“No.” Isisa discarded the suggestion with a flick of her wrist. “These cards are special. If you ask them questions they’ll give you answers.”
“About what?”
“About anything.”
“But how?” Liyana asked. “If they can’t speak, how do they answer?”
“They don’t speak like we do,” Isisa said. “You just have to listen . . . a little differently.”
Liyana tried to make sense of this. But she couldn’t, she had to ask. “How?”
Her mummy leaned forward to turn over the first card. “With your eyes instead of your ears.”
Liyana leaned forward too, peering at the picture on the card: a man and woman chained together by their ankles. The woman was elaborately dressed in silk and fur. The man was naked, his skin green, his eyes red, his hair slicked into horns, his feet shaped into hooves. The woman turned away, but he gazed at her, as if he wanted something from her that she didn’t want to give. As Liyana stared at the card she started to cry.
“What’s wrong, child? Why on earth are you crying?”
“No, I don’t, I don’t want to know,” Liyana mumbled. “I didn’t ask. I don’t, I don’t . . .”
“Don’t be silly, Ana,” Isisa shushed. “The Devil’s not real, he’s only a symbol.”
“What’s a ‘symbol’?” Liyana asked.
Isisa frowned. “You don’t know that?”
“Of course I do,” Liyana said, though she didn’t. “I just, I . . .”
“Good.” Isisa gave her daughter a reassuring squeeze. “And don’t worry, the Devil doesn’t mean what you think. Look . . .” She reached around Liyana to turn over the other two cards.
Still sniffling, Liyana eyed them from under her mother’s arm.
The Six of Cups: a mermaid mummy with her merman son, who held up a vase of flowers and stars for his mother. This one cheered Liyana a little. But she found the Tower even more disturbing than the Devil: a grey wind blowing, a tall stone tower crumbling beside a naked tree, a man and woman tumbling to their deaths from its windows.
Liyana felt her mummy tense. And although Isisa said nothing, not then nor later, Liyana knew her fears were being confirmed. And even when her mummy put the cards away and turned the subject to something else entirely, Liyana felt a disturbance that hung heavy in the air for days after.
Liyana snuck into her mummy’s bedroom several times in the following week. She shuffled the pack as best she could, then picked three cards. But no matter how many times she shuffled or how many times she picked, the three cards were the same. Every time. Sometimes they appeared in a different order. But they always told the same story.
Bea
“I don’t want to.”
“Oh, go on,” her mamá said. “Don’t be such a scaredy-cat.”
“I’m not,” Bea said. “I just don’t want to.”
With a sigh, Cleo picked up the rock and smashed it onto the snail. Bea flinched at the crack. Her mamá lifted the rock to reveal the squashed remnants—the splintered shell, the soft sticky body now oozing across the flagstone.
Bea wanted to say sorry to the snail, since it’d done nothing to deserve such cold-blooded treatment. It’d been sacrificed on the altar of practice, a lesson for greater callousness to come.
“Don’t be so squeamish, niña,” Cleo said, pulling her long hair from her face. “Ese es el punto. We’re not doing this for no reason. You need to toughen up. If you can’t squash a snail, how will you kill a stag or hunt a man? How will you be ready for what’s to come?”
Bea nodded. She knew what was to come—it was Cleo’s favourite subject, one she could spin out for hours—and didn’t want to talk about it. She wondered what her abuela, who liked only to cuddle and feed her, would think of how her granddaughter was spending Sunday afternoon, or what her friends at school would say. When Miss Evans asked the class how they’d spent their weekends, Bea doubted anyone would admit to the murder of molluscs. Why couldn’t her mamá take her shopping at Selfridges, like Lucy Summer’s mamá? Or for ballet lessons, like Nicky Challis’s mamá did?
Bea couldn’t trust her mamá with either activity. Unleashed in department stores, Cleo was liable to be ejected for her exhibitions of public theatre involving randomly chosen couples she aimed to split up by pretending to be having an affair with one or the other of the parties. Cleo had