The Shores of Spain (15 page)

Prostrate?
Marina pulled out of her grandmother’s arms and demonstrated just that, dropping to her knees and bowing her head to her grandmother’s feet. He could do that. Probably. The old woman
reached down to touch the top of her head, and Marina pushed herself back up to her feet. Then she turned and looked for him. Duilio took the portmanteau from Joaquim and added, “You address her as ‘Honored Grandmother’ until she tells you otherwise.”

Forewarned, Joaquim walked to Marina’s side.

“And who is this, child?” the old woman asked.

Marina glanced at Joaquim, her brow furrowed, and he grasped her problem.
How is she supposed to introduce me?

“Is this the young man you’re courting?” her grandmother prompted.

That
she
was courting? Joaquim had forgotten that aspect of Duilio’s courtship—among the sereia, the women did the courting, not the men.

“Yes, Grandmother,” Marina said quickly. “This is Joaquim Tavares.”

Joaquim realized that was his cue. He dropped to his knees and did his best to bow down gracefully. Duilio doubtless did this far better. He probably practiced. The woman’s hand touched the top of his head, so Joaquim rose awkwardly, cheeks flushed.

“Welcome to the house of Monteiro, child,” she said gravely.

“Thank you, Honored Grandmother.” He’d gotten that correct, it seemed, because she beamed at him.

“Do I understand correctly, that you’re Duilio’s younger brother?”

“Yes, Honored Grandmother.” It was still odd to say it aloud.

“Just call me Grandmother,” she suggested. “Now, let’s go inside and get you both settled.”

And with that, all the formalities were over. Joaquim followed the others through the main doorway and down a white hallway. He leaned over to ask Marina, “Why isn’t your sister here?”

“She’s not head of the household,” Marina whispered back. “She won’t greet visitors unless they’re
her
visitors.”

They went through the large doors into a courtyard with a fountain in the center. The floor was tiled with dark stone, probably quarried in the mountains rising above them. Two young women met them
there, apparently servants. Both wore blue-pattered skirts and went as bare-chested as the women working the docks. Joaquim averted his eyes, noting that Duilio didn’t even flinch. He must be accustomed to this. The first servant gestured for Marina to follow her, but the other motioned for Joaquim to head down a different hallway. Fortunately, Duilio accompanied him.

The servant showed him a room that was clearly a bedroom, although there wasn’t a bed. Duilio followed him inside and closed the door, then crossed the room to open the shutters, letting in the sea air. “What was she thinking,” he said, “not calling you her mate?”

“It would be a lie,” Joaquim said, taken aback. “I’m not . . . sharing her bed.”

Duilio folded his arms over his bare chest and leaned back against the wall. He seemed a strangely savage visitor with his tattoo and jewelry and painted eyes. Joaquim had to remind himself that
he
was the one out of the ordinary in this place.

“What is she doing here with you, then?” Duilio asked.

Joaquim set his bag on a wooden bench that stood near the door. “She hid away on the ship. In the closet in the cabin. I didn’t find her until we were a full day out at sea. Are you even going to ask why I’m here?”

Duilio grinned. “Very well, why are you here, brother?”

“You wrote a letter,” he said, “asking me to come.”

“I never sent it,” Duilio pointed out.

Joaquim raked a hand through his hair. “I know that, but you’re going to show it to me.”

“I plan to.” Duilio gestured toward a cluster of shelves set along that wall. “The pillows and blankets you can arrange however you want, but you need to replace them on the wall in the morning. There’s a dressing area back there,” he added, pointing, “plus a bath. You can put your bag in there and clean up. You probably have time to nap before dinner. I’ll come to wake you, just to be certain.”

“Do I have to wear a skirt?” Joaquim asked, gesturing toward Duilio’s strange attire.

“Pareu,”
Duilio corrected in an amused tone. “And no, I don’t think Grandmother will be upset if you wear trousers. I keep this up . . .” He made a gesture that swept from his painted eyes to his gold ankle bangles. “. . . to bolster Oriana’s standing here. You don’t have to.”

“Thank God,” Joaquim said gustily. “What do I do about Marina?”

Duilio shrugged eloquently. “You’ve been seeing her for six months. If you haven’t decided that yet, brother, I’m not going to interfere.”

“Fine, be an ass.” Joaquim pinched the bridge of his nose. “Are we going to discuss why I’m here?”

Duilio gestured toward the dressing area again. “Later. Get cleaned up, take a nap, and after dinner we can do this one time with everyone present. I’ll get the letter and leave it on the bench for you to look at when you’ve napped.”

A nap sounded terribly seductive at the moment, and a bath would be truly welcome.

Duilio pushed away from the wall and laid one hand on Joaquim’s shoulder. “And after dinner you and I can have a nice private talk.”

Joaquim watched Duilio let himself out, and went to contemplate the auspiciously familiar-looking faucet in the bathing area.

*   *   *

M
arina sat down on the bench in her guest room with a groan. They’d taken Joaquim off to the males’ wing, which meant she wasn’t supposed to talk to him unless he was chaperoned. Surely Grandmother didn’t mean to hold her to that. Then again, her grandmother probably still thought of her as twelve years old. She puffed out her cheeks. She was twenty-three now, and whom she courted was her own business.

A quick shake of the bells warned her before her door opened
and Oriana stepped inside. Marina ran to embrace her. “I’ve missed you so much!”

Oriana stepped back, a fond smile on her face. “I missed you too. But how did you end up here? We were expecting Joaquim, not you.”

Marina heard the reproach in her voice. “I hid in his boat. I didn’t want him to leave me behind. And he would have,” she added. “He meant to leave me in the city while he sailed off to help you.”

Oriana’s lips pressed together in an expression she’d stolen from her husband. She was holding something inside. “Did you let Father know you were going?”

“Yes.” Marina gazed at her sister, trying to place what had changed. Oriana wore a black vest embroidered in rose and gold over her
pareu
. That would save Joaquim from embarrassment if nothing else. She’d grown her nails out and filed them to points, and the bangles on her ankles and her bracelets were all rose gold. Then Marina noticed how the
pareu
was secured at Oriana’s hips, with five folds rather than the traditional three. “You’re pregnant?”

“Yes,” Oriana said with a secretive smile. “We haven’t told Father yet.”

Which was why Marina hadn’t heard it herself. Their father could keep a secret endlessly, but he would have told her if he knew this. “Um, how long until you have the baby?”

“About six months,” Oriana said. “Now, what do you intend to do about Joaquim?”

She threw up her hands. “Nothing, since he’s locked away in the men’s hall.”

“I’ve never known the rules to stop you,” Oriana said mildly.

Marina stole a glance at her sister’s face. There was no point in announcing it if she did decide to break the rules and sneak into the men’s quarters. She changed the subject. “So, what does your husband want Joaquim to do?”

“It’s about Mother,” Oriana said. “Something you don’t know.
Father chose not to tell you. He didn’t tell me either, not until I pushed him.”

“What?”

Oriana took a deep breath. “Mother didn’t die of food poisoning. She was murdered.”

Marina gaped at her.
“What?”

“Mother was murdered,” Oriana repeated. “Father didn’t know until the very week he was exiled. Do you remember we went to visit our aunts on Quitos that summer?”

“Yes,” she managed, thoughts in a whirl. How could they have kept this secret from her?

“Father found Mother’s journal hidden under the floorboards in their room. In it, she wrote about something being wrong with a new recruit to the intelligence ministry. She was going to go speak with that person’s superior that day, but she died first.”

Marina felt her hands curl into fists. “Who? What person?”

“The woman who jumped off the palace rooftop back in the Golden City.”

The woman who killed the prince the previous fall? “But I thought she was a Canary. What would she have to do with Mother?”

“She was also an agent of the Ministry of Intelligence.” Oriana paused, waiting for her to take that in. “She said to me once that I look like Mother. She had to have known her.”

“And you think she killed Mother.” Marina wrapped her arms about herself, chilled all the way through now. “I’m glad she’s dead, then.”

“The problem is that someone in the ministry was protecting her. They were aiding in her plan to assassinate the prince. They condoned her actions, including her efforts to kill me. And Father was exiled because he was asking questions about what Mother wrote in her journal.”

All this time she’d thought he’d been exiled for his unpopular
political beliefs. That had been common in those days. “Why didn’t Father ever tell me?”

“Because he was concerned you might run off and do something about it,” Oriana said. “That’s part of the reason Duilio and I came to Grandmother’s house. She had Mother’s journal here, and we came to retrieve it.”

“Does it say who that woman was working with?”

Oriana held her hands wide. “It was stolen from this house before I read it.”

“Stolen?”

“Yes. That’s what we intended to ask Joaquim to find. We hoped that if he could find the thief, we would learn who wanted the journal badly enough to send someone here to steal it. That’s our only way to find out who’s responsible for Mother’s death.”

Marina folded her arms over her chest. “Then I’m going with him.”

CHAPTER 14

J
oaquim felt far better after bathing and taking a nap. Once he’d stepped outside his room, though, he realized he didn’t know where he was. Where exactly would he find Marina? Or Duilio, for that matter.

He closed his eyes and garnered a reassuring sense of Duilio. And Marina had been taken somewhere near Duilio, but that seemed to be in a different part of the big house. He couldn’t walk through the walls to reach them, so he traced his steps back until he saw an arch that led onto the courtyard with the fountain. He stopped and peered at the rooftops, hoping to get an idea of the layout of the house.

The house continued back from the courtyard, and acquired a second floor at one point. There were arches on each side of the courtyard, leading off onto other hallways, so he walked straight back and ended up in a second courtyard, this one populated with a handful of wooden chaises with colorfully embroidered pillows. The comfortable furnishings suggested that they spent more time in this room, while the front courtyard seemed more formal.

“Would you like me to show you around the house?” Marina asked from the archway to the left. “I’m not supposed to, but . . . well, I think Grandmother wouldn’t mind if I bent the rules.”

Her appearance took his breath away. Marina’s brown hair was pulled high atop her head with two pearl combs, and it trailed in curls down her back. She wore a black skirt that came almost to her ankles
but left her silvery feet bare. Over that, she wore only a blue vest held together in front by a brooch, leaving an inch of skin exposed between it and the skirt. Her arms were uncovered as well, and on her neck he could see the narrow lines of her gill slits. In Portugal, a man generally didn’t see this much of a lady’s skin unless she was his wife—or if she had a similar relationship. His mouth went dry.

Was this the true Marina Arenias? Was this how she
preferred
to dress? He took a careful breath and hoped he sounded normal. “I would like that.”

She stepped down into the courtyard, closer to him. “This is where we spend evenings. And mornings as well, sometimes. Like a sitting room back in Portugal.”

“What if it rains?” he asked.

“We go inside,” she said in an exasperated tone. “There are a pair of sitting rooms and a dining hall. Plus, Grandmother has a large library.”

He’d meant that to be a rhetorical question, but clearly she hadn’t heard it that way. “Do you miss it here?”

Her eyes rose to meet his and she seemed about to answer, but paused. “Some things,” she said after a moment. “I miss how comfortable this house is. I miss the sea and the beach and sleeping out on the terrace at night. Mostly I miss being a child.”

“But?”

“But I don’t miss dressing like this. I’ve gotten accustomed to my dresses and my shoes and . . .”

Oddly, that reassured him.
I don’t want other men to see her dressed this way. No, I don’t want her to be the sort of woman who likes to dress this way
.

He felt his cheeks heat with shame. It was a horribly judgmental thought, particularly since he’d always considered himself fair-minded toward others. That sort of thought had led to centuries of humans labeling the sereia as more lascivious than other peoples. He
knew Marina better than that. How she was dressed should not affect his opinion of her.

“How could you not be more comfortable without shoes?” he finally asked.

Marina flushed. “It’s fine not to wear shoes in my apartment, but I feel like you’re staring at my feet now.”

Joaquim shook his head. “If I were to stare,” he admitted, “it would not be at your feet.”

“I have lovely feet,” she protested incongruously. “Everyone says so.”

He dutifully turned his eyes down toward her feet. They were attractive, although he wasn’t certain what made them so. They weren’t tiny, nor did she have high delicate arches, but the scale pattern of her skin made them seem shapely. He wanted to touch them now, something he’d never thought about feet before. Perhaps the feet were important here, a strange contrast with their apparent nonchalance about a woman’s breasts. “I have to agree,” he said. “Your feet are lovely. Do you resent that I haven’t noticed before?”