He arched an eyebrow. ‘Like you do to your father?’ They both knew first-hand how savage his temper could be when he was defied. The last time he’d caught them playing together, he had boxed Santi so hard around the ears he had been deaf for three days afterwards, and she had been birched and quarantined in her room for all meals for a week.

She picked up an acorn and threw it at him. As ever, she scored a bullseye, hitting him straight between the eyes.

‘Ow!’ He rubbed his head, glancing over at her, but he didn’t throw anything back, seeming to know that behind her anger there was pain. Real pain in her heart.

He turned and began walking again, taking extra slow steps as she stared after him, her shoulders heaving up and down with silent despair, before she began following after him.

They fell into step again, Santi grabbing at a tall blade of grass and pulling it through his palm. ‘He says it is only for a few years. Just until I become a man and then I can come back here and look after my mother.’ He glanced back at her, his eyes adding something silently that didn’t need to be said.

Nene didn’t reply. It would be an epoch before he became a man but they were both powerless to stop it. ‘. . . When will you go?’ Her voice sounded funny.

‘Before the leaves turn. He says they will need me for the harvest.’

She turned her head away, not wanting to discuss it further. She couldn’t imagine her life here at La Ventilla without him. He was the only person who could make her laugh, the only one who could run faster than her. Other girls her age simply wanted to play with hair ribbons or dolls, and her brothers were brutes who were good only for shooting rabbits. Who would she talk to? Who would she test her jokes on? Who would leave surprises in the jacaranda tree whenever they had a fight?

They wandered through the cork oak fields in distracted silence, deliberately meandering beneath the heavy-headed canopies for moments of shaded relief, their hands still absently grabbing at long blades of grass as they walked down the hill.

They covered the rough ground at an idle pace. There was never any point in arriving anywhere early here, it would only hasten the next question: ‘What now?’ But as they walked, gradually the landscape changed beneath their feet, levelling out and becoming greener – the tangled cork oak forest where the older Mala Fes bulls rooted for acorns replaced by neat rows of orchards, olive, orange, peach and lemon trees planted in strict lines, leading up to the low stone walls that heralded the grazing fields where the famed, gleaming herds roamed. The bulls’ hides glistened like velvet in the sun, rich shades of chestnut, dove grey and a blacker-than- black black. They moved their great bulks slowly, nosing the ground unperturbed, their distinctive horns pointing ever upwards in silent warning.