Free Incantation by Alice Hoffman Page A

which I kept my pearls.
    Luckily, my mother had thought to hide her emerald ring in her shoe. The soldiers took almost everything else and nearly destroyed our house. Dishes shattered, furniture split in two, woven blankets torn apart. My grandmother came at one of the soldiers with a knife, but he just pushed her away and she fell to the ground. The soldier wasn’t afraid of her the way I always had been. He barely even saw her.
    Don’t fight with him,
my grandfather said.
    We obeyed my grandfather, even though we wept as we did so. At least the soldiers knew nothing about the hidden room filled with books and surgical tools, and they took only one member of our family, because he was the one who’d been said to be an enemy of the church.
    The soldier in charge had the decency to let the great teacher Jose deMadrigal walk out the door a free man, but he remained so just until he reached the end of the yard. Then they put irons on him, the heavy sort, used for heretics and murderers.
    We were crying and screaming for him, the family of a man for whom there was no hope. We cried so many tears the air itself had turned blue.
Grandfather, father, husband, dearest man.
    The soldiers took our sheep from which my mother had made such fine yarn. The chickens scattered and hid under the house, but the pigs were herded together, out the gate, down the lane, following behind my grandfather. At the very last moment, one of the soldiers grabbed Dini, my pet, and carried him away over his shoulder. Dini was screaming and he sounded like a person. I tried to go after him, but my mother ran to me and held me back; she covered my ears. All the same I could hear what the soldiers were doing; I could see it even when I closed my eyes. My grandfather, my pet, my life, my world. I knew the monster on the Plaza had walked through our house, destroying everything.
    We stood there, broken.

    F RIAR DE L EON came again that evening to tell us we should leave. Leave my grandfather. Leave our home.
    Now I began to understand why there were people who decided to stay. It was not so easy to abandon those you loved.
    When we refused to run, the Friar told us we must stay away from the courthouse. I promised I would go no farther than the yard, but even while I said so, I had another plan entirely. I’d seen what had happened to the Arrias family; I knew my grandfather’s trial was to begin.
    The next morning, I told my mother and grandmother I was going to the fields behind our house. Instead, I made my way to the Plaza, wearing a shawl over my head so no one would recognize me. I hid everything but my eyes. I sneaked in at the last moment, before the court doors closed, and sat in the back.
    I recognized someone a few rows in front of me. I knew her from the shape of her head, from the rise of her shoulders, from the way she clasped her hands and rested them on the bench in front of her. Catalina.
    How had I never noticed how hard Catalina was, how brightly she shone when something bad was happening to someone else? She had watched us: my beautiful mother, my strong grandmother, my brilliant brother, and she’d been dull with jealousy. So dull I hadn’t seen what was shining beneath her skin. She was green with it; I saw that now. She would not be called as a witness; only the judge would speak. All the same, Catalina was at the center of the trial, and she knew it; she was shining like an emerald. She had styled her hair carefully and put it up with tortoise-shell combs. I wondered if those combs had come from some Marrano woman who’d been stripped of everything she owned.
    A long list of crimes was read out at last.
Heresy, judaizing, magic, medicine, murder, blood.
    They called my grandfather a sorcerer. The greatest sorcerer of our town and of our times. The most evil, the most dangerous, an even bigger threat to the townspeople than the black fever had been.
    The court decided to test my grandfather. I had heard of such tests. They were