“You come to our land.” Telo leaned in close, his voice quiet and charged with menace. “Your force your Prophet on us. You raid our holy places. And now you have the gall to defile my sister in our own home.”
“Telo,” Leandro said warningly.
“No.” Telo turned to his brother. “These Moors need a lesson. Hold him.”
I tried to jerk away in panic, but Telo shoved me over the edge of Sofia’s bed, and Leandro pinned me belly-down, his knife nicking behind my left ear. The bedclothes still held Sofia’s warm smell, mixed with fresh blood and my own sharp fear. Telo’s belt clicked.
“Please….” I tried to turn, but Leandro’s knife pressed below my jaw.
Telo knocked my legs apart with his boots. I felt pressure, and then pain ripped up through my bowels.
“No!” I screamed and strained my arms against them, but Leandro held me still as Telo forced himself into me. Oh, God, this is happening, this is happening. God, stop it, God have mercy. This is happening.
“Stop, please, stop.” Sofia’s voice shook.
My feet scrabbled uselessly on the floor.
“You’ll pay a hundredfold for what you’ve done to our sister,” Telo grunted in my ear.
He finished and drew back. I slumped beside the bed, shaking with shame and shock. How could this have… oh, God, I am… why did you let this happen?
Without warning, Telo leveled a kick at my ribs. I heard the pop of bone before I felt the pain. I fell to my side. Another kick, to my head this time. It caught my left eye, and one side of my vision exploded in a white starburst. Leandro joined in. One of them brought his foot down on my femur. I heard it snap and the room swam close to blackness. I rolled onto my stomach, tried to drag myself away from the blows, but they came at me from all sides. Adán, I thought, but no, he was far away in Córdoba, safe, presiding over his mother’s table. I curled my arms around my head and tried to hold still in my own half-darkness, praying for it to end.
And then they were finished, the room silent except for Sofia’s ragged crying.
“What have you done?” I heard Sofia say, somewhere far away.
“You stupid bitch,” Telo said, out of breath. “Did you think your virtue was yours to give?”
“He is Ishaq ibn Hisham, the heir to the caliphate,” she said. Her voice canted higher. “What have you done?”
The room went quiet. I blinked the darkness away from my open right eye. My left eye was already beginning to swell shut, and strange patterns of light danced across my field of vision. A surge of anger rolled over me, followed by shame and blackening pain. Anger. Shame. Pain.
“No one would blame us.” Leandro’s words swam close. “It’s simple vengeance. Breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.”
“No,” Telo said. His footsteps sounded near my head. He snarled his hands in my hair and tugged me up sharply. “Help me, Leandro.”
“That’s enough,” Leandro said.
“Enough?” Telo laughed. “For ruining our sister?” He took hold of my wrists and began pulling me from the room.
Leandro hung back, uncertain.
“What are you doing?” Sofia’s voice shot high.
“Taking him to Grandmère,” Telo said. “Let her judge what’s to be done with him.”
Telo pulled me to the stairs. Leandro followed. Fire shot up my side as the muscles tugged on my fractured rib. Lamia. Hope and dread clouded together in my chest. A woman with books might be civilized, might put an end to this, but the recipes for poisons and the stories, the boys’ stories of her cursing them over mere oranges…. My broken leg fell limp against the landing. I cried out and all my thoughts dissolved in a burst of pain. A cold sweat broke over my body, mixing with the blood that slicked my neck where Leandro’s knife had bitten me.
“Please,” Sofia said, faint now.
My back hit the cool, smooth flagstones of the house’s ground floor. Blearily, through my open right eye, I saw we were coming into the central hall, where a steady fire burned in the hearth. A woman in a red-hemmed gray dress sat before it. The fire’s heat and the billowing darkness over my eye warped her face. The windows reflected the flames, backed by the dense blackness of the country night.
Telo dragged me up on my knees before her. I swayed. He grabbed the back of my neck and stood behind me, holding me upright.
Slowly, Lamia de Rampion turned her face from the fire. She was aged, but younger than I expected, regal in the way of women who have not forgotten what it was to be beautiful in their youth. Her hair waved black and silver in equal parts into a low, loose bun. My mind sparked and fever-wheeled with the notion that perhaps she was Sofia’s mother after all, not her grandmother.
“What have you found?” she asked, cool and calm, the tone a cat’s mistress would use when he made a present of his kill.
“A rat.” Telo tightened his grip on my neck. “Glutting himself on our stores.”
She lifted her chin to Leandro, standing at the bottom of the stair. “And where did you find him?”she asked, as though she already knew his reply.
“Upstairs,” Leandro answered. “As you said.”
“Please, doña.” My voice trembled and scraped as I spoke. “If you would let me make amends…”
Lamia’s eyes drifted down and hooked into my own. A chill washed over me. I could make out nothing of mercy in their depths.
“Amends?” She leaned forward, as if I had made an interesting point. “How do you propose to compensate me for what you have taken from us, hmm? Can you restore my granddaughter’s virginity? Or perhaps you mean to repay us in horses and lands. Is that it, Moor? Will you heap us with gold if my granddaughter’s legs prop open for you whenever you happen by?” Her voice stayed even, furiously calm.
“No, never—”
Lamia cut my words short with a curt lift of her hand. She stood, and I saw her then as she was, a woman with the full swell of her powers come to fruit. “Bind him, please, Telo,” she said, nodding to a straight-backed wooden chair facing the fire.
I tried again. “Doña, please.” I turned to Leandro. “Peace, brothers—”
“What did we say?” Telo asked. He heaved me into the chair and bent to bind my ankles to its legs with horse rope. “We’re not your brothers.”
“Grandmère,” Leandro said from the stair. “What are you doing?”
“Please,” I said. It hurt to breathe around my broken rib. “Let me go. I won’t say a word. We can forget all this.”
Telo twisted my arms and bound my wrists together behind the chair back in answer.
“You’re Christians,” I pleaded. I strained my arms against the ropes, but they held me fast. “Does your Christ not love mercy?”
Lamia walked behind me to the stairs. I craned my neck to see. “Lend me your knife, Leandro,” she said.
“Grandmère—” Leandro said.
“Your knife,” Lamia repeated.
Leandro handed it over slowly. Lamia rustled past me and knelt by the fireplace, shuffling her grandson’s blade in the coals. “Do you know what our Christ says, Moor?” She turned her head to regard me over her shoulder. “Do you?”
My throat would not part to let me speak. “No,” I whispered.
She spoke into the fire. “If thine eye do cause thee to offend, pluck it out and cast it from thee.” She turned the knife within the coals. “Lest thy whole body should be cast into hell.”
“I meant no offense to you or your granddaughter.” I fought for enough breath to speak as the blade turned from dull silver to red. “Please, I love Sofia.”