Page 26 of Deathless
My grandmother stood beside the cauldron with a ladle and the expression she saved for men about to do something stupid. She filled two clay cups, and the steam came off them looking innocent, which was a lie because nothing that came out of that cauldron had ever been innocent in its entire existence.
Danior picked up his cup first. I picked up mine.
"Don't think about it," my grandmother said. "That's always been your problem, Diego. You think too much."
Danior drank. He locked his jaw and his eyes went wet before he could stop them, and he set the cup down without making a sound, which told me everything I needed to know about how bad this was going to be.
I brought the cup to my mouth and drank it in one go.
The drink hit my throat like liquid fire and kept going south, burning a path straight through my stomach. I squeezed my eyes shut. The heat locked my whole chest tight. It tasted like scorched earth and grudges, like my grandmother had put forty years of unsolicited opinions in a pot and boiled them down to their meanest concentrate. And somewhere underneath all of that was something almost sweet, which was worse, because my body tried to want more of it.
I handed the cup back and kept my face together. My grandmother took it without looking at me, which meant I'd passed, and honestly, that was the best I was going to get from Amparo Lucenio, so I'd take it.
We stripped down to the bare minimum and, Jesús, the morning air bit into every inch of skin. Danior kicked his boots off faster than me, and I let him have it because pequeñas victorias, small victories. The boots were all he was getting today.
The path went straight up.
This wasn't just about the family name. Whoever came down off this mountain controlled the Kalderash network across southern Europe: the border crossings, the safe houses, the smuggling corridors that ran from Andalusia to the Aegean. Every intelligence channel Emilio had spent forty years building went to whoever bled for it today.
Danior was three paces ahead of me, shoulders working, already settling into his rhythm. I tracked how he moved. He favored his left side on the uphill, shifting his weight before he committed. He was faster than me, always had been. Speed wasn't going to save him.
Tío Beno waited at the first marker, sitting on the flat boulder with a paint pot between his knees and a brush in his hand. He had the look of a man who'd gotten up before dawn and wanted credit. He was seventy-nine years old, had buried two wives and one of his sons, and still showed up for this at ass-crack of dawn. It was devotion or stubbornness or both, wearing the same face.
He painted Danior first, one stroke across the collarbone in blue-white. Danior worked his jaw but stayed silent, stayed still, which I had to respect even if I was planning to kick his ass in about an hour.
Then Tío Beno came to me and did the same blue-white, shoulder to shoulder. The brush was freezing. The paint smelled like wet clay and something sharp I couldn't place, and it hit my chest like a brand.
Tío Beno stepped back, capped the pot, and sat down on his boulder like we'd already left, which was extremely on brand for Tío Beno.
We kept climbing.
The rock face came next, and Jesus Christ, I'd forgotten how much I hated this thing. The slope stretched up with basically no handholds, just rough stone and prayer. I let Danior pull ahead on the steep parts and paced myself, letting him burn himselfout while I saved my energy for the part where I was going to put his face in the dirt.
I found holds and pulled up. The stone bit into my palms, and I kept going, one reach at a time, and somewhere in the back of my head Emilio was laughing about the time he'd done this climb hungover on a dare.
Father Gomes waited on a boulder at the top with his bandaged foot propped up. He looked at me and pressed his thumb above each of my eyes, and I stood still and let him paint my face.
Then came the river.
The river was snowmelt straight off the mountain. I went in first, and the cold hit my chest like a fist and kept squeezing. I couldn't breathe for the first three steps, legs going numb, everything in me reorganizing around one task: get across before my body quit. The current pulled at my knees, and the stones under my feet were slick, and every step was a negotiation between my legs and the river, and the river was winning.
Danior came in behind me and made a sound I was going to remember on my deathbed, which almost made the whole thing worth it.
I hauled myself out on a root, chest heaving. An older cousin grabbed my jaw before I'd finished standing, tilted my head back, and dragged a freezing brush under my throat in one stroke. He did the same to Danior, and we stood there shivering, painted, bleeding from cuts we'd picked up on the way.
My left foot bled from a gash I'd picked up on the rock face, one the river had torn wider. I put my weight on it anyway. Stopping meant Danior won, and that wasn't happening today. The hot springs were close now, sulfur cutting through the cold air, steam above the trees. Every part of me wanted that water. But Danior was watching to see if I'd break first, so que se joda, he could keep watching.
Valentina's tía waited between the pools and the circle, old enough to have been doing this since before my father was born. She had the face of someone who'd seen everything twice and hadn't been impressed either time.
She looked at my bleeding foot, looked at the trail of blood behind me, and said nothing about either one.
She painted my forehead with something I couldn't see. Her thumb was steady. When she stepped back, she held my eyes, and I held hers. You don't look away from an anciana like that if you want to keep living.
Then she moved aside and I could see the circle through the break in the trees.
The white stones sat in the grass, so old the mountain had grown up around them like it had decided they belonged there. The whole clan stood outside the stones waiting, every face I'd known my whole life arranged around what I was about to do.
I found Jasper before I went looking for him. He was at the tree line, clean shirt, collar open, sword on his back. Our eyes met and held. Then I stepped over the white stones.
