The Familiar

by Leigh Bardugo

Her aunt had warned her long ago that some people brought misery with them like weather,

One was not supposed to mourn the dead; it was said to deny the miracle of resurrection. But the death of a queen was different. The city was meant to grieve her passing, and her funeral procession was a spectacle rivaled only by her stepson Carlos’s death earlier that year. Luzia’s first cries as she entered the world were mixed with the weeping of every madrileño for their lost queen. “It confused you,” Blanca told her. “You thought they were crying for you, and it has given you too much ambition.”

Aunt Hualit had only laughed when Luzia told her. “If a little bit of magic could make us rich, your mother would have died in a palace full of books, and I wouldn’t have had to fuck my way to this beautiful house. You’re lucky all you got was a spider bite.”

Luzia saw her reflection in the goblet, changed but unchanged, made perfect and ruined all the same.

Not like her mother, shoved beneath the stones of this church; not like her father, tossed into an unmarked grave. She reached for the thread of hope she’d had within reach only moments ago.

Not when she might carve some real luck from this moment. Her mother and father had vanished from the earth as if they’d been consumed, as if they’d never been here at all, uncelebrated, unsung,

Better to live in fear than in grinding discontent. Better to dare this new path than continue her slow, grim march down the road that had been chosen for her. At least the scenery would be different.

Later Luzia would understand that when it came to anything worth having, there was no end to more. She would reflect on the path she’d seen before her and how wrong she’d been about where it would lead.

Luzia might burn. Or she might sprout wings after all—very fine wings of velvet and pearls.

she would feel it tremble in her palm, as if it were an egg, something waiting to be born beneath its thin red shell. What might it become? What might she?

There is a fine line between a saint and a witch, and I wonder if you are prepared to walk it.”

Language creates possibility. Sometimes by being used. Sometimes by being kept secret.

“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.

She fought to find the melody and then there, the song, she followed it, humming, the sound blooming from her chest with the strength of a hive, a swarm of bees singing with her, the words taking shape, traveling across the sea, across time, the words of exile, of new beginnings, of survival.