If there was going to be a fall, the foremen said, they’d have warning. They’d get them out fast enough.
Fel and Adán believed them because they had to. Because they were brown-skinned men who could find no other work, and if they did not believe the foremen, they would go back to starving.
But there had been a fall, an endless river of rock and earth rushing down toward them, and it had killed them. Then it had been lied about, made into gardens. The Nomeolvides women had no idea that the ravine they made into a valley of flowers had been a quarry.
And a graveyard. The Nomeolvides women had planted flowers in places men had died.
Armed with the blur of half remembering, he had hated Estrella, hated all of them for it. But none of them had known. He understood that now, the things he had not realized finding him in the dark.
They had been complicit in covering this over, and they had no idea.
The land had become vicious, and hungry. It did not care that the Nomeolvides women did not know. It held them responsible for turning death into gardens. It demanded their tears sown into its ground like seeds. It drew their lovers into hills and hollows. It took from the women who spent their lives kneeling in this earth.
They covered the death of so many men, the fall that had happened here, all blood and rock and dust. They had silenced the land with arbors and flowering trees. They had hidden its story with countless bright petals. And La Pradera made them pay for it. It took any man they loved. In making this land beautiful, the Nomeolvides women had also made it ravenous. Wrathful.
Bloodthirsty.
This land had seen so much death that by the time the Nomeolvides women spread their petals over it, it had grown a taste for it.
What still existed of Fel wrung out with all the things his brother would have taught him. How to keep the flint shell of his heart from cracking before he was ready. That being forbidden a thing would only make him want it more, but sometimes it was easier not to want something if he knew he could never have it.
It was the possibility, the potential in a laugh or the brush of fingers, that could leave them in pieces. It had etched on Fel’s rib cage the memory of light on a girl’s skin, her ankle wearing thin cords of gold and moon silver.
The earth should have given Fel the sense that he couldn’t breathe, like the ground falling over him so long ago. But down here, he had no body to be crushed, no breath to be taken, no blood to be lost.
All that was left were his dreams of indigo horses, turning teal beneath the sun’s heat.
A girl setting her lips against his forehead as he slept.
The wild flicker of her skirt, like petals scattering.
This was a thing he’d learned: that setting his hand on a girl’s back, and that girl letting his hand stay, led to fairy rings, and ponds full of stars.
Even in its first faint traces, love could alter a landscape. It wrote unimagined stories and made the most beautiful, forbidding places.
Love grew such strange things.
THIRTY-ONE
Her mother did not try to hold her as she cried into the sheets Fel had slept in. Her mother did not try to stroke her hair or shush her with a soft voice. Instead, she soaked a cloth in rosewater and with rough, quick strokes she cleared the trails of salt and the indigo dried on Estrella’s cheeks. She handed Estrella a small cup and told her to swallow it down. The alcohol burned the back of her throat, then left the taste of anise and honey.
The sting of the liquor faded, and Estrella fell into the open well of sleep.
“Luisa,” her mother said from the doorway.
Estrella sat up, half-asleep, wondering if, for a moment, her mother had forgotten her name.
“The one I loved most wasn’t your father,” her mother said, her shape a silhouette in the hall’s light. “We loved each other the way friends do, your father and I. But I loved someone else in a very different way. Her name was Luisa.”
To another daughter, it might have stung, the revelation that her father was some lesser love to her mother.
But this one name shimmered with the possibility that her mother understood the hearts of Estrella and her cousins.
And right now it kept Estrella breathing.
“What happened to her?” she asked.
“I sent her away,” her mother said. Even in the dark Estrella could make out the hardening of her face, bracing against the memory. She looked washed clean of excess color, her lips pale against the brown of her face and her deep eyes. “I told her I didn’t love her.”
Estrella sank back onto the bed. “I should’ve sent him away.”
“Where?” her mother asked. “This was the only home he had.”
Estrella’s eyes fell shut, and she breathed in the air through the window and the soft breath of her mother whispering, “Sleep.”
This was what turned Nomeolvides girls into women. Not their first times bleeding between their legs, but the first time their hearts broke. Estrella could feel hers inside her rib cage, a bird trapped in an attic.
She still wore her blue dress, limp and creased. The stains from the mushroom milk had turned a deep green. She slept in the bed that still smelled like him, the salt of his sweat and the scent of leaves in the gardens. She dreamed of setting her mouth against him, kissing the places where pale scars crossed his back like he was a map. She dreamed of the heat that lived just under his skin. And when she dreamed of him, she woke to starflowers spreading across the ceiling. The vines unfurled, wrapping around rafters and trailing down to the curtain rods. The purple blooms opened and showed their five blue petals.
She didn’t care who saw them. She didn’t care if they reminded her mother or her grandmother of girls driven from their houses for being witches. Estrella was more dangerous than any bruja. She had killed the boy she’d brought back. And this was a thing worse than loving him into disappearing in the first place.
She opened herself to her family’s worry. She hoped it would sharpen into scorn, because that was what she deserved. Not their concern. Not their sense that she should be looked after. Their contempt. Their blame.
Estrella deserved the name her mother had given her. She deserved how it made those blue flowers unpredictable, waiting at the edges of her dreams. She deserved the way it kept her a little distance from her cousins, making her a lesser Nomeolvides girl.
Later, her cousins filled the room, carrying haircombs, a clean dress, glasses of water, cups of tea. They came with hands ready to lead her into the shower and spin her into something living.
“We have to tell her,” Estrella said.
Her cousins stilled. She had said so little since shutting herself in this room that now her voice caught them.
“What?” Gloria asked.
“Bay.” Estrella slid to the edge of the bed, her feet brushing the floor. “We have to tell her to get away from us.”
“Why?” Calla and Azalea asked, a half second off from each other.