Prologue: The First Bargain
Manila Bay, 1574
The pain in her ribs was a constellation of sharp, bright points of light, each breath a fresh discovery of torment. Ligaya stumbled on the packed earth of the path, one hand pressed to her side as if to hold herself together. The coarse fabric of hersayawas gritty with dust and stained dark where she had fallen. Above, the sky bled from orange to a deep, bruised purple, the color of the welt bloomingon her cheek.
The evening toll of the church bell rolled through the village, each resonant clang a hammer blow against her skull. It was meant to be a call to prayer, a sound of comfort, but to Ligaya it was the metronome of their subjugation. It counted the hours of their lives under the Spanish king, under the Spanish god, under men like her husband. She could see twoguardia civillounging near the fountain in the plaza, the setting sun glinting off the barrels of their rifles. Their laughter was a harsh, grating sound that made the villagers hurry past, eyes downcast. She ducked behind anipahut, the rough palm leaves scratching at her torn sleeve, and waited for them to pass, her breathing shallow and fast.
Her husband, Mateo, was a man who enjoyed the sound of that bell. He had risen, agobernadorcillowho served the Spanish friars and the military captain with equal servility, trading the dignity of his people for a measure of power. He wore leather shoes when everyone else wore sandals or went barefoot. He spoke their Castilian with a practiced flourish that made her stomach clench. As she skirted the edge of the plaza, keeping to the deepest shadows, she could hear his voice drifting from the open doors of the tribunal. It was his public voice, full of false bonhomie, punctuated by the deeper, guttural laugh of the Spanish captain he was entertaining. The sound of it sent a fresh wave of nausea and fury through her. This was the man who had just thrown her against a wall for burning the rice, his rings slicing her lip. This was the man who quoted scripture while his fists did the devil’s work.
Clutched in her right hand was a small, tight bundle wrapped in abaca cloth. The contents were a dangerous weight, a blasphemy she had prepared in secret over weeks of whispered consultations and furtive gatherings. She felt the sharp edge of a seashell press into herpalm through the cloth, a small, grounding pain that focused her mind.
She finally reached the edge of the village, where the manicured severity of the plaza gave way to the untamed chaos of the forest. The air changed instantly, growing cooler, thick with the scent of damp earth, night-blooming jasmine, and something else - something ancient and feral. The trees, great pillars of narra and balete, loomed like silent giants, their branches weaving a dense canopy that swallowed the last of the light. Here, the church bell was a muffled, impotent sound. Here, other powers held sway.
Fear followed her in, a cold companion that whispered ofaswangandkaprehiding in the gloom. But the terror of what lay behind her was greater than the terror of what might lie ahead. She pushed deeper, her bare feet finding the familiar path by memory, the forest floor soft with a carpet of decaying leaves.
The trees parted to reveal a small clearing perched on the edge of a cliff. Above, the nearly full moon bathed everything in silver, catching on the dew-laden leaves and transforming them into glittering jewels. Below, the vast darkness of the sea stretched to the horizon, where thunderheads gathered like an army preparing for invasion. The waves crashed against the rocks far beneath her feet, their rhythm steady and ancient. This place held a reverence the village church could never match despite its ornate altars and soaring ceilings. Here, with the taste of salt on her lips and the wind in her hair, Ligaya could finally fill her lungs completely.
With trembling hands, Ligaya knelt and unwrapped her bundle. The contents seemed meager in the moonlight. A handful of crushed herbs, gathered from her grandmother’s garden, whose names were a prayer in themselves. A dozen small, iridescent shells, plucked fromthe shore at the lowest tide, when the sea revealed its deepest secrets. And the talisman.
It was a hideous, beautiful thing. A piece of blackened wood, perhaps from a ship struck by lightning, carved into a shape that was both a crucifix and a horned effigy. A previous owner had wrapped it in rosary beads, the silver tarnished, but the effigy’s eyes were inlaid with mother-of-pearl that seemed to watch her. It was an object of dualities, of warring faiths, much like herself.
She knelt at the cliff’s edge, where the black waters churned far below, and positioned the talisman on the bare earth. With reverent precision, she began arranging the iridescent shells in a perfect circle around the carved effigy. Her movements were clumsy, her fingers stiff and swollen. With a shard of obsidian, another item from the bundle, she drew a larger circle in the soft earth around her ritual space.
As she worked, she began to whisper, the words a torrent of desperate need. The dialect of her ancestors tumbled from her lips, a litany of forgotten nature spirits and protective deities, their names feeling strange and powerful on her tongue. Mixed within it, like poison in a well, were fragments of the Latin Mass she’d been forced to memorize.
“Sanctus, Sanctus, Dominus Deus Sabaoth.By the salt of the sea and the root of the earth, I call.Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, I summon.“ It was a prayer of defiance, a corruption of her captors’ faith woven into the fabric of her own.
The air grew heavy. The chirping of insects fell silent. Her ragged breath and the thundering pulse in her ears merged with the distant roar of waves against the rocks below, as if her body and the sea had become one restless entity. The ritual required one final component. Blood, freely given. A sacrifice to seal the pact.
She picked up the obsidian shard. Its edge was wickedly sharp. For a moment, her resolve wavered. The memory of Mateo’s fists, the casualcruelty, the way he’d smiled as she crumpled to the floor - it all came rushing back. This pain would be her own. A pain with a purpose.
She turned her left palm upward. It was a small hand, calloused from work, but tonight it would be an instrument of power. She closed her eyes and drew the sharp edge across the fleshy mound below her thumb. The pain was immediate, a clean, biting fire that made her gasp. A line of crimson welled up, impossibly dark in the moonlight. She held her bleeding hand over the talisman.
One drop fell, then another. They landed on the blackened wood with a faint sizzle, like water on a hot stone. The moment her blood touched it, the talisman changed. A deep, unnatural warmth radiated from it, chasing the chill from the clearing. A faint, internal light began to pulse within the wood, a slow, rhythmic beat like a monstrous heart waking from a long slumber. Ligaya stared, mesmerized and terrified, as her blood was consumed by the artifact, sinking into the grain and making the dark wood gleam as if it were wet. The bargain had been offered. Now, she could only wait to see what would come to claim it.
The heat from the talisman pulsed against her skin, a living thing. The silver moonlight seemed to curdle, drawing back from the clearing as if afraid. One by one, the jungle’s night voices fell silent - first the cicadas ceased their electric pulsing, then the frogs swallowed their throaty songs, followed by the hushed retreat of creatures rustling through undergrowth. Even the eternal rhythm of waves against theshore seemed to hold its breath, leaving behind a void so complete it pressed against her eardrums like a physical weight.
It was not mere quiet; it was a smothering absence of sound, a vacuum that pressed in on her, making the blood pound in her ears. A strange pressure built in the air, a physical weight that made her bones ache and forced the air from her lungs in a strained gasp. She felt a metallic taste, like old blood, coat her tongue.
She had placed four small candles of beeswax at the cardinal points of her ritual circle. Now, their flames sputtered, dancing wildly for a moment as if in a gale, though not a single leaf stirred on the trees around her. Then, one by one, they were snuffed out, plunging the clearing into a disorienting blackness broken only by the sullen, internal glow of the talisman at her feet. The ground began to tremble, a low, resonant vibration that hummed up through the soles of her feet and into her very marrow. Ligaya squeezed her eyes shut, a prayer dying on her lips as she knelt in the humming dark, her world reduced to the scent of ozone and her own terror.
Just as she thought her heart would burst from the strain, the candles reignited. Not with the warm, yellow light of beeswax, but with tall, slender flames of an impossible blue-black hue. They cast no heat. Their light did not illuminate so much as it defined the shadows, making them deeper, sharper. And in the center of the circle, where nothing had stood a moment before, was a man.
He was a monument of flesh and shadow, standing well over six feet tall, with shoulders as broad as the doorway of her home. His form was one of breathtaking, masculine perfection, yet every line of it screamed its inhumanity. His skin was a canvas of shifting colors, swirling from the deep bronze of ancient statues to the slick black of obsidian, with faint patterns like forgotten script moving just beneath the surface. He was naked, his powerful musculature sculpted withan artist’s precision. But it was his face that held her captive. Features of impossible symmetry, a jawline that could cut glass, and lips that seemed carved for both cruelty and kisses. His eyes, when they opened to look at her, were chips of volcanic glass, black and depthless, until they caught the dark candlelight and a flicker of amber fire burned within them.
He took a slow, deliberate step toward her, and he did not walk so much as flow across the ground, his movement a liquid, predatory grace that was utterly silent.
A voice entered her mind. It did not come through her ears, but bloomed directly in the center of her thoughts, a resonant, multi-layered baritone that vibrated through her skull. “You have called me from my prison.”
Terror was a physical thing, a hand of ice that seized her throat and clamped down on her lungs. Every instinct screamed at her to scramble away, to run back to the village, back to the simple, understandable brutality of her husband. But she couldn’t. The desperation that had driven her here was an anchor, holding her fast. She looked from his terrifyingly beautiful face to her bleeding hand, the source of this conjuring, and found a sliver of resolve.
She pushed herself up from her knees, her legs shaking so badly she feared they would give out. She met his gaze, a feat that took every ounce of her will. Her own voice was a dry, reedy thing in the crushing silence. “I have,” she whispered, then cleared her throat and said it again, louder, firmer. “I have. I seek judgment.” She held her hand out, not in offering, but as a statement. “Against the man who breaks my body and my spirit.”
The entity’s perfect mouth quirked. He began to circle her, his movements fluid and unnervingly silent. The strange blue-black light of the candles caught the shifting planes of his body. He stoppedbehind her, and she felt a wave of cold radiate from him, raising gooseflesh on her arms. He was so close she could feel the displacement of air as he moved, could smell his scent - an intoxicating mix of rare incense, sea salt, and something wild and elemental, like the air after a lightning strike.
He observed the torn fabric of hersaya, the angry red marks on her back. He circled back to face her, his obsidian eyes lingering on the split in her lip, the dark bruise on her cheek. He raised a hand, his long, elegant fingers tipped with nails that were like polished jet. For a horrifying second, she thought he would touch her, but he stopped a hair’s breadth from her face, his fingertip tracing the shape of her injury in the air. A phantom touch that was more intimate, more violating, than any blow she had ever received.
“Judgment is costly,” his voice echoed in her mind. “The scales must be balanced. What do you offer in exchange for the unmaking of a man?”
