The Shores of Spain (26 page)

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B
ARCELONA

J
oaquim sat across the table from the boy, watching as he consumed an apple he’d stolen from some vendor on the Rambla. They’d strolled along the wide avenue back to the plaza and the hotel, avoiding the eyes of the blue-and-red-uniformed men. Once at the hotel, they’d ordered a lunch to be brought up and made their way back to their room, the very image of a family planning to rest after a morning of sightseeing.

It was eerie how much the boy resembled a younger version of himself.

Many years ago, Lady Ferreira had gathered all her boys to take a picture. She still had that photograph in a silver frame in her room, Joaquim knew. He’d been twelve and Duilio thirteen. Erdano had been a terribly restless fifteen, Alessio fourteen, and Cristiano only four. Shortly after that Alessio had begun teasing him about being a bastard. In hindsight Joaquim realized that Alessio had looked at
the photograph and
guessed
the truth about him. In it, he and Duilio sat side by side. They’d looked almost like twins.

The boy sitting at the table could have made them a set of triplets. He was younger than the boys in that photograph, yet the Ferreira stamp that showed on Joaquim’s face—and Duilio’s and Rafael’s—already showed on this boy’s. His jaw hadn’t formed, but he had the wide brow they all shared. His eyebrows arched exactly like Joaquim’s own.

Joaquim guessed the boy’s age as seven or eight, although he might be small for his age. He was thin, and the reverence with which he’d consumed his stolen apple suggested familiarity with hunger. But if he was around eight, that meant he would have been conceived when Duilio was twenty-one and still at Coimbra. Joaquim didn’t think Rafael had ever been to Spain at all, and he’d been in seminary at that time himself. No, if this child had Ferreira blood, he’d gotten it through Alexandre Ferreira.

Joaquim waited until the boy finished eating his apple, core and all. “Will you tell me your name?”

The boy’s dark eyes flicked toward Marina where she sat on the far side of the table. “Jandro,” he said, pronouncing the j in the Spanish way. “Alejandro.”

And that clinched the matter; Alejandro was the Spanish form of Alexandre.

“We went down to the Rambla to find you,” Joaquim said to him. “But you found us first. Were you looking for us?”

Alejandro glanced at Marina again, and nodded.

“Do you know who we are?”

The boy’s lips twisted. For a moment he seemed disinclined to answer, but his eyes crept toward Marina once more.

“Do you know me?” she asked gently. “Who I am?”

“You’re going to be my new mother.”

Marina’s mouth fell open.

So the boy had the seer’s gift as well. The only way he could
have recognized Marina was if he’d seen her in dreams or visions. Joaquim tapped his finger on the table to get the boy’s attention, buying time for Marina to regain her calm. “What about
your
mother, Alejandro? Leandra, right? Where is she?”

“She didn’t tell me where she was going,” Alejandro said. “She left me with Capitan Captaire.”

That translated roughly as the
chief beggar
. But he hadn’t denied that Leandra Rocha was his mother, even if she’d left him behind. “Forever? Or does she mean to come back for you?”

The boy’s mouth twisted downward again. He shrugged. “She said if she didn’t to go to the Golden City.”

An odd order to give a boy so young.
Is this boy clever enough to make his way across Iberia alone?
“How? Do you have money to go there?”

“Capitan has it. He owes her, so he says he’ll send me.”

Honor among thieves?
It did exist. “What will you do in the Golden City?”

“I’m supposed to find my family.”

Joaquim was fairly certain who that family was. “The Ferreira family?” he asked, just to be sure.

The boy nodded. “They call me Ferrera, but my name’s Ferreira. That’s why the Vilaró taught me Portuguese, so I’ll sound right there.”

Leandra Rocha had a mission that required she leave her son behind. She’d arranged for a caretaker to transport him to his father’s family if she didn’t return. She’d made preparations in case she died. “Who is the Vilaró?”

“He’s in the prison,” Alejandro said. “In the very bottom. The other prisoners leave me alone because they’re scared of him.”

Joaquim licked his lips, his stomach sinking. “You live in the prison?”

“I did,” the boy said, matter-of-factly, as if it were normal for a child to be raised inside a prison. “Mother told me never to go back there.”

Joaquim tried not to react, but nausea welled in his stomach. He had no doubt this boy was exactly who he seemed, a son of Alexandre Ferreira and a woman carelessly left behind.

He had a
brother
who’d been raised in a prison.

He’d held a grudge for some time against his dead father for refusing to acknowledge him. Alexandre Ferreira had always avoided being in the same house as Joaquim, and even if he hadn’t realized the man was his father, Joaquim had felt shunned anyway. He hadn’t complained of the man’s behavior, not even to Duilio, but he’d
resented
it.

Despite that, he’d had a good life and a loving father in the elder Joaquim Tavares. He’d had food and clothing and never worried for his safety. He’d had brothers who fought with him, but respected him anyway.

Alejandro had none of that. He’d been raised in a prison, and spoke of it so flatly that it must never have occurred to him to resent that fact. At the moment, Joaquim resented Alexandre Ferreira enough for both of them. He took a deep breath, forcing down his twisting stomach.

“Do you know your father’s name?” he asked the boy.

“It was Alexandre,” the boy answered. “He had ships and lived in the Golden City.”

“Alexandre Ferreira was my father too. That makes you my brother.”

The boy’s mouth made a round O. Not surprise, but epiphany, as if some missing piece of a puzzle had fallen into place. “That’s why I’m supposed to live with you.”

It was telling that Alejandro had identified Marina so easily as his new mother, yet didn’t call Joaquim his new father. Somehow the boy’s gift had recognized that he was a brother instead.

A knock came at the door, a welcome distraction. When Marina jumped up to answer it, Joaquim raised a hand to forestall her and went himself to be sure it was safe. He opened the door only a sliver and saw that a waiter had arrived, so he allowed the man to bring in
their lunch and handed him a couple of pesetas as he left. Joaquim locked the door behind him.

Marina took over, moving the food to the small round table near the balcony doors where the boy already sat. They had a basket of the local tomato-rubbed bread, soup with pasta and rice accompanied by sausage, and coffee with almond biscuits. Joaquim picked up his cup of coffee first, hoping it would help clear his mind.

After removing her gloves, Marina laid out utensils for the boy and placed a large chunk of the sausage on his plate with his bowl of soup. The boy’s eyes lifted to hers, almost as if he didn’t grasp that she’d set it there for him. “That’s yours,” she said to him. “I know you just ate, but it never hurts to have a full stomach.”

“Makes you slow,” he said. “Mossos are looking for me.”

“The men in the blue and red?” she asked. “Are they police?”

“Mossos d’Esquadra,” Joaquim offered. He recognized the name if not the uniforms. “The provincial police for Barcelona. Are they looking for you because of the apple?”

A shake of the head. “They want to take me back to the prison.”

Marina’s jaw clenched. “Well, you’re safe here. You can take a nap afterward. We’ll keep the door locked. No one will take you back to that prison. I promise.”

Alejandro watched silently as she sat in the chair next to him, laid out her napkin, and sliced up her portion of the sausage to put it in her soup. The boy began cutting up the sausage just as Marina had done, demonstrating that he understood either table manners or mimicry. Joaquim suspected it was a mixture of the two. Belatedly, he joined them at the table.

“Your hands are cut,” the boy said, eyes on Marina’s scarred fingers. “Like my mother’s.”

“Sometimes that has to be done,” Marina said. She talked to Alejandro at intervals during the meal, trying to determine what the boy liked. Most of his answers were vague, making Joaquim suspect the boy had never given much thought to his own preferences. He ate
everything placed before him, finishing up with the almond biscuits that Joaquim neglected to eat with his coffee.

With a full stomach, Alejandro seemed about to nod off, so Joaquim led the boy into the bedroom. The boy went willingly enough and, after removing his worn shoes, curled up atop their coverlet. “We’ll be in the sitting room,” Joaquim said, and pulled a spare blanket over the boy’s thin form. “I have to go out for a bit, but Marina won’t leave you.”

Alejandro didn’t respond. Perhaps he was already asleep.

Joaquim left him there and quietly closed the bedroom door behind him. Marina watched him with wide eyes. “What do we do?” she whispered.

“I’m not going to leave him here,” he said. “We have to keep him with us. I don’t . . .”

Just because he’d found a brother he hadn’t known he had, that didn’t mean their quest to find the journal—and Alejandro’s mother—was over. But it changed everything.

How could they protect the boy here? He was not going to hand the boy off to some local nursemaid’s care. He didn’t know whom he could trust, and Alejandro was at risk of imprisonment merely for being half sereia. He
could
place both Marina and the boy on a train back to Portugal immediately, but if he suggested it, Marina would balk. And he couldn’t be certain they would be safe heading back alone anyway.

“I need to send a telegram,” he said to Marina. “I’ll let Lady Ferreira know . . .”
Know what?
That I’ve found another of her husband’s bastards?
“I’ll figure out what to tell her on the way to the telegraph office,” he finished weakly.

He hoped that was the case.

CHAPTER 24

                   B
ARCELONA                   

A
fter double-checking to be sure that the door was still locked, Marina went to the balcony and stepped outside to let the breeze clear her mind. The plaza below was crowded, busy with people crossing its paths, heading in every direction. A tram moved by, and she saw a wagon selling something from its bed. Pigeons fluttered like clouds from one spot to another. Marina leaned over the fancifully curved wrought-iron railing and peered in either direction in hope of seeing Joaquim.

He’d been gone a long time, and she didn’t like that. If Joaquim was caught by the Mossos d’Esquadra, they couldn’t prove he was a witch. That afforded him some protection out on the street. Like her, though, Alejandro could be exposed by the simple act of tugging up his trouser leg high enough to reveal scale-patterned skin. And that alone could get him hauled back to the prison.

She knew very little about the Unnaturals Prison at Lleida. The Canaries could use their
calls
to control the prisoners, and therefore managed the prison for the Spanish government. The other prisoners were the purported undesirables of Spain: nonhumans and those witches who wouldn’t disavow their powers. There were many kinds
of witches, but she knew of very few types of nonhumans. Selkies, sereia, and otter folk lived on the sea for the most part. There were the great fairies, but they were reportedly almost extinct, and all manner of lesser fey, but they hid themselves from humans. She wasn’t certain what existed beyond those, but a prison like that could not have been a safe place for a child.

According to what Oriana had told her while on Amado, there was another, more frightening aspect to that place. The duo who’d killed the prince of Northern Portugal, Dr. Serpa and a healer, Father Salazar, had also come from that prison. Dr. Serpa had been experimenting on the prisoners with the healer’s help—experiments that involved transplanting parts from one person to another. They had been trying to see if they could give a normal person a nonhuman’s special abilities—the same surgery they’d tried on the prince of Northern Portugal the previous fall.
None
of their patients had survived. Father Salazar had been defrocked when his order found out, but since he was already in the prison, he simply remained there.

Marina hoped that Alejandro had stayed well clear of that poisonous duo. She’d nearly become one of their victims herself in the Golden City. With Joaquim’s help, she’d escaped their efforts to find a sereia to experiment on, but one of her closest friends hadn’t, and had died.

She heard a cough in the room behind her, and turned to see that Alejandro had woken. He stood next to the table, gazing down at the note she’d left there—a list of questions she wanted to ask him. His hair was rumpled, angling up on one side, and his expression seemed bewildered. Had it frightened him to wake up in a strange place? “Alejandro, why don’t you come here? There’s a lovely view.”

He hesitated but came to stand next to her. She reached over to smooth down his hair, only to be dismayed when he flinched away. “Your hair is mussed,” she explained.

He quickly ran his own hands through it, settling it back into a semblance of order. His eyes surveyed the plaza below them, but he
said nothing. At least from this vantage point she could see the top of his head. It didn’t look as though he had lice, a small mercy.

“Did you read that paper on the table?” she asked him.

He shook his head. “I don’t know how.”

Hadn’t Duilio said he suspected the thief was illiterate? Marina couldn’t recall a time when she hadn’t known how to read. “Would you like to learn?”

After a moment he shrugged.

She wasn’t certain what that meant, so she tried something else. “I know that most boys hate being told this, but I think it’s time for you to have a bath.”

At least he didn’t ask what a bath was.