The Familiar

by Leigh Bardugo

And while it was true that she’d simply gone from one loveless home to another, that didn’t mean she didn’t feel the absence of love.

Doña Valentina had no acceptable name for the longing she felt, and no idea how to soothe it, so she filled her days irritating their few servants with constant correction and existing in a state of relentless dissatisfaction.

“There are worse things for a woman than being alone.”

She was not the same girl who had stood in her clean apron at the table, moved by pity or anger or something equally pointless. The night had been a dream, the glass no glass at all but a soap bubble, born and burst in the same breath. If she could simply not think about it, then maybe it had never happened.

“No, señor,” she said. “It is only that I have nothing to say.” She had plenty to say. About the thin stew and those pearl earrings and the price of salt and about the unpleasant surprise that even magic could become drudgery. But it was nothing they wanted to hear.

She took a long breath, trying to swallow the bitter mix of panic and rage and something nameless that had the shape of a bird, lost in the rafters of a building, searching for sky.

I like how she describes emotions

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.

She was allowed to want more for herself. And even if she wasn’t, she would find a way to get it.

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

And if she couldn’t read then she couldn’t write and was at less risk of causing trouble. There was nothing more dangerous than a woman with a pen in her hand.

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

But who knew how long any of it would last, lost to exile and the Inquisition, magic bleeding away with the bodies of Jews and Muslims, their poetry silenced, their knowledge buried in the stones of synagogues made into churches, the arches of Mudéjar palaces.

And yet as he watched Víctor scratch away at his correspondence, he felt the old rage stir. Once he had craved revenge almost as much as freedom. It had driven him through the sameness of his days and given him purpose. But in time, even his fury had waned, extinguished by the truth of his curse, by the relentless march of years. How strange to discover it within him still, an underground spring that might feed a great river.

“No. No one looks too closely at a woman in rags.” “They should,” said Luzia. “Who has more power in a house than the woman who stirs the soup and makes the bread and scrubs the floors, who fills the foot warmer with hot coals, and arranges your letters, and nurses your children?”

Her anger radiated from her like heat from a stone left in the sun.

“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.”

Luzia couldn’t banter over such a thought. Would she have felt the loss less keenly, if she had known her mother would die? Or would it have been worse? A death drawn out over weeks or months, the knowledge taking on its own life as if feeding on hers? Would she have wondered if she had brought about her mother’s death by dreaming it like Lucrecia with Philip’s armada?

It was like standing in the sea and feeling the tide shift, pulling at your ankles, the sand sliding away as the ocean breathed.

Though Santángel was beginning to believe her will was the greater gift. She was stubborn as a well-built wall, as decided in her course as an avalanche.

“You may posture and fluff your white feathers if it pleases you,” she replied. “But you’re like every other man who wishes for a woman who is shapely and kind and pious and only wise enough not to trouble him.”

In the past it was as if he’d hoarded the things that brought him pleasure, greeting any question about his day or his interests as a kind of intrusion. But now he seemed eager to share with her, turning to her at meals to suggest she taste an interesting dish, returning from the hunt brimming with stories, even inquiring over her own day.

“You are still the child who thought the city wept for her. Your ambition will destroy you, Luzia.” “Maybe,” Luzia admitted. “But let it be my ambition and not my fear that seals my fate.”

Despite her anger and her fear, some part of her had believed Santángel would come for her, that he would find a way, but she couldn’t hope for that any longer. No one would carry her, so she would find a way out herself.

Better to be hunted and brought down than to bare her throat for the slitting. She would die as a wolf did.

Then Luzia had entered his life, a character in a play who was meant to have a few lines and depart. Instead she had overtaken his story. The plot he knew so well had suddenly confused him, the shape of his narrative bending around her into something new.

But his sudden enthusiasms were harder to bear, his chattering excitement. She would smile and nod along with him, even as she felt herself closing up like a fist. Someone had to be wary, to be practical. Someone had to be ready when it all fell apart.

She was twelve years old and she missed her mother and she didn’t know how to live with a man who wept and tore his garments, then vanished for days and came back bright-eyed and full of promises and plans.

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.