But Juan would never agree. He was capable of killing himself first, and of killing me. And he was right. I accepted his arguments. Never give them a child for the Darkness, he repeated. Don’t let the slavery continue. But I rebelled against that idea now, sitting by the river. It didn’t have to be like that. Gaspar was of blood. Gaspar was not a slave. I thought about my son. I hadn’t loved him instantaneously, hadn’t felt that overflowing love women always talked about. I had protected him and fed him on my own, without any help but Juan’s. I never wanted nannies. And I had watched him sleep every night, trying to fall in love with him. All I felt was a wave of tenderness that I didn’t recognize as love. Until one early morning, when I stayed with him because he had a little cold, and I thought I saw him stop breathing: an effect of the dim light from the hallway made him look completely still. He inherited his father’s illness instead, I thought then. His weak heart had stopped beating before my eyes.

I ran over to the cradle, and in that short run to pick Gaspar up, I wet myself. I soaked my bare legs and left a puddle on the wooden floor, such was my fear when I was confronted with the certainty of my child’s death. I understood. That was love. After the death of one’s child, there was only more death. A blackness with no future.

I was toying with the sand, and down in the wet layer I saw a wooden handle and dug it up. A knife. It could only be Tali’s. I put it in my skirt pocket, and thus armed I went up the stairs: from the beach to the house was less than two hundred meters, but I felt I was traversing kilometers, because I was heading into an endless fight and I was my own main enemy. I had fantasized with pride, with arrogance and joy, about giving a child to cruel gods, because Gaspar was of blood, and Gaspar deserved the possibility of a princedom. And I had thought I deserved all the dominion that a powerful son could give me. I, who had never had abilities, who envied Olanna, Laura, even Tali, had imagined myself crowned in shadows.

And I would imagine it again. I was always capable of betrayal. But whenever I doubted, I clung to the memory of that night when I’d believed my son dead. And the unmitigated joy when I heard him cry.

It was our worst fight, the one that seemed definitive, and I was afraid of it even in advance. It was the first time Juan mistrusted me. I had seen that look and its dark depths of disappointment before, but never directed at me.

“How long have you all known? How long have you been hiding it from me? Why put on that whole farce of having a child if you were just raising him to die?”