Quin had noticed, too. Mia felt his body enliven.
“And that’s what you don’t understand about magic,” Pil said. “It isn’t evil—it’s a way of combating evil. Magic is a way to topple the power structures that have held women captive for thousands of years. Why do you think we have the gift of enthrallment? Because sometimes the only way to escape a guard who has imprisoned you, or a husband who has forced himself upon you, or an executioner knotting the noose around your neck because you loved someone you weren’t supposed to love . . . was to entrance his heart with passion, and then make your escape.
“And if a man was about to hurt you, to violate you, he needed less blood in certain areas. Say a king was about to make you his new favorite doll. You could funnel the blood away from his hands when he touched you, or his arms when he pinned you down. You could coax the blood out of the parts of his body he found most pleasurable. Drain him of his power to harm you. Slow the assault and buy yourself time. That’s how unblooding was born.”
Mia knew every word Pilar said was true; she heard no telltale whoosh, no agitation in her blood. Which meant Mia was the ignorant one. She hadn’t known how much she hadn’t known.
Pilar turned to Quin. “Your father has perpetuated the lie that we are wicked and depraved. That we are monsters, not people.” She turned to Mia. “Your father has only made it worse. These men are threatened by our power. But that’s nothing new. Our sisterhood has always been under threat. For the entirety of human history, weak men have been afraid of powerful women.”
The moonlight anointed Pilar’s black hair with a blazing blue halo. She reminded Mia of a phoenix rising from the ashes. Had the Dujia her mother loved also stood like this in the merqad, brave and beautiful, hair shimmering beneath the moon?
And then she saw this same woman reaching forward to touch Wynna on the last day of her life, death cloaked in a loving caress.
“If this is all true,” Mia said, “if magic is a way for women to protect themselves against the men who would seek to hurt them . . . then why is my mother dead? Why would a Dujia turn on one of her own?”
The fire in Pilar’s face flickered and went dark. “I don’t know.”
Mia closed her eyes and listened, straining—hoping—to hear the slosh of lies. But Pilar’s blood was quiet.
When she opened her eyes, Pilar was watching her with something akin to pity.
“Sorry, Rose. I’m telling the truth.”
Mia sat on the lakeshore, her knees tucked into her chest. Her feet were bare. She dug her heels into the earth, scooping up soft red sand in her hands and sifting it through her fingers. At night, the lake was stained a deep indigo, a swatch of smooth silk in the crater of a volqano.
She was thinking about her parents. The way they were physically drawn toward one another; how easily her mother’s cheek found the smooth plane of her father’s shoulder, or how his hand rested perfectly on the curve of her back. One of Zaga’s questions had filled Mia with doubt: Was your parents’ marriage a farce?
She ached for her mother’s journal. Surely it held the answers. But it was buried under a heap of snow in the Twisted Forest, surrendering its secrets to humus and decay?
Mia should have gone back for it. She cursed herself for leaving behind her most precious possession. It was the last surviving link to her mother. In a way, losing the journal meant losing her mother all over again.
Mia heard footsteps and looked up to see Quin standing quietly on the sandy path.
“Can I join you?” he said.
“Yes.”
They sat staring out at the lake. The water pitched the cornflower moon back up to the sky, perfect and whole.
Quin raked his hands through the coarse red sand. “Do you think everything they’ve told us is true?”
“I can hear when someone is lying.”
“You really are a marvel.”
She didn’t feel like a marvel. She felt like a fraud. No longer a Huntress, but not quite a Dujia, either.
“But you can’t hear them if they lie in the cottage, right?” Quin said. “Or in the tavern? For a place where people purport to trust each other, there sure is a lot of uzoolion around.”
She hadn’t thought about it, but he made a decent point.
“Is that an active volqano?” Quin pointed to a molten cone of orange in the distance. It glowed incandescent, sending coils of gray smoke into the sky.
“I don’t know.”
He nudged her arm. “I thought you knew everything about an insufferable number of things.”
“I don’t know anything anymore.”
Quin took her hand and a spark ignited in her belly. That was one thing she knew: the cold she’d once felt slinking off the prince had been replaced by the warm melt of desire. She tried to focus on the stars overhead, but they were hazy, trapped under a net of ash and smoke. Heat was pouring off her, or pouring off Quin, or maybe there wasn’t any difference.
With his free hand, he reached out and delicately lifted one of her curls. “Your hair is wilder here than in the castle.”
“I’m wilder, too.”
“I know,” he said. “I like it.”
The heat moved into her mouth so suddenly she was at risk of garbling her words.
“I think Tristan is still alive. Dom found two bodies in the Twisted Forest. Two of the guards.”
Quin’s hand stiffened. “They’re dead? He’s certain?”
“It’s not the dead ones I’m worried about. If Tristan is trekking through the forest, crawling back to the Kaer . . .”
“Then it’s only a matter of time before he reaches your sister.”
Mia’s impulses were at war. A full day had passed, which put the duke one day closer to the castle and Angelyne. What was she still doing in Fojo?
“I’ll go with you, ” Quin said, “if you want to go back.”
“You can’t go back,” said a dulcet voice behind them.
Mia turned to see Lauriel, a nubby pink shawl drawn over her shoulders. She was cradling something in her hands. “You shouldn’t leave Refúj. At least not until you’ve read this.”
Mia’s heart leapt.
Lauriel was holding her mother’s journal.
Chapter 42
The Blood Beneath
IT TOOK EVERYTHING IN Mia not to pounce on the book.
“Quin, darling.” Lauriel smiled at the prince. “Dom and Pilar were asking for you in the tavern. Perhaps you could join them for a drink?”
He looked at Mia. “Go,” she said. “I know where to find you.”
Quin tipped his head toward Lauriel and disappeared into the night, taking his warmth with him.
Lauriel sat heavily on the bank of sand. Mia reached for the journal, but a smiling Lauriel tucked it beneath her arm.
“You don’t get it right away,” she said. “You have to talk to me first.”
“About what?”
“About everything, darling. Everything you’re thinking and feeling.”
Mia exhaled. It was going to be a long night.
“How did you find the journal?”
“Dom brought it back from the Twisted Forest. He knew I’d given it to your mother, so he returned it to me.”
“You gave it to her?”
“Yes. So that no matter how much she had to lie from day to day, there was one place she could speak true. She wanted so much to tell you about magic, Mia. Your mother believed magic was the body’s response to a broken heart.”
Mia thought of her own magic, blooming when she found herself on the cusp of a marriage she didn’t want.
“How much do you know about magic?” Lauriel asked.
“A little.” Mia conjured up Pilar’s words in the merqad. “To be honest, not very much.”
“For centuries,” Lauriel began, “men have found ever-new ways of oppressing women. Our bodies have been receptacles, both container and contained; our wombs soft and pliant for the children we were meant to bear our husbands, whether we wanted to or not. We have been restricted, silenced, and confined. This has been called many things—‘protection,’ ‘progress,’ even ‘love.’”