Free Incantation by Alice Hoffman

was,
I said.
    You can be anything at all and it won’t matter to me.
    How many men had said that to how many women in this world? How many girls had believed such things, only to be left waiting in a doorway?
    But sometimes a hawk is a hawk and a dove is a dove and a nightingale is a bird that sings until morning. I decided to trust him.
    You won’t change your mind?
I said.
    He laughed and said,
Will you?
    Let me tell you who I really am,
I began.
    You don’t have to. I know you. I know your heart. That’s the only thing that will ever matter to me.
    I told him anyway. Even though it was dangerous, even though I knew I must never tell. When I was done, he kissed me.
    So I gave him my promise, and he did the same, just like that. No matter who we might be in the eyes of anyone else, we belonged to each other.

 

    HUSKS

    Who Betrays You

 

    Blood

    I t was something small that made it happen. Small like the bite of a poisonous bug. That small thing was a kiss.
    You would think a kiss could bring only good things into the world, but not this time.
    Andres and I continued to meet nearly every night under the olive tree where the hawk had been. It was our secret place.
    But secrets can be kept for only so long. I have learned that now.
    Catalina caught us. She waited in her yard, and when we met she confronted us. It was a dark night, but there wasn’t enough darkness to make this right. Catalina wanted us to explain ourselves. She felt it was her right to accuse us because she was the wronged party.
    We didn’t mean for it to happen,
I said.
    Catalina laughed a hard laugh.
    Andres tried to make her understand.
You and I are like brother and sister,
he told her.
My love for you is there,
he explained,
but it’s different than the way I feel about Estrella.
    I don’t want your love,
Catalina told him. Then she turned on me.
I wish I’d never met you. I wish you’d never existed. Now I wonder what else you’ve lied to me about.
    She closed her eyes as though I had already disappeared. When she opened them again I knew she no longer saw me. I was nothing to her.

    T HE OFFICIALS didn’t come to Catalina. She went to them. She asked for an audience with the judge who was in charge of the court inside the Duke’s palace. She knelt before him and told him my grandfather had a secret life and a magic school; that we practiced witchcraft and Judaizing. She told them so easily, she might have been telling him the names of the pigs in her yard. She did it as though turning us in to the court was the simplest thing, a household chore, a recitation of a daily prayer.
    Catalina said that she had seen my grandfather place a spot of blood on our door on the day when known Jews celebrated Passover. When I asked my grandfather if this was true, he said people from our church did so, but it was the blood of chicken, not, as Catalina had said, human blood, the blood of a stolen child.
    Catalina told the judge she had never seen anyone in our family eat chorizo, and that brought on her initial suspicions. We refused sausage and roasts, and our pigs were our pets; she announced that we slept in bed with them. She had once heard my grandfather call my grandmother Sarah, when Señora deMadrigal went by the name of Carmen to the rest of town.
    And that’s what the evidence came down to.
    A name.

    I T WAS F RIAR DE L EON who told us all of this. How Catalina had been escorted out of the old palace as though she were an important person, how she’d been dressed in silk, wearing new satin shoes.
    The Friar told us we should leave our town, go without questions and leave everything behind, but the soldiers came so quickly we barely had time to catch our breath. When they arrested my grandfather, they made sure to take everything they needed as evidence for the trial. This meant anything that mattered to us. Our candlesticks, our silver, letters written from my father to my mother, even my box of trinkets from beneath my mattress, in