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.