The Shores of Spain (8 page)

He and his brother, Cristiano, had moved into this house when Joaquim was only eight years old, taken in by Lady Ferreira when their mother died in childbirth. Lady Ferreira had suspected even then, Joaquim now knew, that he was actually her husband’s child, not the son of Joaquim Tavares, the man for whom he’d been named. Even so, she’d always treated him well, like one of her own sons. Felis, old enough to be Lady Ferreira’s mother, had become a surrogate grandmother to him. There wasn’t much in this household that Felis didn’t know.

After a few moments of pleasantries, she sat down at the servants’ table, her pack of well-worn cards in her equally well-worn hands. While he waited, she shuffled them and let him cut the deck. Once he’d handed it back, she held the deck out for him to select a card. She set that one facedown and then began laying the remaining cards in three neat piles.

Joaquim pressed his lips together. Normally he would have discussed his worries with Duilio or their cousin Rafael, but Duilio was far away and Rafael had gone to Lisboa to speak with the Jesuit brotherhood there. So he’d come here instead. Since childhood, Felis had been his last line of inquiry. If there was something bothering him, once normal inquiries and even prayer failed to provide guidance, he would turn to her. She was a gentle soul despite her gruff manner. And while there were those who considered reading cards sinful, he had yet to see harm come of anything Felis had done, so he waited patiently while she finished arranging the cards.

Her dark eyes peered up at him, then. “What do you need to know, Filho?”

His nickname within the family,
Filho
simply meant
son
. He’d been named for his father, or more accurately, the man who’d taken responsibility for him and raised him. And while the elder Joaquim Tavares might not have fathered him, he would always hold the place of
father
within Joaquim’s heart.

“I had a dream,” Joaquim said, “that Duilio needs my help.”

Mrs. Cardoza strolled back over to listen, dusting flour from her capable hands onto her apron.

Felis regarded him steadily. “Do you want to know if you should help him?”

Joaquim nearly laughed.
That
had never been in question. He’d always gone to Duilio’s aid when needed. “No, I’m going.”

Felis nodded sagely, as if she’d expected that answer. “Then what?”

Joaquim licked his lips. “Will Miss Arenias wait for me?”

“She would be a fool not to, Mr. Joaquim,” Mrs. Cardoza said, laying a floury hand on his shoulder to reassure him.

He’d have to remember to dust off the back of his jacket after he left. “Thank you,” he said, glancing up at the cook. “But I wouldn’t blame her. I don’t know how long this mission of Duilio’s will take.”

Felis lifted the solitary card and peered at it. She frowned and laid it back on the table, then picked up one of the piles and began redistributing the cards, flipping some over and leaving others facedown until she had nine cards lying faceup on the table. Her murmurs took on an angry tone.

That doesn’t sound good
. Joaquim licked his lips. Duilio didn’t believe Felis was a true seer. He believed she merely provided a framework for the listener to organize what he already knew about the situation. Joaquim wasn’t so sure. She’d always seemed magical to him.

Felis glared at her cards, the corners of her thin lips drawn down in a mighty frown. “You’re going to go on a journey.”

Since I’ve already said I was going to help Duilio, that’s given.

The old woman fingered the one card
he’d
drawn, the ten of clubs. “You’re to go on a journey to visit a relative.” She pulled four of the upturned cards to sit next to it, laying the king of spades on the top of that batch. “These all say that you’ll be under a cloud, that there will be complications, and that you will come out of this journey changed.”

Again, he’d known that. As one of the Ferreira males, he’d
inherited a seer’s gift. He’d been told his seer’s gift was buried under his inheritance from his mother, the gift of
finding
. That stronger gift served him well in his work for the police, where he usually spent his hours hunting missing people whom other officers couldn’t find. But when he slept or meditated, his seer’s talent would sometimes emerge, presenting him with dreams or visions of something ahead of him on the road of life. Both his half brother, Duilio, and his cousin Rafael Pinheiro—the bastard son of a bastard son of the Ferreira family—possessed the seer’s gift, although Rafael’s talent was by far the strongest and most reliable. Joaquim’s recent dreams had shown him over and over again traveling to the islands of the sereia and beyond. One thing those dreams carried was a promise of transformation, although of what kind, he didn’t know.

He’d never been fond of change.

Felis picked out two more cards, the jack of diamonds and the queen of clubs. “A man and a woman will come to your aid, but that woman will
not
be the woman you love.”

“I see. But will Miss Arenias wait for me?”

She pushed the six of clubs toward him. “Soon you will marry.”

What?
Joaquim glanced up at her. “So Miss Arenias
will
wait for me to return?”

“No,” she said softly. “These cards are all tied to your journey, Filho. They say you will marry
before
you return home, while you are on this journey.”

His chest tight, Joaquim rose from the table, nearly backing into Mrs. Cardoza. He’d forgotten she was standing behind him. He’d always been sure that Marina Arenias was the one for him. But if Felis was correct, then
he
was the one who wouldn’t wait.
How can that be?

He pinched his nose. He shouldn’t have done this. If the prediction Felis made was true, he would rather not have known. Even so, he had to believe that he made his own way in life. No matter what his gift told him about his future, his decisions were
always
his own.
“Thank you for your time, Miss Felis. I have a lot of things to take care of before I go, so I may not see you again for a while.”

The old woman gathered her cards and slid them back into their tattered box, her mouth pursed in a worried scowl. Mrs. Cardoza hugged him and promised to bear his farewells on to Cardenas, the butler, and to Lady Ferreira. Then Joaquim took his leave, his nerves rattled.

*   *   *

I
LHAS
DAS
S
EREIAS

D
uilio sat in the warm afternoon sunlight in the front courtyard. He’d laid out a timeline for every event in the stolen journal’s history. He sat back in his chair, pressed his folded hands to his lips, and closed his eyes as he contemplated what was happening.

The ferry captain had proven a fount of information about the thieves who’d taken the journal. The woman, remarkable because she wore a neck clap, had taken the same ferry to Amado that the advance guard had. She’d stayed on the lower deck, so they hadn’t seen her. Where she and the boy had gone the next day, taking the journal with them, was still unclear.

Logic told Duilio that the journal was in the hands of the Ministry of Intelligence now, if it hadn’t been destroyed outright. He couldn’t bring himself to believe it. Every time he asked his gift if the ministry had the journal, it fed him a resounding
no
.

What he couldn’t figure out was
why
. His gift never told him that aspect of the future, no matter how important it was. Only yes or no.

He rubbed his hands over his face, got up from his chair, and strode around the courtyard. It was a lovely afternoon, and if he weren’t stuck here trying to figure out what had happened, he would have liked to be hiking some of those mountain trails Oriana had told him about. Or swimming. He quit his pacing and leaned with his back against one of the courtyard’s warm walls.

The thief could have turned the journal over to the ministry
anytime in the past four days. Why hadn’t she? His best guess was that she was negotiating with the ministry, possibly for more money, but when asked that, his gift again told him
no
.

He’d tried a different tack, asking whether the theft was related to the Spanish. His gift told him
yes
, but when he asked himself if their thief was a Canary like Iria Serpa, that had seemed wrong. He asked whether she was acting as an agent of the Spanish throne, whether she was working for the Spanish embassy here, whether she was working for the ministry. All were ambiguous, as if all were true, or none. He couldn’t make sense of that.

It seemed more and more likely that their investigation needed to be carried to Spain—a place that he, as a member of the ambassadorial mission, couldn’t go. He couldn’t send Vas Neves or Benites either, not without the Portuguese Foreign Office asking questions they didn’t want to answer.

That morning, he’d written a letter to Joaquim, asking for his help. If anyone could find the journal, Joaquim could. But this wasn’t Joaquim’s problem. His brother had his own life to live, and Duilio didn’t want to force Joaquim away from his all-consuming work with the police. Before Lent, Joaquim had written that he intended to ask Marina to marry him. Duilio didn’t want to ruin that either.

And there was danger involved; the Spanish weren’t fond of witches. Spanish witches were expected to disavow their gifts, leave the country, or be imprisoned. While one couldn’t simply look at Joaquim and know he was a witch—save for Inspector Gaspar, of course, who
had
done exactly that—Duilio wouldn’t risk his brother’s safety by asking him to go there.

So he left the letter in his desk drawer. He had to find someone else.

*   *   *

O
riana sat on the carved bench next to the bedroom door with a small writing table pulled up before it. The sunlight coming in through the east-facing windows was beginning to fade, so she squinted as she plied a soft cloth in an effort to remove ink from
under one of her nails. Before her on the table lay the adoption paperwork that would make her a citizen of these islands again. She’d signed on so many lines she’d thought her hand would cramp.

The bells warned her a second before Duilio came into the bedroom. He settled next to her on the bench, and she caught the faint musky seal scent of his skin, warmed from the sunlight in the courtyard. “I’ve signed these,” she said. “Are you sure?”

Shaking his head, Duilio took the cloth from her hand. As her legal advisor, he’d read through the paperwork a couple of times. Despite its being drafted by members of a very different culture, he said the legal terminology was reassuringly similar. He’d asked her grandmother for clarification on several points, and had seemed satisfied with her answers.

It would mean living here most of the time, but they would be able to travel. There was also an expectation that she would step into her grandmother’s role as a leader among the top families on the island of Amado. That meant a lifetime of political involvement.

The islands were governed by an oligarchy, with members of all the prominent families serving as a senate. Monteiro was one of the oldest family lines representing Amado in that body. But everyone knew the true power lay in the elders of only five family lines, all of them on Quitos. That concentration of power on Quitos kept the other islands from seizing control of the archipelago.

Until recently Oriana wouldn’t have liked the idea of service in the government, but the past few months as ambassador had allowed her to explore her views on political matters. She’d developed aspirations of activism, both on behalf of Northern Portugal, of which she was now a citizen, and the males of these islands. While in Portugal, she’d experienced the constraints under which women there lived. Duilio lived with similar restrictions now, even on Amado, and she didn’t want that for him. Or for their children.

His warm eyes met hers. “I understand these documents. I know what they say.”

“And will you forgive me for signing them?”

She had nearly refused to marry him for fear that she would have to live out her life pretending to be a human woman. Now
he
would have to spend most of his life in the role of a sereia male. But he merely picked up the papers, secured them with a clip, and took them to the door. “There’s nothing to forgive.”

The guard outside the door bore the papers away on Duilio’s request to Grandmother’s head of staff. Duilio came back into the bedroom and locked the door behind him. “Now stop worrying about them. The adoption is the least of our problems.”

She sighed and rested her head back against the wall as he told her of his afternoon’s musings. The thief’s trail only seemed to grow dimmer. Did the woman still have the journal with her? And where did Costa fit in to all this? Duilio’s gift seemed confident they’d find the lieutenant alive, but the man had vanished like a mist as well.

After Duilio finished, she asked, “So, did you decide about your letter to Joaquim?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m not going to post it. There has to be someone other than Joaquim we can send to Spain. Besides, he barely speaks Spanish.”

They’d chosen not to contact the Portuguese Foreign Office. It wasn’t a lack of faith in their own superiors, but instead a distrust of the forbearance of the military. There were too many senior officers waiting for the female military contingent to fail. If they reported the theft of a personal item and the disappearance of an officer to the Portuguese Foreign Office, there would be those in the military who would immediately call for the dissolution of the guard contingent. The women would be thrown out of the army. Given her new awareness of political matters, Oriana suspected that would be a blow to the rights of all women in the country. So she’d decided to keep the matter from the Foreign Office’s ears as long as possible. Since the journal was private property, stolen from a private residence, she had no obligation to tell them.