The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012

“What are you doing?” Sofia’s voice shot high.

“Taking him to Grandmere,” Telo said. “Let her judge what’s to be done with him.”

Telo pulled me to the stairs. Leandro followed. Fire shot up my side as the muscles tugged on my fractured rib. Lamia. Hope and dread clouded together in my chest. A woman with books might be civilized, might put an end to this, but the recipes for poisons and the stories, the boys’ stories of her cursing them over mere oranges…. My broken leg fell limp against the landing. I cried out and all my thoughts dissolved in a burst of pain. A cold sweat broke over my body, mixing with the blood that slicked my neck where Leandro’s knife had bitten me.

“Please,” Sofia said, faint now.

My back hit the cool, smooth flagstones of the house’s ground floor. Blearily, through my open right eye, I saw we were coming into the central hall, where a steady fire burned in the hearth. A woman in a red-hemmed gray dress sat before it. The fire’s heat and the billowing darkness over my eye warped her face. The windows reflected the flames, backed by the dense blackness of the country night.

Telo dragged me up on my knees before her. I swayed. He grabbed the back of my neck and stood behind me, holding me upright.

Slowly, Lamia de Rampion turned her face from the fire. She was aged, but younger than I expected, regal in the way of women who have not forgotten what it was to be beautiful in their youth. Her hair waved black and silver in equal parts into a low, loose bun. My mind sparked and fever-wheeled with the notion that perhaps she was Sofia’s mother after all, not her grandmother.

“What have you found?” she asked, cool and calm, the tone a cat’s mistress would use when he made a present of his kill.

“A rat.” Telo tightened his grip on my neck. “Glutting himself on our stores.”

She lifted her chin to Leandro, standing at the bottom of the stair. “And where did you find him?”she asked, as though she already knew his reply.

“Upstairs,” Leandro answered. “As you said.”

“Please, dona.” My voice trembled and scraped as I spoke. “If you would let me make amends…”

Lamia’s eyes drifted down and hooked into my own. A chill washed over me. I could make out nothing of mercy in their depths.

“Amends?” She leaned forward, as if I had made an interesting point. “How do you propose to compensate me for what you have taken from us, hmm? Can you restore my granddaughter’s virginity? Or perhaps you mean to repay us in horses and lands. Is that it, Moor? Will you heap us with gold if my granddaughter’s legs prop open for you whenever you happen by?” Her voice stayed even, furiously calm.

“No, never—”

Lamia cut my words short with a curt lift of her hand. She stood, and I saw her then as she was, a woman with the full swell of her powers come to fruit. “Bind him, please, Telo,” she said, nodding to a straight-backed wooden chair facing the fire.

I tried again. “Dona, please.” I turned to Leandro. “Peace, brothers—”

“What did we say?” Telo asked. He heaved me into the chair and bent to bind my ankles to its legs with horse rope. “We’re not your brothers.”

“Grandmere,” Leandro said from the stair. “What are you doing?”

“Please,” I said. It hurt to breathe around my broken rib. “Let me go. I won’t say a word. We can forget all this.”

Telo twisted my arms and bound my wrists together behind the chair back in answer.

“You’re Christians,” I pleaded. I strained my arms against the ropes, but they held me fast. “Does your Christ not love mercy?”

Lamia walked behind me to the stairs. I craned my neck to see. “Lend me your knife, Leandro,” she said.

“Grandmere—” Leandro said.

“Your knife,” Lamia repeated.

Leandro handed it over slowly. Lamia rustled past me and knelt by the fireplace, shuffling her grandson’s blade in the coals. “Do you know what our Christ says, Moor?” She turned her head to regard me over her shoulder. “Do you?”

My throat would not part to let me speak. “No,” I whispered.

She spoke into the fire. “If thine eye do cause thee to offend, pluck it out and cast it from thee.” She turned the knife within the coals. “Lest thy whole body should be cast into hell.”

“I meant no offense to you or your granddaughter.” I fought for enough breath to speak as the blade turned from dull silver to red. “Please, I love Sofia.”

At that moment, Sofia’s footsteps sounded on the stair behind us, light and bare. Lamia turned. The tip of the knife blade shone white, like a pale thorn, as if a little piece of noonday sun rested on its tip.

“No!” Sofia shouted behind me.

“Keep her back,” Lamia said. Her voice crackled.

Sofia’s screams grew to a hysterical pitch. Her feet fell in muted thuds against the floor as she tried to kick out of Leandro’s grasp. My own heart beat like a piece of tin beneath a blacksmith’s hammer, and my breath came gasping and shaky.

“Please,” I tried one last time. “Te suplico.”

Lamia took my chin in her hand and shoved my head back so I was forced to look up into her eyes, black and dilated with carefully composed rage. “Here is my mercy, Moor. Remember my face when your world is dark.” Then she pointed the tip of the knife at my open right eye and thrust the white-hot blade into its center.

We are packing up the wagons after a week’s stay in Madrid to buy provisions and fit the horses with fresh tack when the cry goes up from the back of the line.

“God, no. It cannot be. Ojala que no.” A woman’s voice wavers above the crowded plaza.

And soon other voices echo her prayer, spreading through the crowd all at once like water coming to a boil.

“Madinat al-Zahra,” someone says.

I drop the water bucket I am holding to Pulga’s mouth and fumble blindly for the nearest man’s arm. “What of the palace?” I ask.

“It’s fallen,” the man says. “It’s been razed, and the fires seen burning five whole days from the Cordoban gates.”

A cold chill slaps my body. I cannot stop myself from picturing all my familiar books blackened and shrunk by flames, the deep fountains boiled bare, the gilt ceiling raining molten drops of gold as the roof catches fire.

“Who was it?” I ask. “The Northern lords? Or the Abbasids? Have they sent ships from Baghdad?”

“Neither,” the man says. “Vizier Sanchuelo lost control of his Berbers, and they took it on themselves to destroy the palace city.”

My hands tremble in their grip on his coat. “And the caliph?” I ask.

“Abdicated,” the man answers, and pushes past me to repeat his story for other ears.

I grope my way to the wagon’s tail and sink down beneath it, by the tall wheels. The world spins too quickly around me, and behind my ruined eyes all I can see are tongues of fire spreading like oil over the glossy leaves of the towering hedges, the tapestries ash, carved ivory doors blackened and hanging ajar, boot prints in the soot. I clutch at the braid around my neck like a drowning man.

Is this Your punishment? I ask God. To know I could have stopped this, and yet stand fettered by blindness as my world burns?

“Ishaq?” a woman’s voice says.

For one reeling moment, I think it’s Sofia. But then the wheels of my mind start turning in tandem again, and I realize it’s Mencia. My given name is common enough I’ve told it to her.

“They’ve burned Madinat al-Zahra,” I say.

“Ishaq, get up.” Her strong hand grips me at the elbow. “We have to move. They’re barring the city