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.”

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

There was nothing more dangerous than a woman with a pen in her hand.

Santángel had been tempted to correct him. He had been close enough to Luzia to know she smelled of orange blossoms and had considered advising her that women of good families didn’t wear scent.

“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.

He grasped her hand in his. “I was wrong when I told you to fear men and their ambition,” he murmured in her ear. “Fear nothing, Luzia Cotado, and you will become greater than them all. Now sing for me.”

Just as I make you stronger, you do the same for me. You make the blood flow in my veins once more. You remind my heart to beat.” “A heart cannot forget to beat,” she scoffed. His face shuttered. “All things can be forgotten given enough time. Now

“When we were on your horse, I wanted you to keep riding. I wanted you to charge through the gates and onto the road. I didn’t want to come back.” For a long moment she thought he would say nothing. When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet, as if he were confessing. “I thought the same thing,” he said. “I wondered how far we might go.”

“It’s not too late,” he said. “If you ask me to go, I will.” “Is that what you want?” “In all these many years I’ve never wanted anything less.”

“Then kiss me again, Santángel,” she said. “It was too late for us before we ever met.”

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.

It had taken years and strange circumstances but she understood now that she and Luzia were lonely in a way that only the overlooked