فصل سی و دوم

32

It’s Nothing

Though Mercedes yearned to run, she walked down the stairs, worried her shaking knees would make her stumble. The capitán didn’t follow her, not yet, but there wouldn’t be much more time.

She pushed aside the tile in the kitchen floor and took out the latest batch of letters she’d been entrusted to deliver to the men in the woods, letters from mothers, fathers, sisters, lovers. A woman’s voice drifted down from Vidal’s room singing softly of love and its torment, as if he were teasing her with his music, each note the tip of a knife pressed against her throat.

He knows.

Yes, he did, and she would end up like Ferreira with her face in the mud—though Vidal would probably prefer her to die on her back like Ofelia’s mother, while giving him another son. For a moment Mercedes just stood in the dark kitchen, held by the song drifting down from above, as if his fingers were still grabbing her hand, those murderous bloodstained fingers.

Go, Mercedes. He can’t tie you down with a song. No. But she couldn’t leave the girl. Not without saying goodbye.

Ofelia was fast asleep, although the night was still young, when Mercedes slipped into the attic room, the night of her mother’s funeral. Grief exhausts the heart. Vidal’s music drowned the treacherous creak of the door and the sound of Mercedes’s steps as she approached the bed. Most times it seemed as if the old mill was on the soldiers’ side, but sometimes Mercedes found the old house to be a friend.

“Ofelia! Ofelia, wake up!”

Mercedes grabbed the girl’s shoulder without taking her eyes off the door. “Ofelia!” Please wake, please. . . .

The girl’s eyelids, heavy with sleep, finally opened. Mercedes bent over her, grabbing her hand.

“I am leaving, Ofelia.”

The eyes opened wide, such beautiful eyes, as beautiful as her mother’s, but beauty was a dangerous gift in this world.

“Where are you going?”

“I can’t tell you. I can’t.”

Mercedes cast another gaze at the door. The music was still seeping in, as if Vidal was weaving his web into the night.

“Take me with you!” Ofelia grabbed her arm. “Please!”

“No, no!” Mercedes whispered, caressing the frightened face. “I can’t!” The girl threw her arms around Mercedes’s neck. She was too young to be alone in the world, far too young.

Mercedes kissed her hair, as raven-black as her own, and held her in her arms the way she’d once wished to hold a daughter of her own. “I can’t, my child! I will come back for you, I promise.” But Ofelia wouldn’t let go. She held on so tightly Mercedes could feel her heartbeat.

“Take me with you!” she begged. “Take me with you!” Over and over again.

How could anyone say no in the face of such loneliness?

Stumbling through the night, they followed the brook, shuddering under another pour of freezing rain. The old umbrella Mercedes had grabbed barely sheltered them from it. One time she believed she heard Ferreira’s footsteps behind her and had to remind herself that he was dead, like Tarta and so many others. Dead. Did the word become more or less real with every time one had to attach it to a loved one?

“Wait!” Mercedes stopped, her arm firmly around Ofelia’s shoulders.

She thought she could hear a horse snorting, but when she listened keenly into the night, all she could hear was the rain drumming against the trees and dripping from the leaves above them.

“It’s nothing!” she whispered, pressing Ofelia to her side. “Don’t worry. Let’s go.” But the game was over.

As Mercedes turned, lifting the umbrella, she gazed into Vidal’s face. Garces stood behind him and at least twenty more of his soldiers. How had she not heard them? The night is always on the hunters’ side.

“Mercedes.” Vidal turned her name into a chain around her neck. He let his gaze wander across her face, so stiff with terror, and down to the girl.

“Ofelia.”

He didn’t try to veil his hatred.

He grabbed the girl’s arm and left Mercedes to Garces.

They will kill her. That was all Ofelia could think, while the Wolf dragged her back to the mill, through the forest, over the mud-covered yard, into the house, where her mother had died. They will kill Mercedes like they killed my mother.

The Wolf pulled her up the stairs with hands of iron. He called for one of his soldiers to guard the door before he pushed her roughly into her room.

“How long have you known about her?”

He slapped Ofelia’s face. It was still wet with rain, or was it tears she felt on her cheeks? It didn’t matter. The raindrops were tears too. The whole world was crying.

“How long have you been laughing at me, little witch?!”

The Wolf shook her and Ofelia felt his wish to do more. Break her. Slash her like one of the rabbits the cook prepared in the kitchen for him and his men. Finally, he let go of her with a rude curse and took off his cap, breathing heavily, smoothing his hair. For the first time there was a crack in his mask and it frightened Ofelia more than the Faun’s rage. The Wolf would never forgive that she’d seen him weak—just as he wouldn’t forgive that she hadn’t told him about Mercedes.

“Watch her!” he barked at the soldier by the door. “And if anyone tries to get in”—he put the cap back on his head, straightening it, closing the crack—“kill her first.” Ofelia’s cheek stung as if the slap had split her skin. She started crying the moment the Wolf closed the door, all those tears: for her mother, for Mercedes, for herself.