All colors of torn-out flowers dotted the hills. Every stripe of color had been broken. Fountains stilled and trellises shrugged away their coats of climbing roses. Trees shed their blossoms, growing toward the sky. And in the days after, the land turned wild.
The stories Fel had told Estrella grew and flowered. Cherry and almond trees sprouted from the ground and wore coats of white and pink petals. Cork oaks spread from saplings into thickening trunks. Wild olive trees broke through the green hills, their leaves growing in like feathers.
Indigo mushrooms and stalks of unfamiliar flowers rose in their shadows. They grew tall and straight, the tan stems giving way to tiny brown flowers.
In all this new life, La Pradera had given Fel and his brother back a small piece of the land they had come from. A little of the life they’d had before found its way into these gardens. In these shade-growing flowers. In the perfume of almond and cherry blossoms. In the warm green and dust smell of olive trees.
Estrella knelt to the stalks of brown flowers. They looked like snapdragons, but spindlier. Instead of reds and yellows, these were all in tones of brown and gold. They looked photographed in sepia. Some were closed, their tops like hyacinth buds or tiny pinecones. But they were all drawn in those same browns.
“They’re called bird’s-nest orchids,” Fel said.
She looked up, finding the boy she didn’t know had been watching her.
“They grow wild in the woods,” he said.
The way he looked at her made her feel like she was made of countless petals. Like her skin was the brown of orchids that grew in Cantabrian forests.
“Why are you avoiding me?” He said it without accusation or hurt. He just stood there, hands in his pockets.
His eyes followed the vines of blossoming almond and cherry branches, the petals blushing the wood. The bird’s-nest orchids rose in soft brown stalks. Fairy rings of blue mushrooms covered the ground. Dandelions showed their wispy blossoms and greens.
He recognized these things. He knew them as belonging to his family. His stories had taken deep enough root here that they grew into things that could be touched.
If Estrella could keep her own brutal heart from finding him, she could keep him safe. She could guard the beautiful things locked inside him.
She opened her mouth to say she hadn’t been avoiding him. That the stone house had been thrown into welcoming back lost men, and mourning ones who’d drifted up toward the stars. That the grandmothers and mothers were busied with how they would use the rumors of what had happened here to keep selling seeds and bulbs as though they were covered in gold. That at night Estrella and her cousins stood at the border of La Pradera, clasping hands, wondering if this land would still draw blood and pollen from them if, one day, they ran.
He felt it, the excuses building in her throat, and he gave her a smile of Don’t even try.
The lies fell away.
“You shouldn’t be with me, Fel,” Estrella said.
He took a few steps toward her, the bird’s-nest orchids brushing his calves. “Why?”
She shut her eyes tight, shaking her head. But the cherry and almond blossoms just got sweeter, and darker, an almost fall smell that the courtyard of flowering trees never let off. There, everything was perfume and light. Here, flowers smelled like wood and rain-slicked oranges.
You shouldn’t be with me, because I helped turn the place you died into flower beds. This was the truth. But she could not bring the words to her lips. So she grabbed at any others in reach.
“We’re las hijas del aire,” she said.
“And my brother and I are immigrants with no family,” he said.
“For years we didn’t even exist on paper, Fel. You did.”
“You want to talk about paper?” he asked. “On paper, I’m twenty-five. Or I was.”
“What?” She couldn’t help letting a laugh into her voice. He looked seventeen, eighteen maybe.
“It was so I could be twenty-one when I was fourteen,” he said. “So my brother and I could both get the same jobs.”
“Who believed you were twenty-one when you were fourteen?”
“Foremen who wanted to.”
An indigo milk mushroom brushed her ankle, the cap the same blue violet as forget-me-nots. The color of her family’s name. The shade of the wooden horse Estrella had buried in the sunken garden. The skirt Estrella had worn when Fel had first shown her indigo fairy rings.
That color, and her name, carried what she and her cousins had done, and what their mothers and grandmothers had done. The blue of their own name wore the stain of it all. The guilt was a weight in her hands as heavy as all those flowers yet to be made.
That guilt folded in on itself. It turned into a faceted thing made of edges and mirrors. It reflected back all the ways he had trusted her. She had believed she could protect him, that he needed her to, like he was a boy made from these gardens. But he’d had his own life, and death, and her family had buried it under everything beautiful.
She had never bothered to think of him as a boy with a story of his own, one that did not begin and end with her family.
“What we did to you,” Estrella said.
“You didn’t know,” he said. “And Bay won’t let the Briars hide this anymore.”
A flicker of motion drew Estrella’s eyes.
Among the olive trees, she could make out the shape of her cousin and Bay, the last Briar left at La Pradera.
Even with how long Estrella and her cousins had watched Bay, there was so much of her that Dalia had noticed before any of the rest of them had. Her watching eyes. Her ready hands. Her stance that held the vigilance of girls and the confidence of boys. Marjorie had passed down a little of herself to Bay.
The Nomeolvides girls had thought Bay belonged to them. She had always been theirs. And now they had let her go, not just so the one of them she loved most could love her, but so she could be her own.
The way Bay kissed Dalia, both of them parting each other’s lips, pressing their hands so hard against each other’s clothes it seemed like they could feel each other’s skin through fabric, it was a thing Estrella envied them. There was so much hope and possibility held between them. Their love was something small but glimmering. They were careful with it, handling it like it was fragile as new ice. And now it was spiraling out and opening like frost flowers.
They shared the weight of two things yet to be done. Tell the truth about this place. Find the shape of a love they had kept to blushing glances for so long.
But Estrella and Fel. They were two sides of a war that had gone on under the earth for generations.
“We’re dangerous, Fel,” Estrella said. “I used to hate everyone who called us brujas, but they weren’t wrong. We’re poison.” Her voice fell to a whisper. She couldn’t wring anything louder from her throat. “I’m poison.”
“And I’m a thief,” he said. “Does it matter?”
“What?” she asked.
He shrugged one shoulder. For a second he looked like he was checking the land behind him.
But he meant his back, the scars she’d traced with her fingers in the dark.
“What did you think they were from?” he asked.
“What happened?”
“I stole fruit,” he said. “Figs. I wanted to get them for my brother’s birthday. Please don’t tell Adán that part. He doesn’t know what I was doing, he just knows I got caught trespassing.”
Estrella took this, the small weight of him telling her something he could not tell his brother.
“I thought I was on land no one was taking care of,” Fel said. “It looked like it.” He held his laugh between his back teeth, as though it might soften the memory. “It wasn’t. I was on the far edge of a rich man’s property. There was so much of it he wasn’t doing anything with a lot of it.”
When Estrella had first seen Fel naked, when her hands had mapped the scars crossing his back, a deep place inside her had cracked. Now it shattered like a knot of glass.
“They did that to you for stealing fruit?” she asked.
He nodded. “Fifteen.” Even saying the number made him wince. “They never told me if it was for my age or the number of figs I stole.”
“You were fifteen and a court gave you that?”
“A court?” A laugh punctured the second word. “That wasn’t how it worked. I got what the owner asked for. What rich men asked for was the law. He wanted to make sure I understood. I did.”
The hope in her that he had no recollection of each lash on his back broke and crumbled.
“You remember it?” she asked.
“Oh, I remember it.” His laugh was less bitter than pained. “I didn’t know one man could own that much land. I didn’t think men owned that much more land than they could farm. But I never made that mistake again.”
His laugh was slight, but she felt the depth of it, the sad smile like there had been uncountable days and unmeasured darkness between now and that life he’d known.
“So that’s what happened, if you’ve been wondering.” He set one hand on her waist. His fingers slid onto her, then his palm, so slowly it felt like asking permission. “I won’t let you call you or your family dangerous unless you’re willing to call me a thief.”
He didn’t understand. Her family’s legacy was sorrow. She didn’t know what shape it would take now, but it was there, waiting in her blood. He was a buck in the woods, old enough to know the trees and the dark, but not old enough to realize that things smaller than he was could still be dangers. It wasn’t just rich men and their quarries that could hurt him. She had been soft under his hands, but if he kept close, she would get her teeth and poison into him.
Even the flowers she grew would not stay under her hands. They made meadows out of rafters. They became oceans instead of gardens. There were things about her she wanted to make tame and mild, but they would not settle. They stayed fierce, defiant.
“Everything we touch, we wreck,” she said. The truth of what had happened here. The men they loved. The women they adored and kept secret. “All of it.”
His other hand started at the small of her back, fingertips first. They slid up to her shoulder blade, his palm laying flat against her.
“Then wreck me,” he said.
He was doing this slowly enough that she could stop him. He was leaving room for her to say she did not want this. If she said it, he’d let go. If she couldn’t say it, she could break away, ease his hands off her, with so little effort.
“I died,” he said, “and you brought me back to life.”
The sheet of cold air between them, the small distance she’d been keeping, thawed and heated. It turned as warm as his back while he slept.
She kissed his shirt, a place she had seen a scar crawl up to his shoulder. She wanted to give her own breath to every part of him that hurt, every piece of him still broken or bruised or left underground.
Her lips slid up the side of his neck. He bowed his head so the next time her mouth left his skin, he caught her lips with his.
He kissed her, and she was a world in bloom, her skin becoming starflowers. His tongue between her lips was borraja, that first bloom of hers that he’d taken into his mouth.
The sky over them lightened to gray blue. She kissed him hard enough that each time their lips broke, she heard him drawing in a thread of breath.
He kissed her until her tongue felt like it would burst into petals. He kissed her collarbone, his tongue tracing the path where her necklace had been. Her skin felt hot as the stars those beads had become.
The wind brought a rain of blue over their skin. Not the deep shade of borraja, or the lavender of forget-me-nots. Turquoise and blue green, petals from the tree of colors Fel had brought with him when he came back to her.
Years ago, her family had been forced off their own land, displaced by treaties and newly drawn borders. Rumors had followed them, and they’d been driven out of every town they tried to make their home. Their gift for holding earth in their hands had drawn suspicion, fear, scorn.
Wherever they lived, even now, they would have to give the ground flowers. That was a truth that stayed in their blood. Unless they wanted their gifts to decide when and how they showed themselves, they would have to bring into life the blooms waiting in their hands. If they refused, hundreds might show up in an attic or growing from wallpaper.
There were places that might hate them and the work of their hands. There were whispers that might follow them like shadows. There were women who might declare them witches and men who might chase them from their streets.
But there were also oceans and ice forests. There were deserts as red as foxes and forests of cork oaks and wild olive trees. There was this boy and his brother, and the land where they would care for horses, hills softened with meadow grasses.
There were hearts girls like her could love without fear of them vanishing. There was the five of them standing at the edge of La Pradera, their bare feet in the wet grass and the perfume of their names clinging to the hems of their slips.
There was so much ground they had never felt under their hands. There was the whole world, all its gardens still unseen.