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.