three; o lord, let my soul.

He broke away to look at her.

Bel's face was flushed, naked, and she was utterly still, though whether it was because of how firmly Antonio was holding her was not clear.

"Sir...?" she said, on a half-breath, just before he kissed her again. Only now the kiss continued. His tongue moved around the edge of her lips, then slipped softly inside. She let out a tiny breathless moan but did not resist. Her eyes were tightly closed and her hand hovered close to him, as if not knowing where to go. He lifted his mouth from hers.

"My name is Antonio," he said, and his voice was dangerously gentle. "Say it."

But as his lips came back, she flinched, as if jolting herself awake from a difficult dream. "No, Antonio."

The protest started as a flutter, dove wings against glass, becoming fiercer when he did not respond, so that now she was pushing, trying to get her hands between them. They were mushed together like the playing cards of a magician, colliding; a hanged man meeting with sweet temperance. "No, I cannot."

"Why?"

It was a true question, and one she could not imagine answering with any truth. Not when her chin was tipped up and parting the shadows around them, her face fearful of something bigger than the world, her body comfortable and maddeningly close in the space between his arms, feeling almost too small to contain her. He withdrew a caging arm to instead touch her waist, inches away from his hand, sliding an arm around her hip and pulling her in close. Relishing the sharp inhalation he felt more than heard next to his ear. Her body curled into his, frame bending under the touch of his hands — as many before did, but few so gracefully — the shade catching dark in the hollow of her clavicle, as stark as a martyr's heaven-touched flesh.

"Why?" he asked again, but silence was answer in itself. He had learned this long before.

Abruptly, he let her go and she moved away from him. He leant back against the wall, a strange expression on his face. She stood staring down at him, her breath coming in starts. He lifted his hands in mock-surrender. It was a gesture that she somehow knew was a way of swallowing down feelings so they were hidden from anyone watching.

His face told a different tale. look at me, it said. i am what you see: easy on the eye, strong to the taste, a man with substance. Someone to admire, for how can beauty this natural lie?

How indeed. The good-sized shoulders, the capable chest. And then the tapering of the waist, the well-turned calves. And the face, nested in all that glossy hair. The fine who-cares nose, the wind-raw lips, eyebrows always askew, unmatched, challenging. A face with charity and mockery displayed in equal measure.

was such a face to be trusted, she wondered. Then Antonio laughed.

"Nothing happened, cariño. It was a moment of love, that's all." But though the words were light, there was something in him that was not. Antonio moved to the door, like a man in a semi-trance. Before he left, he turned. His mouth opened to speak but nothing came out.

"Goodnight," was what he decided to say.

"Goodnight." she replied.

With the door closed, Bel sank down against the wall, hands clasped in her lap, staring at the floor. She lifted her fingers to her mouth, holding them there as if to feel the burn mark that he might have left.

.

She knew it was how housemaids were usually said to be. Conniving, manipulative young things; only putting on a show of subservience in order to reveal a more seductive nature in private to their employers, spreading their legs and slanting coy smiles. She wondered if the people who started this gossip hadn't mistaken kitchen-girls for sea-bound sirens, drawing in hapless men with their devil-given charms.

Even so, a housemaid she still was, with all the work that came with it. The gathering that was to be hosted was just in time before the beginning of Lent, or as Bel had taught Lovino, the three days before it, called Vastenavond. It hardly seemed right to have households feasting like gluttons when whispers of plague had been heard in the narrow alleyways and above the town canals. But Bel threw herself into the preparations with the same energy she spared daily tasks. Today, on a day when the sun could barely show itself behind a gauzy grey cloudy morning, it was to be a stew with mutton, citron, greens, and ginger. A nice, steaming hutsepot. A trip to the markets was in order, then.

She ran a finger over the top of a cabinet, checking for dust, looking down from the sun. She caught sight of Antonio looking over the balustrade, uncharacteristically silent. His face was angled forward. The light caught around the hair along his jaw, finer and fairer in the light, looking closer in color to her own than the dark curls on his head. Could he more fair-haired as a boy, she wondered, at ten, eleven, twelve? Did he look more like little Lovino? She watched the muscle in his throat tense and release in tandem with his fingers.

When he caught her eye, he still smiled, though it seemed even more insincere than it used to be. If such a thing were even possible.

Perhaps courtesy was bred into him, it seemed very much likely. And she was determined to return the favor, even if her own breeding demanded nothing of the sort. So she approached him with cautious steps, took a look at the palm of his suntanned hand covering the wrist of the other, and tried not to be overwhelmed by the stillness of him.

"Good day," she offered, stilted. As though they had reverted back to the unfamiliarity of the day they had first met. Was she still to call him by his Christian name?

"And to you."

"I'm heading for the grotemarkt soon, sir, with your permission. Is there anything you might need from me before I go? Or anything in particular for me to pick up?"

He chuckled, smile curling around the edges. Did her attempt at mirroring his nobler manners look that transparent? "Ah, no, thank you."

Lying through one's teeth was a skill that must be relished at a court such as the one where he grew up. The thought of it made her body twitch in a manner embedded in the blood, a thousand miles away from her mind. Well, he was skilled at it, she thinks dispassionately; not that she would know (wouldn't she?)

"Sir, please," Bel said. "About the other night..."

"Nothing happened, cariño," he interrupted, his words a careful repetition, hammering it home. "Let's just not touch the subject again, yes?"

"But—"

"Noli me tangere," he said, aiming for teasing but ending up just shy of it. But she had written enough to her devout brother Lucas to know what the words meant.

It seemed that it was Revelations that captivated her dear little brother these days, with its dreams of locusts and fire and endings. Saint John's prophecies spoke of a world unraveling and creations monstrous enough to swallow it whole. She would read her brother's missives and the Biblical book itself until she forgot to blow out the lights; her head would ache behind her eyes when she forgot to sleep. Her stomach curled in on itself with a hunger bigger than flesh, to which she did not give name.

If anything, she would think in the dead of night when the time approached Matins, it was her supposed beauty that was monstrous, sweeping away any other aspect of her character. But wasn't that the meaning of monstrare, in the Latin that was so familiar to one who recited prayers daily? To frighten, to warn?

"You said you were going to the market, weren't you? Off with you, then." Antonio dismissed, smile still in place.

"Sir." she replied, hollow.

After all, it's said that God's mercy and His anger often wear the same face.

.

On his first night in his estate, Antonio had laid his head down upon a cushion and relearned his Lamentations.

He was not used to this: this lack of lassitude, the smoke of too-close candles in his eyes, the moist cool scent of rain in his skin. His bare face, washed clean of its pretensions but still recalling its lines. In the hasty communion that had been his farewell he'd been made anew; drawn to a new life, a new body, a petulant messiah breathing dust in the desert.

He was his own, now. Though not yet, not that night. That night, he had still been fasting, in preparation for Advent, denying himself the pleasures of eating flesh in hopes to properly celebrate the Annunciation of the Virgin, the birth of Christ-child, an attempt to echo the proceedings in the court he once deemed home. December months were kinder in Aragón than up north, though fasts and veils of piety had continued, led in example by the king. It was unkind to think so but Antonio couldn't help but sense that the reverent pageantry displayed was but a veil, where flesh-and-blood pleasure and ambition seethed beneath.

Bored, he had switched gospels for romances, soon abandoning the witty prose of de Cervantes for old stories of Rome. He tilted his chin skyward, ceiling-ward, to the dome of the roof overhead. He muttered nonsense and placed a hand on his forehead in habit, fingers fidgeting without the usual beads of sweat to wipe. In the gold trappings of the room he had felt candle-light, holy light, reflecting onto his upraised cheeks and browbones. Beneath his closed lids came out images in searing rich color, leftovers of the tales that he had just read; one in particular, its old inks staining his fingertips. He frowned.

He had another namesake, he knew. A war-general, one who was enthroned in a marketplace, sitting in the city of his Alexandrian lover dressed as a king as she descended to him as nothing but a goddess. The two had gone beyond turning themselves into stars; they had performed godhood, and expected the universe itself to comply. Mythical, almost, even as they still lived.

give me my robes, put on my crown. A flicker of candle-light dropped an illicit kiss on the bare hollow of Antonio's neck, as if licensed. Heat coiled low in his stomach. for i have immortal longings in me.

And in the stories about this namesake of his, there was always talk of destiny, about people as pawns in a chess game of the gods. He had wondered, sometimes. He wondered still. Did the general lie in his queen's arms, waiting for the poison of his thoughts to overtake him as much as his blade did, and there was so much — his hands were covered in blood more than his own and there was no use of pretending otherwise, no use no use. But then he forgot who, exactly, he was wondering about.

Marcus Antonius had been grandiose. Hubristic, vicious. A Mars to Cleopatra's Venus.

but then, his mind whispered traitorously. marcus antonius had died.

.

It was the waning of the moon and the fog of winter's end was thick as soup. Her brother, now no longer even bothering to hide his frequent trips out of the house, paid most of his due visits to guilds and alehouses. Ever stolid, he went about his business, maneuvering over the streets that froze up into icy ruts every night. He seemed very Dutch in the way he was buttoned and swaddled against the weather, as stoic and skeptical as a Frisian cow. When he returned, he came with a collection of news about the latest sufferers of the plague.

"We shouldn't seem ungrateful for our room and board here," he said to his sister, which sounded so different from the usual complaints he had of his patron Bel struggled not to ask just how much he had drank. "If we were tossed onto the streets again, there to find lodging and food in some more despicable spot, we'd undoubtedly put ourselves in the path of contagion. God has seen fit to secure us here, and we must praise him for his providence. Our Heavenly Father takes care of his own."

"And a brother must take care of his own too, I suppose," said Bel, but darkly, pitching a potato into the fireplace. The reproach was clear. Niels was spending too much time away, and not enough time on the actual portrait he was commissioned to do. He spoke of being thankful for a place to stay, hearty meals coming three times a day — yet his constant, if silent, impertinence towards his patron must be coming close to endangering it.

"Subtlety was never your strong suit, sis. And yes, I should say so. The plague is even worse further south, I'm told," said Neils. "Luxembourg is bearing the brunt of it. Signs of it have also been sighted as up far as Utrecht, too. Again, mind you. This is a prosperous country and a fine time to be alive for all who will live to tell the tale. I won't be thrown out on the street to watch my family starve, or waste away with the pox, or dribble their insides out with bloody flux."

Bel grimaced. "A lovely image, brother."

"Besides, who are you to talk?" Niels mowed on, unmoved by attempt at humor. "You take care of yourself, I've noticed, in any way that comes to hand, thanks to our employer."

"I am paid for services rendered, just as you are," she replied, disliking the implications that her brother, who claimed to care so much about family, was throwing in her face. "And might I remind you that it was you who brought me into the household and allowed it? Making me have a trade?"

"Hah, is that what they call it, a trade," said Niels. "I believe that you are good at your 'trade.' And no, though I may have been the one to bring us under his employ, I certainly have no say in what might come after."

"That's right," she said. "You don't. And I say that it is only from guilt that one can find the strength to make such claims of others."

A long pause morphed into a silence. Then she huffed. "There's too much work to be done to waste our time in talk. If you can't help, then you must excuse me."

"Sis, I—"

"No," she interrupted. ""You're not my father. We both lost one and right now I have no need for someone attempting to be another," she said to him, snatching her cleaning rag into her hands before picking herself up and walking out the back door. Her shoes weren't all the way on her feet, so she stopped at a corner to pull them on. A bird cried outside, far away, distracting her from the argument she had fled from and she had wondered where it was going and where it had been. She glanced to see a vase of wilting flowers sitting atop the table, and was reminded of her job that needed doing. Her brother was nowhere in her sights.

She hadn't lied; there was indeed a lot to be done. Bel wasn't familiar with customs of Spain when it came to throwing a party, but if it wasn't obvious from the lack of Calvinist abstemiousness, it should be from the frantic orders yelled in throaty Catalán, echoing throughout the house: it was to be a great undertaking, this gathering, and entirely Spanish in nature.

There were bowls of oysters soaking in saltwater and vinegar, and a brace of hares to unfasten from the spit, and a spill of produce from the cold cellar to be cooked in various ways. Bel, having made her harrumphing procession about, returned with rapid feet down the steps to the kitchen, and there she set a couple of hired girls and her own self to task. Lovino showed up in the doorway looking for a glass of water. He was assigned to scrubbing potatoes before he even knew what was happening.

Bel worked furiously the rest of the days without speaking, selecting the most perfect fruit, withdrawing the bread from the side oven, preparing and spicing the quails, hurrying with the newly-purchased blooms. For the hour was approaching when the Young Woman with Wildflowers would be unveiled to ravenous merchants and men of good breeding.

.

The candles were lit, the tables spread with linen, and Antonio had seated himself for a moment at the virginal. "What a picture," he said to Niels, but the latter didn't hear the slight sourness in his voice, merely answering in a tone less at ease that what his face might suggest, "Oh, yes, isn't she?"

Two maids from a household down the street had come to assist in the serving, so Bel could stand at the door and supervise both kitchen and dining salon at once. Lovino had been roped into collecting cloaks and staffs and hats, buoyed by the promise of extra plates of sweetmeats and sugared fruits, as well as a kiss goodnight. He had turned red and decidedly brought a stool to the doorway, wondering to himself about the whole social affair, until at last there was a knock on the door and the first of the burghers arrived.

The good citizens of the town had many thoughts about the Aragonese noble hosting the party, living in so close vicinity to them. The Dutch could be sullenly tolerant of their own House of Orange residing in the Hague; but royalty of a different stripe, be it Stuarts or Bourbons or, Lord forbid, true Spanish Habsburgs, carried a different prestige. If it could even be called thus. Everyone was aware of the severe reputation that cloaked the royal courts of Spain, and so to have in their midst a young prince étranger raised in such a court — Catholic to the bone and was ready enough to shout it from the rooftops, if need be — the stories and gossip practically created themselves. an overcompensation, surely, said the crones and granddames sagely. Perhaps for a spotty, hypocritical, conversos -stained family history; that had less limpieza de sangre than boasted — who knew?

But the subject of the gossip wasn't yet to be seen, playing a coy host that wasn't to emerge until at least half-an-hour. Instead a devil's garden of blossoms: women in high color, flaming cheeks and gowns, fantastical combinations that warred against each other like the worst patch of summer weeds. Some of the town regents: portly men in black with colored sashes and ceremonial swords and chests full of ribbons, medallions, and lace. The ruffs were so high and stiff that their goatees looked ready for harvesting. As the made themselves comfortable, many of the partygoers had taken refuge in the relative anonymity along the margins of the room, underneath the balcony. They were packed like fish in a crate.

In time, Bel's brother appeared. His new coat with its bit of braid, coupled with the Dutch stoicism he was born with, did little to disguise his fretfulness. He made a round about the hall, greeting those he knew, muttering curt — shy, perhaps; though it would likely be dubbed later as chilly — hellos to strangers. Several he made the effort of conversing with, hushed and low. Almost at once he escaped to the kitchen, where he shucked off the new coat and sat on an empty stool. He fiddled with his hands for a bit.

"They are a worthy lot," said Niels to his sister, who, though in the midst of last-minute preparations, took a moment to remark in a voice carefully blank: "You look like you're doing well out there, brother."

"These men admire the talented and they count themselves as learned. Do you know that some of them have invested in the settlement of the New Netherlands across the tremendous Atlantic?"

"They have an uncommon passion for paintings, these Dutch," said Bel, as if in this instance she understood herself to be entirely and safely something other. As if one kiss one night from one Spaniard had marked her as different. She stopped herself. What was she thinking? What a laughable thought!

"And why shouldn't they?" asked Niels. "The marvelous Reformation has torn away icon and ornament from churches. What's left from the hungry eye to admire? Our fellow Dutchmen make do with tedious scenes of merry company. Scenes of meadow, woodland, the lot of the common husbandrymen. Views of the city from this aspect or that. Or views from the comic lot of the desperately poor."

That last one hit a little too close to home, though she was too gladdened by the hint of excitement in her brother's words to properly admonish him.

"When your painting is met with approval," said Bel, choosing her words deliberately — when, not if. when. "Just watch: you'll paint all of that. You'll spend your time gazing on the thick jowls and the double-chins of everyone with guldens enough to pay you for their likeness."

"Don't remind me," he groaned. "My possible patrons are out there in the reception room right now. And I have enough trouble dealing with the one patron I have now."

"Don't forget that he is also the host of this splendid occasion," she added, sounding slightly bitter, though she didn't know why. "There is no shortage of subjects, Niels, nor coin to pay you for painting them."

"There's no shortage of painters this side of the Low Countries, either," he muttered, almost inaudible. He watched as his sister laid a pair of poached salmon on a salver and worked them with her fingers to move the flesh back to correct form. He grabbed a filled jug and inspected it closely, his hands almost covering its' top.

"So you have a mixed mind? Like most of us. You want the work and the reputation, and you also want to despise your patrons for refusing to pay for religious subjects. This way," she said in attempted good cheer — when they were small children she used to enjoy teasing him so. "You can be unhappy whatever happens next."

"Bless your magnanimity, sis," Niels replied, dryly. "But the patrons also talk of other things. Like I said, most of them had the courage to stake investments on expeditions across oceans. For the more cautious of them, they play at the market for tulips. I've heard that there has even more money to be made in it this year, due to a strong season in the Exchange in Amsterdam. I've been meaning to tell you—"

Antonio was at the door. "Maestro, we're going into the next room to show them your work," he said. "And you are here gabbling in the vegetables like a soup-boy? Get out here, and prepare, at your advanced age, to make your career, and to make mine as well."

Niels did not rise to the bait; to the petty, feeble jab about the few years he had over his impatient patron. He did, however, nod and dutifully step outside into the halls. Antonio made a show of shaking his head at him, before swiveling back to glance at the kitchen. Bel looked up from her work.

Their gazes met, but Antonio left without a word.

.

"Here it is, a major work by a minor artist," Antonio cried. "Splendid, isn't it. Subjects like this inspire artists to heights of achievement. It's hard to distinguish which is more magnificent, the beauty of the girl or the sensitive skill of the rendering — but I suppose it doesn't matter. This is what art does, confuses the senses so to magnify the appreciation of the heart." He peered at it, a strange expression etched upon his face.

"The artist, Maestro Niels Johanssen," cried the Spanish host, and raised his glass. His guests froze, as they didn't know the protocol.

"To the Maestro," exhorted Antonio. "To the Maestro," weakly replied those nearest him, while other farther away said more boisterously, "To the Maestro!"

Niels stepped forward four or five inches, gave the tiniest little bow, which might as well have been a stretch to aid in the digestion of some lumpen bite of pork pie. He looked pleased and guilty and sullen and tired, all at once.

"The portrait looks incongruous in a Spaniard's home," a hushed whisper opined, much to the ill-disguised amusement of certain guests.

"Why?"

"Simply in the fact that it is not their home," was the reply. "This estate is on Dutch land."

Lovino exploded, his attempt at being courteous for his cousin's social affair shattering — it's the only word that fit — and dropped like shards of a mirror. "You dare—!"

"Hmm. Is it? A paper bearing a royal seal in my possession—" The calmness in Antonio's voice was admirable. He looked around the room as if to enunciate without words what else might be in his possession. "You see, it says otherwise."

"Whose royal seal, Catalan?" the guffaw seemed deafening. "Your king Philip's? Forgeries of those are readily available, when one knows where to look, are they not? And I would hazard that your esteemed self does. Know."

Several guests with more tact — or probably with more Spanish gold weighing their pockets than honest guldens, unkind rumors would later suggest — attempted to diffuse the tension. "This is no place for discord, Heers."

The belligerents would not be assuaged. "No? Where better, then?"

Antonio bared his teeth. "I don't care. Not in my home," he said. "This is my family's estate and I possess it lawfully. I have the papers to prove it, and I would not have a gathering intended for celebration degenerate into something we civilized gentlemen know better than to commit."

"Ah, but what is family to the Spanish? And with history half tainted by the Moors, and another half marred by corruption and oppression taking the guise of churchly endeavors, I always thought the notion of 'civilization' would be a foreign one."

"And you Dutch would harvest the very bones out of the skins of men who disagree with you," Antonio hissed, voice rough, decorum thrown out the window. He threw back his head and laughed — a short, stifled laugh; more scornful than delighted, but a laugh nonetheless — and every conversation for twelve feet in every direction came to a halt. "Oh no, you wouldn't, if you find you couldn't resell them for a profit."

"Sir, please, you speak ill of my countrymen," Niels finally said. "And there is no saying what a man is capable of on his family's behalf."

"And on his own," interrupted Lovino, with a steady vehemence that surprised even him.

"I know that in a family, the good of one member advances the good of all members. Though," Niels added under his breath, though apparently not quite lowly enough. "I imagine you wouldn't know something like that, little Vargas. Or maybe you would."

It was unclear what happened next; the room was struck silent. Guests glanced at one another; one small, slow girl hired to serve the water already hiding her face in her apron. Lovino sat up straight, and he was suddenly no longer a child but a stripling adult, with all the feisty disregard for authority that came with it. His lower lip stopped trembling and his eyebrows drew closer together. He seemed ready to rise from the table and fling something at the man who had offended him, while Niels seemed very displeased.

But before he could, a sound from the other end of the table caused all heads to turn. There was a clatter of dining utensils, and a spilled glass of port. The room gasped.

Though Antonio was a son of Aragón through and through, he had been about five years old when he spent two seasons in Valencia. In his mind's eye he could still see himself gawping up at the broad shoulders of Saint Martin's statue on the Puente de Serranos, one of the two bridges spanning the river Turia. Unfortunately, his awe had been ruined when he looked down and spied a body bob up from the waters, so his family had said. He had not screamed, but instead was scared into a week-long silence.

When he was older, he understood that every day in Valencia was perfect for vendetta and revenge. No city in all of Spain had as many blood-feuds and murders, and the killing increased during Shrove Tuesday, the debauchery preceding Ash Wednesday and forty days of Lenten contrition. Which was today, he realized. The day of carne vale. The last of Antonio's thoughts trickled slowly, like smoke. how fitting.

The small serving girl came sprinting into the kitchen. A white panic had come up in her face. She trembled and, to Bel's astonishment, made a face that anyone could read. The mute girl grasped her own neck and bulged her eyes out. The gargle of her uneducated throat completed the message. A thud punctuated its' end, while the halls erupted in cries that made Bel's blood run cold.

(carne vale. farewell to the flesh.)

The host was sick, sick or bludgeoned, or fainted, or dead.

.

.

.

(tbc.)