He was not alone here in the dark.
Fel reached out toward a voice that sounded a little like his own but deeper. Surer. Certain as a call across water. Fel remembered that voice. He had carried it with him.
We’re gonna raise horses one day, you and me.
His brother.
They were two brothers again, a man and a boy. The boy knew the man’s dream of working with Andalusian horses, held close even here. He tasted the burnt sugar of the figs his brother loved when they could find them growing wild. He felt the blood and calluses made on their hands, their fingers turning rough alongside each other’s.
Fel hovered in the same living and not-living space he had come from before Estrella found him. But there was enough of him that he and his brother could pass back and forth memories of a world their mother and father had sent them away from.
Cutting wild asparagus with their father’s knives.
Slipping the lacy shells of red macis from between nutmeg seeds and their fruit.
How their grandmother left behind not just her recipes for pomegranate-orange-blossom water and pickled lemons, but her sadness that one day Fel and his brother would have to leave the place they had been born.
Adán. The name spun through what was left of Fel.
His brother’s name had been Adán.
Adán had saved him, pulling him back into the ground when Fel thought Reid might kill him. Adán had drawn him back into the dark and the rush of voices.
It wasn’t just them. There were others down here.
They were the bodies and spirits taken into the ground. These voices carried the scent and color of where the land had pulled them into its earth. Flowering branches or bare boughs depending on the season. The perfume of roses at midnight or lilies at dawn. The tiny leaves and thread-thin stems of cut hedges. A slope of jacaranda and magnolia.
But Fel had not been taken by these vengeful gardens. Not like they had.
He was one of the first men dead. He had gone into this ground long before Nomeolvides hands ever touched it. The truth he had died to and come back from went deeper than their fingers could reach.
These were voices that brought with them the heavier smells of iron and limestone. They carried metal and salt from both earth and blood. This was the bitter growth of a story untold, kept underground.
Fel and Adán and the other men left here had been forgotten. The bodies of named men, men who had died with them but who were more likely to be missed, had been unearthed from the dirt and rock. But no one searched for Fel and Adán and the forgotten men. The foremen found the bodies of men they considered worth looking for, and left the rest.
Fel and Adán and those left here were the unnamed, the unaccounted for, the unlawful. They were the ones who carried forged papers. They ones left off role sheets because they were not worth the trouble to write down.
They were the ones sent into the bed depths so thick with dust they could barely see. It burned their lungs, and at night they coughed it onto their mats along with sprays of blood.
They were the ones lying about their ages, and the foremen knew it. But because they needed men who could be paid little, they handed them scrapers and picks, shovels and wheelbarrows.
The Briars wanted the deposit fast, the foremen told them. So they sent Fel and Adán and other unnamed men into stretches of the mine floor jagged with faults and slips and fractures.
If there was going to be a fall, the foremen said, they’d have warning. They’d get them out fast enough.
Fel and Adán believed them because they had to. Because they were brown-skinned men who could find no other work, and if they did not believe the foremen, they would go back to starving.
But there had been a fall, an endless river of rock and earth rushing down toward them, and it had killed them. Then it had been lied about, made into gardens. The Nomeolvides women had no idea that the ravine they made into a valley of flowers had been a quarry.
And a graveyard. The Nomeolvides women had planted flowers in places men had died.
Armed with the blur of half remembering, he had hated Estrella, hated all of them for it. But none of them had known. He understood that now, the things he had not realized finding him in the dark.
They had been complicit in covering this over, and they had no idea.
The land had become vicious, and hungry. It did not care that the Nomeolvides women did not know. It held them responsible for turning death into gardens. It demanded their tears sown into its ground like seeds. It drew their lovers into hills and hollows. It took from the women who spent their lives kneeling in this earth.
They covered the death of so many men, the fall that had happened here, all blood and rock and dust. They had silenced the land with arbors and flowering trees. They had hidden its story with countless bright petals. And La Pradera made them pay for it. It took any man they loved. In making this land beautiful, the Nomeolvides women had also made it ravenous. Wrathful.
Bloodthirsty.
This land had seen so much death that by the time the Nomeolvides women spread their petals over it, it had grown a taste for it.
What still existed of Fel wrung out with all the things his brother would have taught him. How to keep the flint shell of his heart from cracking before he was ready. That being forbidden a thing would only make him want it more, but sometimes it was easier not to want something if he knew he could never have it.
It was the possibility, the potential in a laugh or the brush of fingers, that could leave them in pieces. It had etched on Fel’s rib cage the memory of light on a girl’s skin, her ankle wearing thin cords of gold and moon silver.
The earth should have given Fel the sense that he couldn’t breathe, like the ground falling over him so long ago. But down here, he had no body to be crushed, no breath to be taken, no blood to be lost.
All that was left were his dreams of indigo horses, turning teal beneath the sun’s heat.
A girl setting her lips against his forehead as he slept.
The wild flicker of her skirt, like petals scattering.
This was a thing he’d learned: that setting his hand on a girl’s back, and that girl letting his hand stay, led to fairy rings, and ponds full of stars.
Even in its first faint traces, love could alter a landscape. It wrote unimagined stories and made the most beautiful, forbidding places.
Love grew such strange things.