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Every night she shuts the windows tight to guard against drafts, and every morning he dies and is reborn beside her. She reminds his heart to beat again, as she did so long ago. He kisses her fingers, and combs her hair, and he treasures her, as only a man who has lost his luck and found it once more ever can.

The song spilled through her one last time, splitting, changing, tearing open the world.
A change of scene. A change of fortune.

There are different kinds of suffering, Valentina thought. The kind that takes you by surprise and the kind you live with so long, you stop noticing it.

I’m here, she wanted to shout. I’m so sorry. I only wanted a little warmth. I didn’t know what kind of fire I would start.

"Why!" he said. "Why sentence yourself to death?"
"Do you want to argue or do you want to kiss me?"
He closed the space between them in two strides and took her in his arms. "I assure you I am capable of both."
Why had she wasted time doubting him? He was a killer. He was a liar. He was not a good man. But it was possible she didn't want a good man.

"Your luck brought me Luzia Cotado. If the king will not use her as the instrument she was meant to be, I will."
There was the truth that had choked him in the scorpion's den.
He had doomed her before they had ever met.

"Fate can be changed," Luzia said. "Curses can be broken."
She had to believe that, or she would sink beneath the waves.

But what real solace could any answers from Lucrecia provide?
Santángel had been using her. Santángel had cared for her. Both things could be true and still mean nothing. ... A cruel calculation, a single efficient blade she could cut herself with every night. You are not worth saving, Luzia Cotado, Luzia Cana, Luzia Calderón. Luzia whose name would vanish in the ashes.

She could put her body back together as she had restored her tongue, but the question twisted and wriggled inside her: Who will carry me?
The answer had to be no one, as it had been for so long.

"I was already scared," Luzia said. But it was hard not to think of those marks, of what it would mean to cry out and not be heard, and to know all the while that none of it made a difference because she was going to be put to death anyway. There would be no pardon, no gentler punishment.

This was the magic that was good for boards and beans and eggs and heads of garlic, but that made spiders out of copper and hornets out of silver. Because magic was never easy; because food was food, but coins were nothing without the greed of men.

How was she to sort love from desire? It was like planting sage beside foxglove, trying to separate the leaves when the plants were still new. Both were a kind of medicine if only you knew which was which. Santángel was dangerous, but was he dangerous to her?

Luzia considered the sketch on its easel. Was it so easy to rewrite a moment? To change a story she thought she knew? A child erased with the swipe of a thumb. A scullion transformed into a holy warrior. Two rivals made allies.
"I don't want to do this alone, Luzia. I don't think I can."
"But we are alone," she said as she turned away from him.
"Always."
A warning to the Prince of Olives. A reminder to herself.

"When I was young," he began again, I did everything to ex-cess. There were nights when I would drink and laugh and sing, but there would be a moment when a kind of misery came over me. When I looked around at my friends making merry and I felt only lonely, and even angry that they could be so happy and light when I was drowning beside them."

"You chose yourself," Luzia said. "I can hardly blame you." And yet she did. It was a petty sentiment, but she'd been so alone. Her mother dead, her father mad. She'd been a child. In some ways she still was one. A woman who had barely had a chance to live.

Maybe Víctor was right and he did fear freedom. He would be mortal again and he was still the same fool who had run from death so long ago. He would have but one life to squander, to fill with his own mistakes. The first would be leaving Luzia.

"All empires are the same empire to the poor and the conquered. But not all empires are the same... They will bleed the world for an age. Spain builds nothing, just spends its stolen wealth on wars that have no end. If the walls of La Casilla are wet with blood, then so are the king's monastery and all of the churches in Madrid, and the houses of every noble.

Her small shoulders rose and fell. Her gaze was distant. "It's this house. My dreams are troubled here. There's too much silver, too much gold. All of it plunder. All of it stinking of death. At night the walls bleed."

"I will ride out with them. I won't hunt. I know what it is to be shot from the sky."
At least he'd had a chance to use his wings. Perhaps she should leave off talk of death and bloodshed, but he'd told her she could ask him any question she liked. "Did you kill that man? Gracia de Valera's guard?"
"He forfeited his life when he tried to take yours."

"Why not tell the truth yourself now, Luzia? Admit that the act had gotten so good you yourself had started to believe it."
"I know who I am."
"Do you? I know what it is to lower yourself, to keep your eyes downcast, to seek invisibility. It is a danger to become nothing. You hope no one will look, and so one day when you go to find yourself, only dust remains, ground down to nothing from sheer neglect."

A child. A farmer. A scullion. And a young woman who looked like the Virgin herself had stepped from the frame of one of Pérez's many paintings. Luzia could taste the pomegranate in her mouth, the flavor of her own ambition, her appetite for more. She eyed the golden curtains of the stage and knew she would prove Santángel right. She was done going hungry.

"Without morals or manners. And if you want to know what I think of this... I think it's a very grim little party. Everyone in black. Sad music, no dancing. The wealthy can afford anything but a good time, it seems."

"Well, I am a peasant. Little better than a beast of the field." She was goading him but she didn't want to stop. She couldn't claim that they were friends, but whatever transformation the eating of the pomegranate had worked on her, it had changed something between them as well.

okay… pretty good so far! this is the second novel we are reading for my women men and power class.

"Good," said Santángel. "And if my master would be so kind to send for someone who might set my broken bones so that they heal straight?"
He waited for Victor to meet his gaze.
"Yes," Víctor rasped.
With his scullion in his arms, Santángel strode past the luckiest man in Madrid.

"Fear men, Luzia," he said. "Fear their ambition and the crimes they commit in its service. But don't fear magic or what you may do with it."
It was the closest he could come to honesty.

"Fear men, Luzia," he said. "Fear their ambition and the crimes they commit in its service. But don't fear magic or what you may do with it."
It was the closest he could come to honesty.

There was advice he should give Víctor. It was dangerous to tie your fate to someone of uncertain talent. A title was one thing, but it was foolish to put yourself in such close proximity to a king's ca-price. Had Santángel been a true friend or a true advisor he might have said all these things. But he was a captive, and a captive's only thought could be of freedom.

He hadn't lied to Garavito. His injuries were painful, but pain held no real interest for him. He knew it would stop. He knew death wasn't coming. Pain without fear was easy to bear. He would wash his hands and change his clothes, and forget Garavito's name the way he'd forgotten so many others.