“What?” She couldn’t help letting a laugh into her voice. He looked seventeen, eighteen maybe.
“It was so I could be twenty-one when I was fourteen,” he said. “So my brother and I could both get the same jobs.”
“Who believed you were twenty-one when you were fourteen?”
“Foremen who wanted to.”
An indigo milk mushroom brushed her ankle, the cap the same blue violet as forget-me-nots. The color of her family’s name. The shade of the wooden horse Estrella had buried in the sunken garden. The skirt Estrella had worn when Fel had first shown her indigo fairy rings.
That color, and her name, carried what she and her cousins had done, and what their mothers and grandmothers had done. The blue of their own name wore the stain of it all. The guilt was a weight in her hands as heavy as all those flowers yet to be made.
That guilt folded in on itself. It turned into a faceted thing made of edges and mirrors. It reflected back all the ways he had trusted her. She had believed she could protect him, that he needed her to, like he was a boy made from these gardens. But he’d had his own life, and death, and her family had buried it under everything beautiful.
She had never bothered to think of him as a boy with a story of his own, one that did not begin and end with her family.
“What we did to you,” Estrella said.
“You didn’t know,” he said. “And Bay won’t let the Briars hide this anymore.”
A flicker of motion drew Estrella’s eyes.
Among the olive trees, she could make out the shape of her cousin and Bay, the last Briar left at La Pradera.
Even with how long Estrella and her cousins had watched Bay, there was so much of her that Dalia had noticed before any of the rest of them had. Her watching eyes. Her ready hands. Her stance that held the vigilance of girls and the confidence of boys. Marjorie had passed down a little of herself to Bay.
The Nomeolvides girls had thought Bay belonged to them. She had always been theirs. And now they had let her go, not just so the one of them she loved most could love her, but so she could be her own.
The way Bay kissed Dalia, both of them parting each other’s lips, pressing their hands so hard against each other’s clothes it seemed like they could feel each other’s skin through fabric, it was a thing Estrella envied them. There was so much hope and possibility held between them. Their love was something small but glimmering. They were careful with it, handling it like it was fragile as new ice. And now it was spiraling out and opening like frost flowers.
They shared the weight of two things yet to be done. Tell the truth about this place. Find the shape of a love they had kept to blushing glances for so long.
But Estrella and Fel. They were two sides of a war that had gone on under the earth for generations.
“We’re dangerous, Fel,” Estrella said. “I used to hate everyone who called us brujas, but they weren’t wrong. We’re poison.” Her voice fell to a whisper. She couldn’t wring anything louder from her throat. “I’m poison.”
“And I’m a thief,” he said. “Does it matter?”
“What?” she asked.
He shrugged one shoulder. For a second he looked like he was checking the land behind him.
But he meant his back, the scars she’d traced with her fingers in the dark.
“What did you think they were from?” he asked.
“What happened?”
“I stole fruit,” he said. “Figs. I wanted to get them for my brother’s birthday. Please don’t tell Adán that part. He doesn’t know what I was doing, he just knows I got caught trespassing.”
Estrella took this, the small weight of him telling her something he could not tell his brother.
“I thought I was on land no one was taking care of,” Fel said. “It looked like it.” He held his laugh between his back teeth, as though it might soften the memory. “It wasn’t. I was on the far edge of a rich man’s property. There was so much of it he wasn’t doing anything with a lot of it.”
When Estrella had first seen Fel naked, when her hands had mapped the scars crossing his back, a deep place inside her had cracked. Now it shattered like a knot of glass.
“They did that to you for stealing fruit?” she asked.
He nodded. “Fifteen.” Even saying the number made him wince. “They never told me if it was for my age or the number of figs I stole.”
“You were fifteen and a court gave you that?”
“A court?” A laugh punctured the second word. “That wasn’t how it worked. I got what the owner asked for. What rich men asked for was the law. He wanted to make sure I understood. I did.”
The hope in her that he had no recollection of each lash on his back broke and crumbled.
“You remember it?” she asked.
“Oh, I remember it.” His laugh was less bitter than pained. “I didn’t know one man could own that much land. I didn’t think men owned that much more land than they could farm. But I never made that mistake again.”
His laugh was slight, but she felt the depth of it, the sad smile like there had been uncountable days and unmeasured darkness between now and that life he’d known.
“So that’s what happened, if you’ve been wondering.” He set one hand on her waist. His fingers slid onto her, then his palm, so slowly it felt like asking permission. “I won’t let you call you or your family dangerous unless you’re willing to call me a thief.”
He didn’t understand. Her family’s legacy was sorrow. She didn’t know what shape it would take now, but it was there, waiting in her blood. He was a buck in the woods, old enough to know the trees and the dark, but not old enough to realize that things smaller than he was could still be dangers. It wasn’t just rich men and their quarries that could hurt him. She had been soft under his hands, but if he kept close, she would get her teeth and poison into him.
Even the flowers she grew would not stay under her hands. They made meadows out of rafters. They became oceans instead of gardens. There were things about her she wanted to make tame and mild, but they would not settle. They stayed fierce, defiant.
“Everything we touch, we wreck,” she said. The truth of what had happened here. The men they loved. The women they adored and kept secret. “All of it.”
His other hand started at the small of her back, fingertips first. They slid up to her shoulder blade, his palm laying flat against her.
“Then wreck me,” he said.
He was doing this slowly enough that she could stop him. He was leaving room for her to say she did not want this. If she said it, he’d let go. If she couldn’t say it, she could break away, ease his hands off her, with so little effort.
“I died,” he said, “and you brought me back to life.”
The sheet of cold air between them, the small distance she’d been keeping, thawed and heated. It turned as warm as his back while he slept.