? Cecília asked for the millionth time. There were so many ways you could have escaped it. You were no one important...

  To end up with a death sentence over even exile, he would have had to have been making a point. And Cecília could only guess it was directed at her. He held honesty so dear as to go to a noble death rather than live with such heavy sin on his soul.

  Though it was barely past eight in the morning, the field was packed with more people than Cecília had seen since before the quake. Easily ten thousand men, women, and children stood around, waiting to see what would happen to the people who once would have been thought untouchable.

  Skirting the masses, Tio Aloisio led Cecília to another set of risers and placed them low alongside the courtiers who had stayed on the right side of the fallout and who gathered there. Graça looked over from where she was standing by her parents and offered a quick smile. Cecília pointedly looked away.

  A rise of voices went up through the crowd, and Cecília turned in time to see the first line of traitors being led forward under guard, the opening course for a bloodthirsty crowd. Theirs would be simple hangings, nothing like what would come. The thousands standing closer to the scaffolding began to jeer, some throwing rotting food and other things Cecília didn’t want to identify. She swallowed, every urge pushing her to shut her eyes. Already, she felt faint, and Luís wasn’t yet in sight. Tio Aloisio’s hand went to Cecília’s elbow as though he sensed she needed to be steadied, but she jerked away.

  Almost mockingly quickly, the line of men turned to dangling corpses, the beam holding them aloft creaking under their weight. Another line came, then another—a mix of faces Cecília knew, didn’t, and had only perhaps seen wandering the halls of the Real Barraca once or twice. Their lives could easily have been exchanged with hers if only for a few changes in providence.

  Finally, a mix of much-too-familiar faces appeared, with Luís toward the end. Cecília sucked in a sharp breath before she could stop it, tightly closing her eyes. A hard pinch to the fleshy part of her forearm made them open again. She glanced at her uncle, but his eyes remained fixed forward. Taking as steadying a breath as she could manage, Cecília forced herself to watch.

  That’s the very least you can do. Watch. You put him there.

  Though none of the men had been allowed to properly dress, lacking coats or anything to cover their heads, Luís still managed to look entirely dignified, his face set in a look of determination and his chin raised as if he couldn’t hear the shouting from the rabble. Co
mpared to the trembling, pale men around him, he looked truly noble. Cecília curled her hands into fists, digging her nails into her palms, attempting to use the pain to hold herself together. Charges were read as nooses went around necks, one by one. Even as the rope was tightened, Luís didn’t flinch. Cecília bit down her own whimper. Then the rope went taunt, and the world seemed to fall silent, nothing making it past the loud pounding in Cecília’s ears. Each twitch hit like a physical blow, knocking the air from her lungs. The world around her spun.

  And then the roar came back. Cecília blinked, feeling Tio Aloisio’s hand back on her elbow, keeping her upright.

  “Try to smile,” he murmured.

  If she’d had the air, Cecília would have laughed in his face. The bodies were being taken down and added to a pile at the bottom of the scaffold, waiting to be burned once it all was over. Cecília only blinked, forcing her hands to relax, though she could feel a stickiness that said her nails had drawn blood. She didn’t bother to look, her eyes glazing over as she tried to forget the day even as it unfolded in front of her.

  The rest of the deaths seemed to rush together, each stage growing more and more gruesome. The marchioness lost her head. Five were strangled at the stake. Two were strapped to a cruz de Santo André and broken alive. And then came Antonio Alvares Ferreira, the poor man who had the unholy honor of being the day’s finale. With the bloody and broken bodies uncovered around him, he was brought to the stake, tied there even as the executioners stacked bodies and kindling as though needing to taunt the sniveling, shaking man about his fate. They began to read his list of crimes, each dark and vile, enough to fully deserve the fate he’d been dealt—if any of them were true. The executioners finished stacking. The magistrate finished reading. And the lit torch appeared. A true hush fell over the crowd for the first time all day. Ten thousand people went quiet enough that Ferreira’s sobbing and broken calls for mercy and proclaiming his innocence carried across the field. The executor lifted the torch theatrically then lowered it to the kindling set under the dead bodies.

  Cecília closed her eyes again, not receiving another pinch for it this time, and mumbled a prayer for Ferreira, for all of them, fighting to keep down what little she had eaten for breakfast as the smell of wood smoke and burnt flesh floated over the field.

  The sobbing turned to shouts then screams, as he was apparently left with no friends even to lessen his suffering by throwing in a charge of black powder.

  Of course he doesn’t have any. They’re all burning under him. Cecília swallowed and forced herself to open her eyes for a final time, watching the thrashing man disappear behind the climbing flames. The only friends left at court are Senhor Carvalho’s.

  Finally, the screaming died away, replaced by the noise of the crowd and crackling fire as the entire platform and all of the bodies were reduced to ash. Blinking away the smoke that floated toward the risers, Cecília felt something tight and hard forming in her chest, just below her rib cage. And though her heart still pounded and her blood rushed through her ears, she went blissfully numb.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” Cecília knelt in the confessional, crossing herself then resting her forehead against her hands. “My last confession was three days ago. I...” She took a breath, wishing she knew which priest was sitting on the other side of the screen. “My soul has been troubled these past weeks, Father. I’m afraid I’ve committed a mortal sin, and I haven’t had the strength to face it.”

  “What sin is that, my child?”

  She didn’t recognize the voice, but that didn’t make her feel any better. “I’ve told falsehoods, Father, and kept secrets. And people were hurt because of them.” “Hurt” seemed like such a weak word for it, but Cecília didn’t dare give it more specific form. “I thought I was doing what was best when it all started, but now... I sinned. I sinned, and people got hurt because of me.”

  “What people?”

  Luís’s determined face flashed through her mind, feeling like a slap. “Friends. A man I cared for, even if it wasn’t as much as he may have wanted.”

  “Was this man pressuring you for impure acts?”

  “No.” She added another lie to her conscience, happily taking that over speaking ill of the dead. She likely should have allowed him those impure acts, at least after she’d met with Dom José. It seemed poor payment for losing the man his life. “But... I told him I loved him, because I knew that was what he wanted to hear, and I was trying to make him do what I considered right.” She took a shuddering breath. “I’ve been fasting and keeping the Litany of Hours and doing everything I can think of to atone, but...” She fought for another breath. “Please. I don’t want to be damned.”

  “Telling falsehoods is a serious sin, child. I’m glad you realize that, but you should not feel sorrow for your sins for fear of punishment but because you have wronged our Lord, God.”

  Cecília pressed her forehead tighter to her clasped hands.

  “He wishes to forgive you, but you must open yourself to His grace and make yourself worthy of it because you understand His love, not just fear His retribution.”

  She took a gulp of air. “Tell me what to do, Father?”

  After a pause, the priest gave her penance—prayers she’d already said, restitutions she couldn’t make. She agreed all the same, hoping her other atonements could add up to what he had asked.

  He offered a prayer for her, granting absolution, and she slid back into the chapel, her chest no less tight than it had been when she’d entered. The court had been quiet in the month since the Távora executions, but she still couldn’t be caught wandering around the halls, pale and trembling. She turned back for her apartment and started the slow progression to her room.

  Tio Aloisio looked up from where he was seated on the couch as she opened the door. “Ah, Cecília, there you are.”

  “I was in confession.” She went to pick up the Bible she had left by the bookshelf. She had read it through several times in the past weeks, trying to reconcile the stories of God’s love with the ones of His wrath, trying to divine what might be waiting for her come the true End of Days. Several times, she had wished she had never learned to read and that she could merely go to one of the priests and be told exactly what she needed from it all. But she had given up simplicity years before in pursuit of her own curiosity. After so many sleepless nights, she wasn’t certain it was a fair trade.

  Tio Aloisio watched her for a moment then stood as she turned for her room. “I was wondering if you might want to get away from court for the day, Cilinha.”

  Cecília frowned, her mind and body too sluggish to react any more strongly. “Get away?”

  He nodded. “I’m going down to the docks today. The Vento de Verão has returned, and I wanted to take a look at the cargo firsthand.”

  The name of her father’s ship jolted through the haze coating her mind. She blinked in an attempt to focus. “With me?”

  He offered a smile. “I know you always loved that ship.”

  A fledgling rush of excitement pulsed through her, followed closely by a stronger wave of guilt for daring to feel anything of the sort. She lowered her eyes. “I have penance I need to do.”

  “You’ve been praying every time I’ve knocked on your door this week. I think God would understand if you took a few hours to get some fresh air.”

  “You speak for the Lord now?”

  Tio Aloisio shook his head, keeping his eyes firmly on Cecília. “Come to the docks today. I truly believe it will do you a world of good.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I will join you for Vespers and Compline tonight once we’re back, if you wish. We can pray for both of our souls.”

  You want to go, Cecília. Are you truly going to let yourself believe what you want is what is right again? The voice that had been plaguing her nagged at her. Look where that led you.

  But Tio Aloisio looked so earnest, and Lord knew he
would benefit from more prayer as well. She looked down at her dress—though it was drably colored, it was still made of a rich, thick fabric that wouldn’t care for sea air. “I should change first.”

  Tio Aloisio smiled, the tension in his body visibly lessening. “I’ll send Águeda in. We’re leaving in an hour.”

  THE SALTY AIR MADE the curls at Cecília’s neck flutter, and she inhaled deeply, gulping as much as she could take. The guilt wouldn’t fully release her, but being at the docks made everything lighter, as if a weight that had been crushing her had at least lessened, if not entirely lifted.

  The way Tio Aloisio was moving along the crates his deckhands were unloading said he felt the same.

  Runs in the family. She smiled a little bitterly. Half of us are saints, and the other half can’t wait to take to the sea and run as far as we can.

  “Cilinha.” Tio Aloisio motioned for her to join him. “What do you think of this?”

  She walked up to the box Tio Aloisio had pried open and looked at the glasses inside, all a vibrant red. “They’re beautiful.”

  “Venetian.” He picked one up and held it out to her. He waited for her to take it before speaking again. “Most of this is to sell”—he motioned to the crates and barrels sitting around—“but I thought you might like these.”

  She looked at him, the smooth glass cool in her hands. “They’re for me?”

  “An early birthday gift.”

  Cecília gave a surprised laugh and set the glass back in the straw that had been used as packaging. “It’s almost my birthday, isn’t it?”

  “Twenty-first, if I’m not mistaken.”

  How that sounded so old and so young at the same time, Cecília didn’t know. She began to answer when a familiar voice knocked the wind out of her. She turned to scan the rest of the ships moored at the docks, the skin at the back of her neck prickling. Then she spotted him. Though she couldn’t understand what he was saying, John was shouting to another man on a nearby brig. Even with him mostly angled away and at such a distance, every inch of her knew it was him. “John,” she murmured under her breath.