Iván’s hand holding his spoon freezes. A dollop of cornmeal falls from the spoon and plops back into the bowl.
Then he nods and continues to shove slop into his mouth, treating me with stony disregard.
9
Then
WEEKS passed. The pain of her tattoos faded. But her ankle was not healing.
The monster woman made her do everything: boil turnips, wash dishes, weed the garden, chop firewood, empty and clean the slop buckets, fetch water from the stream, mend clothing, darn socks, scrape and tan hides, scrub the stone floors.
Mula fell onto her cot every night exhausted, and even though she was given two small meals a day, they weren’t enough. Her dreams were filled with running through the forest after quick rabbits and one-eyed squirrels, while the hole in her tummy grew wider and wider. Sometimes she could see the hole in her tummy, like the giant eye of a needle. She was a hollow girl, with nothing to her insides at all.
Other times, the one-eyed squirrel would turn around and taunt her, saying things like, “I only have one eye, but at least I have nuts,” or “Even I’m not as disgusting as a half-breed.”
The monster woman worked her so hard because she herself had work to do. Important work, that made her disappear into the glassblowing shed for hours, sometimes all day. And if she came out of that shed and Mula’s chores weren’t finished, the girl could expect to go to bed without even her meager dinner. Once in a while, if the monster woman was especially disappointed, Mula would get a cuff across the face or a vigorous shaking.
The girl was slow about her chores, it was true, but only because she could hardly walk. She was a big girl, precocious even, and she knew how to do all the tasks given to her. But her body wouldn’t do them. Her ankle was still too broken, her belly too empty, her eyes too sleepy, to ever do a good job, the kind of job that would have made Mamá proud.
Mula remembered how, when Horteño the blacksmith broke his leg, he walked around on a crutch for a while. So Mula begged the monster woman for a crutch, even remembering to say, “Please, my lady.”
In answer, the monster woman backhanded her, sending her flying into a pile of freshly washed, neatly stacked dishes.
Head pounding, vision blurring, Mula set about cleaning up the mess without another word. Fortunately, only one wooden plate had chipped. If she was lucky, the monster woman wouldn’t notice.
After that, Mula stopped asking for things. Instead she watched, and she learned.
She learned that she and the monster woman lived in one of the free villages, which wasn’t exactly Joya d’Arena, but not exactly Invierne either, and both Joyans and Inviernos lived there. Once, on her way to market day to trade glass baubles for some winter apples, she stopped in her tracks, right in the middle of the snow. Because only a few paces away was a boy, a few years older, with delicate features, ebony hair, and light eyes the color of molten gold. He was skinny and barefoot in the snow, and every time he took a step, his heels flashed the bright blue of his slave marks.
When he saw her, he winced and turned away in disgust, and something inside her died. She’d been hated her whole life, by everyone except her mother. But there was something particularly awful about being hated by someone just like her, another mule slave. Like maybe she had missed the point all along. Maybe she should be hating herself.
Mula also learned that her mistress, the monster woman, loved ale. At first, the girl merely smelled it on her breath. Later, the monster woman would return to the house with an unsteady gait and words that were too slippery to make sense. Mula realized that instead of working in her shed, she was drinking, drinking, drinking. The day the woman took off her own shoes and sent Mula to the market to trade them for eggs, she knew they were running out of money.
The girl began to consider escape.
She was scared by the prospect of fleeing through the forest in winter, all alone and hungry. But she was scared of the monster woman too. The forest might kill her, for true, but the monster woman might do it gleefully, with hatred in her eyes and drunkenness in her speech. Mula realized she had to choose between scary things, pick which kind of scared was the best kind of scared.
She picked the forest.
But first she had to heal her ankle. So one morning while chopping firewood, she sidled quietly into the woods and poked through the snow and underbrush for a long branch, which she dragged back to the chopping stump. With her ax, she cleared it of offshoots, sized it to her armpit, and used the hood of her mother’s cloak to create a cushion on top. There. Now she had her crutch.
That night, Mula held her breath when the monster woman walked in the door and saw what she had made. Would she let her keep it? Would she box Mula’s ears?
The woman shrugged, then crumpled onto her cot, already passed out.
Over the next few days, Mula hoarded food. Just tiny squirrel-sized bits of turnip and jerky, a very small pinch from a loaf of bread. She hid it all in the snow, beside the cottage foundation, where the cold temperature would keep it from turning black with mold.
But when she returned to her stash later to add a withered apple, she discovered that mice had found her food and eaten it all, leaving nothing but a tiny bit of shredded turnip.
Mula started over.
She tried hiding food in a little hole in the cottage foundation and covering the opening with stones, but the mice managed to tunnel through.
She buried food in the near-frozen ground, but squirrels dug it up.
She hid some food in a basket beside the hearth, but it rotted, giving off a sour smell that would definitely earn her a cuff if the monster woman noticed.
Finally her eye chanced upon a glass vase on the mantel, one of the few baubles the monster woman hadn’t yet sold. It had a wide base and a narrow neck—too narrow for even a tiny mouse—and a slight amber cast that made it sparkle like fire. She took the vase from the mantel, shoved some pine nuts down that narrow neck, and buried it outside in the snow near the outhouse. Gradually she added bread crumbs, bits of jerky, a twig for brushing her teeth.
It was three days before the monster woman noticed that the vase was missing. Mula was prepared. She had thought up a perfect lie and had practiced it and practiced it.
“Where’s my vase?” the monster woman said. “It used to be right there. Right there.”
“I traded it for ale, my lady,” Mula said. “A few days ago. Remember?” The girl waited, trying her best to look innocent. She was terrible at lying. It put a funny feeling in her belly and a flush on her cheeks.
“Oh . . . yes, I suppose I . . .” The monster woman shrugged. She ate some wheat mash, washed it down with some ale, and passed out on her cot.
Mula stood over her a long moment. The monster woman looked so vulnerable. With her face slack, her lips parted, her hand clutching her blanket, she looked . . . soft, almost sweet. As though kindness could have lived inside her.
The girl remembered her mother’s skinning knife, the way it had slid into the sorcerer’s body like he was nothing, the way it had scraped against his bones.
The next morning, while Mula was chopping a turnip to make a thin stew base, she held the knife up so that it caught firelight from the hearth. She twisted it this way and that, watching the play of light, wondering if she could do it again. Stab someone. Stab them so bad they died.