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 the 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.