Gods of Jade and Shadow - Silvia Moreno-Garcia Page 0,10

gift of your blood. Serve me well, maiden, and I shall see fit to reward you.”

For a fleeting moment she thought she might escape, that it was entirely possible to jump off the tram and run back into town. Maybe he’d turn her into dust, but that might be better than whatever horrid fate awaited her. A horrid fate awaited her, didn’t it? Hadn’t the Lords of Xibalba delighted in tricking and disposing of mortals? But there was the question of the bone shard and the nagging voice in the back of her head that whispered “adventure.”

For surely she would not get another chance to leave this village, and the sights he would show her must be strange and dazzling. The pull of the familiar was strong, but stronger was curiosity and the blind optimism of youth that demanded go now, go quickly. Every child dreams of running away from home at some point, and now she had this impossible opportunity. Greedily she latched on to it.

“Very well,” she said, and with those two words she accepted her fate, horrid or wonderful as it might be.

He said nothing else during their journey to Mérida, and although she was confused and scared, she was also glad to see the town receding in the distance. Casiopea Tun was off into the world, not in the way she had imagined, but off nevertheless.

Martín Leyva. Twenty and good-looking, in a blunt sort of way, with honeyed eyes and a sharp tongue. The only son of Cirilo Leyva’s only son—although the old man had daughters aplenty—was, due to this accident of birth, heir to the Leyva fortune, his sex allowing him to prance around town like a rooster. With his fine boots and silver belt buckles and his monogrammed cigarette case, he struck such a picture that no one doubted his position in society or his magnificence.

No one, that is, except for his cousin Casiopea. Her skeptical gaze was like a splash of acid in the young man’s face. “Why couldn’t you be a boy?” Grandfather had told Casiopea one time, and Martín had never been able to forget that moment, doubt sewn into his soul.

Martín Leyva, the magnificent and contemptuous Martín Leyva, stomped into the sitting room like a child, and like a child he sulked, sitting in one of the overstuffed chairs. His mother, his aunts, and two of his sisters were there that day, busy with their embroidery.

“Mother, do you have any cigarettes left?” he asked with an irritated sigh.

Although the newspapers carried advertisements advising women to substitute cigarettes for sweets, Martín’s mother, Lucinda, doled them out with caution, partly because she was old-fashioned and partly because she was miserly.

“You smoke too much; it’s bad for your breath. And what happened to your cigarettes?” she asked. “Did you go through a pack already?”

“It’s been days since I smoked anything, and I wouldn’t ask if Casiopea ran errands like she’s supposed to,” he replied, angry that he was being questioned.

“Has she been skimping on her chores again?”

“She’s taking forever to run to the store, and she’s simply rude,” he said. If his mother could find fault in Casiopea, then she wouldn’t find fault in him, and his overconsumption of tobacco would be ignored.

“I see.”

Lucinda had hair of a reddish tint and a neck so divine a poet had composed a sonnet in her honor. She had married Cirilo Leyva’s only son, a soft, quiet young man whom she didn’t much like, because poets can seldom pay the rent. She enjoyed the luxuries of the house at Uukumil, the status that being a Leyva conferred on her around these parts, and most of all she enjoyed fawning upon her only son. After Casiopea hit him with a stick, she had regarded the girl with narrowed eyes, convinced the child was foul.

Lucinda reached for the velvet purse she carried with her at all times and took out a cigarette, handing it to her son.

“I’ll have to mention this to your grandfather,” Lucinda said.

“If you wish,” Martín said. He had not meant to get Casiopea in trouble, but if this was to be the final outcome, he did not care. He reasoned that if she’d hurried back home he wouldn’t have been forced to beg his mother for the cigarette; therefore the girl had been the one in the wrong. He used such reasoning often. Seldom was he the cause of his own misfortune.

He went to smoke in the interior patio, watching the