At least she thought it would be empty—but a foul smell burned through her clogged nostrils, and she had to bite her tongue not to scream when she noticed where it all came from. Below her, blood-stained, pus-streaked rags littered the floor. The families must be dumping them here to be burned.
The surest way of contracting the red plague was to be in direct contact with the sores that burst from the skin, and she was sitting in a sea of contagion.
Still, the light of torches crept closer. Shivering and wet, Yzabel held her knees to her chest, made herself small against the shadows and waited for a rampage of boots to pass her. Brites would know what to do about the red plague, about Faty, about everything, and so she ironed her focus to one thing—go to her former maid.
Lucas howled, and the footsteps drifted away. Carefully, Yzabel slipped out, making toward Brites’s home farther up the quarter. It was removed from the rest, surrounded by trees laden with persimmons, oranges, pomegranates, lemons. The chicken coop and pigpen beside it were empty but showed signs of having been cleaned recently.
Dim light seeped from the cracks under the door. Yzabel checked behind her to make sure no one had followed her, and when the night came up empty, she knocked. “Brites?”
Nothing.
Yzabel pressed her ear to the wet wood—there seemed to be fumbling, and angry whispers. A knot of dread tightened in her stomach, became a stone at the back of her throat. “Brites?” she tried again.
The door swung open, throwing her back and out of balance—Yzabel fell flat on her bottom, a sharp pain spiking in her lower back. She winced, crawling back to her feet, freezing in her spot when she took in the sight before her. Matias, leather boots specked with mud, creaking on the wooden floor, squelching on the wet earth.
“I knew it was you,” he growled. “Just as I knew you’d come if I mentioned my mother.”
Panic welled in her throat, and she scrambled to her feet. “Where is she?” Yzabel asked, her voice strong despite her nerves. She bit her lip, considering her next action. With no weapons to defend herself, could she run fast enough to lose him in the streets, then hightail back to the castle?
“She went to the convent as soon as we arrived.” He took another step toward her. She took one back. “But don’t worry—I’ll see to it that she gets her due. She won’t lure in anyone else with false concern or rot them from the inside with her notions about magic and the Lord.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it? Then why are you out here, alone at night and making false miracles?” Righteousness trembled in his brow, in his lips. “I know you freed Fatyan. What deal did you make with her so you could use the sahar?”
Yzabel’s hand went to the lump underneath her clothes, Fatyan’s stone hot against her skin. Matias had known about Brites’s magic, that much was true, but her former maid had sworn he had no idea about Yzabel’s. Had Brites played her, or had Matias played them both?
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, choosing to feign ignorance.
“I might not have paraded my knowledge, but that doesn’t mean I’m not in possession of it.” He threw her a patronizing smirk. “You’ve been using the sahar to put bread in people’s houses. You’ve used it before, on the way here, when you thought I wasn’t looking, to slip loaves into people’s hands.”
Yzabel’s hands clenched. There was no more denying that he saw her magic, which meant he commanded it, too. Despite the many things Brites had hidden, Yzabel trusted her still. She trusted her more than she ever would Matias, and if there was a reason Brites never mentioned he had magic, Yzabel had to believe it had been done to protect her.
Yzabel didn’t wait any longer. She dashed around the house, somehow keeping her balance in the underbrush, slippery from the night’s mist and torrent, and whistled for Lucas. But Matias threw himself at her, knocking her forward. The side of Yzabel’s head hit a rock, and she saw black, then stars. She struggled against him, but he had her pinned under his weight, and all she could muster was a flailing of her legs.
He leaned closer, knees adjusting to lock her arms in place. “How will the king react once he learns you’re the one feeding his people the Devil’s bread?”
“It’s not the Devil’s!” she hissed, careful not to scream and draw more attention. “All I’m doing is giving them food.”
“I doubt that. Just like I doubt the king will want anything to do with you once he learns of yet another betrayal from you.” He spun around, shifted his weight so he sat on her upper back and shoved her hands together. Rough rope circled her wrists, scraped her flesh raw. “You ask me, I’m doing this country a favor by burning you along with the house she raised me in.”
The will to survive drove her to kick and flail, but she might as well try to move a mountain by blowing air. She forced herself into stillness—she had to get out of this herself, through her own means. That meant buying time until Lucas found her, so she asked, “Why?”
“So Brites will be blamed for it. Do you think it will be hard to convince Dom Domingos that a ray of light came down from the sky to set Brites’s home on fire? That it’s all the Lord, telling us to smite the woman who once lived here and dared take refuge at the convent?” His voice was at her ear, hot with delusion. “Do you think it will be hard to convince Denis you slipped out of your rooms to come meet her, disobeying him yet again, and divine punishment struck you?”
Birds flew above her, but no sign of Lucas. Was he lost—or worse, had one of the guards hurt him? As the magic within Yzabel rose, so did her frantic heartbeat, yet she blocked out all the ominous thoughts, swallowed all her fear, and whistled a sharp, desperate note.
A sharp yank, and she was standing, a hand smacking her across the face. “Don’t you dare call attention to us, Aragonese witch,” he hissed, and tore the linen wrapped around her head to shove it in her mouth. Rain fell, freezing droplets hitting her face as he leaned to whisper against her ear. “You will join the Dark Lord in Hell and take Fatyan with you.”
Horror spiked in her chest, in her throat, in her skin. Yzabel’s magic swelled and burned, jumping to Matias’s hands where they closed around her arm, dragging her. Thunder ripped through the clouds, its cracking blaring, its light incandescent—Yzabel yelped, and when she opened her eyes again, white fire consumed her bindings, then engulfed Matias before burrowing into his flesh, leaving behind charred skin and lines of black ash.
“What—” He choked on his words as a large shadow tore through the air. Lucas collided with Matias, throwing him off Yzabel, gleaming teeth aiming straight for an exposed throat—
“Lucas, don’t!”
Too late. Lucas sunk his jaws onto Matias’s neck, ripping flesh with a ferocious shake of the head. Matias twitched. Stopped moving.
But no blood spurted out where Lucas had wounded him. Like with Vasco, flowers spiraled from his body, rising to the sky in a canopy of petals and leaves.
Her head screamed at her to run, and yet Yzabel could not keep the scent of scorched meat and hair from bursting through her nose like acid, nor tear her gaze from the body and the flowers rising in the night. The weight of what had happened dropped on her, at first a pebble, then a crushing boulder.
Matias was dead. Brites’s son was dead. He’d been dead before Lucas tried to rip his throat out.
Her breaths came fast and shallow, tears blurring her sight. She’d taken a life to save her own, a sin bigger than any other she’d committed. Now she wouldn’t be a harmless saint who fed the people. She would be a murderer who poisoned the world.
Tears mingled with rain as she sank to the ground, whispering, “I’m so sorry. Lord forgive me, I’m sorry.”
This was it, the irrevocable sign that she was to stop. For how could God absolve her of this? How could Brites?
First, Yzabel had taken the woman’s oldest friend, and now, she�
��d taken her son. Yzabel’s sodden garments froze her bones and skin as she looked up at the clouds. Maybe it was best she remain here, let everyone find her with flowers on her hands and judge her for her crime.
Tears mingled with rain as she sank to the ground, whispering, “I’m so sorry. Lord forgive me, I’m so—”
Beside her, Lucas growled, his entire body rumbling with menace. Yzabel lifted her gaze to the flowers that had been growing rampant moments ago, now shuddering to a halt before beginning to retreat. The black, sooty lines etched along Matias’s flesh cracked like an egg’s shell. Underneath, new skin emerged, pale and glistening. The wound in his throat closed, the evidence of Lucas’s teeth no more than a bad memory.
Shock slackened her jaw and stole the litany from her tongue. Head shaking and hand to her mouth, Yzabel crawled backward, unable to tear her eyes away. Matias was healing, like Faty had the night Vasco had tried to kill her, only for Yzabel to accidentally kill him in return. And as the bells tolling the fourth hour reverberated in the air, so did what Brites had said that day.
A long time ago, I freed an Enchanted Moura of my own.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Trust
Who is Matias? Who is Matias? Who is Matias?
Yzabel ran to the one place she could get an answer—the convent. Her lungs and heart seemed to want out of her body, but she pressed on, only coming to a halt when the São Francisco Church was in front of her. Beyond, all the streets leading up to the castle were alight; while Yzabel had been waylaid by Matias, the night patrols must’ve called for reinforcements from the barracks, and when they’d failed to find her in the poorest quarter, they’d resorted to blocking every street.
However, the sentries posted in front of the church hadn’t moved. Yzabel sunk to the floor, using the two tall steps to the church’s marble porch to hide her as she crawled, with Lucas low behind her, then prayed the guards wouldn’t look her way while she slithered along the cobblestones between church and convent.
She allowed herself a deep breath when she hit the bushes, and then used their path and the heavy rain to mask her slow creeping toward the convent’s archway. Once safely in its shadows, she turned the knob as softly as she could. There was always a sister inside the foyer, and it didn’t take long for the shuffle of footsteps to reach Yzabel’s ears.
On the other side, metal slid against metal, the latch lifting. The door creaked, and standing there, framed in candlelight and holding out her hand, was none other than Brites.
“I’ve been waiting for you, little princess,” she said.
The sight of her, safe and in a nun’s outfit, crashed through the thin dam Yzabel had erected to contain her emotions on her way here. Sobs and tears burst out of her as she stepped into the convent, and she wanted to wrap her arms around Brites but couldn’t.
Yzabel shook her head rapidly, and somehow managed to unlock her voice to say, “Red plague.”
Brites’s demeanor instantly changed to alarm. “We have to burn your clothes.” She closed the convent’s door and gestured at Yzabel to follow. “What happened?”
“Matias. He-he was going to kill me and have you take the blame—” Words withered on her lips, the terror too fresh on her mind. “I panicked. All I thought about was getting away, and the magic…” She inhaled through her nose, but her breaths lumped in her throat, a knot growing bigger the harder she tried to take in air, to stop the panic from building. But her mind was taken with the consequences of tonight, of how Matias had seen her, how she’d killed him, how he’d healed.
When they came to the large cloister, she made herself look into Brites’s dark eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me he was an Enchanted Mouro?”
Consternation deepened the wrinkles on her former maid’s features. For a long moment, there was only the sound of the storm outside, rain pelting against the shaking shrubs and trees of the garden. When Brites finally spoke, her voice was old, tired. “I was going to tell you once you fully broke Fatyan’s curse. Then that whole thing with Vasco happened, so I decided to wait until we came here and things calmed down.” She weaved her arm with Yzabel’s, and gently ushered her past the bars separating the vestibule from the convent proper. “Out of those clothes first.” Brites opened the door to the warming room, where a fire cackled in its hearth. While Yzabel shed her sodden garments, Brites filled a bowl with wine and rags, then went to the fireplace to get the pincers. “Wash yourself by the fire. I’ll burn these outside.”
Lucas was already lying against the stone beneath the hearth, and Yzabel joined him. The rag was cold and rough, and the wine smelled strong, but the motions served to quell the shaking of her hands and mind.
She was calmer when Brites returned with a bundle of clothes and blankets in her arms. “Do you remember the stories I told you about a Moura named Zaida?”
“The one who was cursed for helping a Portuguese soldier during the Siege of Sintra?” Yzabel frowned.
“Zaida was the Enchanted Moura I freed,” she said, adding more twigs to the fire while Yzabel dressed in the old habit. “And for a while, we traveled together looking for others like her. During that time, we found the man you know as Matias in Terra da Moura. He’d gone half mad, consumed with paranoia and delusion—and when he and Zaida saw each other, they also recognized each other, and he attacked her immediately. I managed to kill him, but he rose back up while we were still recovering from the shock.” Brites shook her head as if to shake off the unpleasant memories. “I killed him again. And again. When he kept on healing, we tied him up. Zaida asked him how he could still be alive since he’d cursed her to her own stone over a hundred years ago.”
Fully clothed, Yzabel sat back down. “And then?”
“He told us he had found a way to use the curse of the stone to make himself immortal.” Brites unfolded the blanket and wrapped it around Yzabel’s shaking frame. “Not in so polite a manner, mind you. He was laughing the entire time, reveling in his own brilliance, and got so obnoxious about it we decided to put his spell to the test.” She knelt and used the tongs to break the embers off a burning log, sparks jumping, crackling, fading. Brites looked at it as she spoke, eyes half lidded against the sharp heat and brightness. “It’s gruesome work, killing a man. It became even more so when he healed from everything we tried. Limbs grew back. Organs regenerated. Finally, I decided to just go for the head—literally. I cut it off from his neck and set it on fire.”
She was still stabbing at the log. Yzabel leaned against her former maid’s side, while Lucas moved his head to the woman’s lap and looked up in the way only dogs could. The tongs clicked against the stone floor, discarded, and with a deep breath, Brites began to pet Lucas and resumed the tale.
“When we found him, Matias had the appearance of a man who’d seen fifty or so springs. With his head destroyed, his old body fell away like a husk. His ribs cracked open, and between the blood and guts, was a weeping newborn.”
Yzabel’s chest throbbed. “And when he turned into a baby, you decided to raise him?”
“It’s…strange, to see a man so reviled become something so apparently innocent.” Brites slid her an askew glance. “I was stupidly arrogant and stubborn, so I decided I could undo a century and a half of prejudice and spite. We had someone with the gift of memory put a veil on his mind so previous notions wouldn’t cloud his judgment, named him Matias so he wouldn’t inadvertently remember himself. I taught him to be kind and understanding, to listen instead of judge, and hoped that would stick even if he somehow got his memories back. But sometimes no matter how hard you try to raise your children right, they come out wrong. It hurts to admit I failed with him, but if I had to fail with one of you, let it be the son I chose for myself and not the daughter my heart chose for me.”
Yzabel had no way to answer that, unworthy of such love and understanding. “I’m still responsible for this. Matias tried to use me t
o get revenge on you, and I fell into his trap like a little duckling. I don’t deserve your help, or your—”
“I decide what you do or don’t deserve from me,” Brites cut her off, the authority drying the arguments on Yzabel’s lips. “But first, we have to take care of Matias, and for that, we need Fatyan.”
“Fatyan?” Yzabel asked with a blink. “Why?”
“She’s the reason he’s been alive so long. He was the one to curse her to that stone and bound himself to her hatred for him in the process. The more she despises him, the stronger he grows, but if she can look at him and profess forgiveness…”
Her eyes widened as she read the lines of unspoken secrets etched upon Brites’s expression and tied them to the clues she’d already had. Fatyan’s reaction to Matias hadn’t been mere coincidence, and he wasn’t just someone who reminded her of the Benzedor who’d cursed her. He was the man himself. “That’s why you drove me to find her. You needed her out of the stone so she could put an end to Matias. You needed to break her curse so she would forgive him.”
“No, what I said back then was true. Until Davide mentioned the children had been hearing her again, I thought she was long gone, or freed by someone else. I was at a loss at what to do with you and your refusal to eat, so I thought I might as well let you try finding her. If she could make a man essentially immortal, then she’d certainly know how to approach your magic.” Brites looked back to the fire. “Still, had you not gone looking for her, I would’ve done it myself. If Fatyan dies without forgiving him, then he will go on living forever.”
Yzabel shuddered at the thought of having someone like him walking around the earth for eternity, and her hand unwittingly went to the stone hidden beneath her clothes.
In the end, finding Fatyan had been for nothing; the Moura was back to where the Benzedor had put her. Telling him the truth about Faty’s whereabouts might keep him from targeting Yzabel’s life, since it would prove that she and the Moura were not bound together, as the original curse hadn’t been broken. But that would give him something else to hold over her, the same way he had a hold on the Enchanted Mouras whose lives he’d forever altered.
A Curse of Roses Page 23