now wore them not only for celebrations but in the streets, the forks nipping at anyone who got in their way.
“Tell me you’ve come here as a joke,” he said. “Tell me one of my friends sent you to see if I would be taken in. Was it Calvo?”
His hand flashed through the air. I flinched, thinking he might strike me. But he was halting me from speaking.
“No, don’t tell me,” he said. “It was Acevedo, wasn’t it?” He clapped his hands. “I swear on the gospel, that man stops breathing if he isn’t trying to trick someone.”
If Oropeza attended church, if he worshipped anyone but himself, he’d know better than to swear on la Biblia. But I kept silent.
“How much did he pay you to do this?” Oropeza’s boots thudded on the tile floor. “Because I’ll double it if you help me play my own little trick on him.”
The rage in me shuddered and trembled. It felt like it was flickering off my eyelashes.
“No one sent me,” I said.
The richest men in El Bajío couldn’t have paid me to be here. But I had begged every official who would see me.
Most I found by stopping them in the street. The ones who listened bowed their heads to tell me there was nothing they could do, not for any Frenchman, least of all El Lobo.
The ones who didn’t want to hear me—Senator Ariel, Governor Quintanar—shoved me to make me move. They backed away from me like I was crafted out of mud, as though if they came too close I might dirty them.
I was not a girl who could ask for things. I was not powder and perfume and lace-trimmed fans. The kind of women who could wheedle favors from wealthy men wore dresses in the purples and deep pinks of cactus fruit. They wore silk and velvet ribbons tied as necklaces. The owners of blue agave farms sent them sapphire and emerald rings.
They were not girls in plain huipils.
But Deputy Oropeza had agreed to see me. Hope had bloomed in the dark space beneath my heart. Yes, he wore the pointed boots of rich men, but he hadn’t gotten into the same competitions the others had, driving one another to have boots made with toes as long as I was tall. Maybe there was reason in him.
“Please,” I said now.
The war had ended. But the hills still lay scorched and barren, and Léon had been captured as an enemy Frenchman. Un francés. And now a blindfold and a bullet waited for him at dusk.
“He didn’t even want to fight with them,” I said. “He deserted.”
The things Léon had seen had driven him to betray his own country. I hated la Légion for what they had done to Léon. He hated them for letting their soldiers loose on this land. They raided villages, throwing women down on the earth floors of their homes, killing the men and keeping locks of their hair as trophies.
And those were only the things he had been willing to tell me, as though I myself had not known families killed or scarred by the French uniform. But he didn’t see the brown of my skin and consider me less than he was. He did not see the red of my hair and decide I was wicked. He saw me as something soft, a girl he did not want to plague with nightmares.
By the time Léon deserted, he had grown to hate not only la Légion but his own country, for starting this war in the name of unsettled debts, and for doing it while los Estados Unidos were too deep in their own civil war to intervene. So Léon had done the small but devastating things that earned him the name Le Loup. At night, he strolled into French camps wearing his stolen uniform. The blue coat with gold-fringed epaulettes. The red pants that tapered to cuffs at the ankles. The stiff yellow collar that rubbed against his neck when he nodded at the watchmen as though he belonged there.
He stole guns, throwing them into rivers. He set horses loose, driving them toward villages too poor to buy them. He pilfered maps and parchments, leaving them burning for the men to find. The rumors said he’d even called wolves from the hills, scattering the camps. But when I’d asked him about that, he only smiled.
Now the memory of Léon’s smile stung so hard I looked for the cut of it on my skin.
“He was working against them,” I told Oropeza.
Oropeza looked out through the silk curtains and onto the rows of curling grapevines.
“Then he is a traitor,” Oropeza said. “He is not even loyal to his own country. What would make you think he would be loyal to you?”
He turned his gaze to the square of tile where I stood in my huipil. In that moment, I saw myself as Oropeza must have seen me.
Men like Oropeza would never consider me worth looking at. I was short, wide hipped, a girl from the villages. I had only ever been told I was pretty by my abuela.
And Léon. My lobo.
Oropeza laughed. “The little campesina thinks el francés loves her?”
Campesina. I knew what that word meant to him, how he wielded it as both insult and fact. It was a word men like Oropeza kept ready on their tongues, a way to show their judgment both of where I had come from and the shape of my body. To them, my height and form marked me. A peasant’s shape, men like Oropeza called it, a shape made for work close to the ground.
“All he told you was lies,” Oropeza said. “He might have thought you were a little bit interesting.” He gestured at my hair. “A distraction.”
The salt of my own tears stung.
“One day you will thank me for what I’ve saved you from,” Oropeza said.
I set my back teeth together. He considered me and everyone like me a child. Men like him thought they had more of God in their hearts than we did, as though they held it in the lightness of their skin, or, for a few of them, in their eyes as blue as the seas their ancestors had crossed to claim this land.
Oropeza lurched forward, clutching his chest as though it had cramped. And then his stomach, as though he’d had a portion of bad wine.
I stepped back.
The venom in me, carried in my family’s blood, was spilling out. It had built in me, spun and strengthened by my rage. Then it had flowed into the air between me and Oropeza until he was sick with it.
This was the poison of Las Rojas, the venom our rage could become.
I kept myself back, pressing my tongue behind my teeth to stop myself.
I could not let the poison in my blood make Oropeza sick. If he’d heard the stories about my family and realized they were more truth than superstition, he would have me dragged into the street and killed as a bruja.
One of Oropeza’s men showed me out. My steps led me over the polished tile, and then out into Oropeza’s front gardens.
Léon had stayed for me. He had kept himself here, caught between la Légion he’d deserted and this country that considered him an enemy. And he’d been taken for it.
He’d never had the stomach for la Légion. He’d told me the night I found him, once I’d given him enough water for him to speak and
