Excerpt from Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by Victoria E. Schwab, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I

Santo Domingo de la Calzada, Spain

1521

The widow arrives on a Wednesday.

María remembers, because Wednesdays are for bathing, and her hair takes an age to dry after it's been washed and combed. She remembers, because it is warm for the end of April, and she is sitting in a patch of sun at the edge of the yard, sucking on a cherry pit (one of the first of the season) and holding a lock up to the light to see if the hair is turning darker, or if it is simply still damp.

María's mother says she is becoming too vain, but then, her mother is the one who makes her go to bed each week with clay in her hair, hoping it will mute the glaring strands. As far as María can tell, it isn't working. If anything, the hair looks even brighter.

She would not mind so much, María's mother, if the hair were honey-colored, or earthy, even auburn, but such an angry shade of red, she says, is a bad omen. Not a warm color, but the hot orange of an open flame. One she cannot seem to douse.

Something tickles María's shin. A thread has come loose on the hem of her dress, and she will have to ask her mother to fix it. Her mother is a seamstress, small fingers making perfect lines. The trick to sewing, she is always telling her, is patient hands and patient hearts, but María came into this world with neither. She is always pricking herself with the needle, losing her temper and flinging the work aside, half-done. Born restless, her father used to say. Which was fine for a son, but bad for a daughter.

María rolls the cherry pit along the inside of her teeth as she pulls at the thread, unraveling her mother's patient heart a little more, when the church bells begin to ring.

And just like that, the day is suddenly more interesting.

She springs up and takes off barefoot down the road, skirts tangling around her legs until she hoists them up out of the way. Heads for her favorite watching spot, the top of Ines's stable, only to find that Felipe is already there.

"Go back home," he calls as she hoists herself up into a cart and then onto the slanted tiles of the roof. "It's not safe."

Only three years between them, his thirteen to her ten, but he's taken to acting like it's an uncrossable distance, as if he's full grown and she is still a child, even though he still cries when he gets sad or hurt, and she has not cried since before their father died.

"I mean it, María," he scolds, but she ignores him, squinting into the late-afternoon light as the caravan rolls into town.

María cannot read or write, but she can count. And so she counts the horses as they come—six, seven, eight, nine—has started numbering the riders too, when a voice barks up at them.

"Madre de Dios. Get down, before you break your necks."

Felipe turns, almost slipping on the slick tiles as he does, but María doesn't bother. It is just Rafa, and she doesn't have to look down to picture him perfectly, hands on his hips and head thrown back, frowning the way their father did. The way her oldest brother has for the last year, since taking his place. As if that's all their father was: a set of shoulders, a stoic jaw, a hardened voice. A space he can so easily fill.

"Now!" he barks.

Felipe's bravado dissolves under Rafa's glare, and he climbs down, shuffling carefully across the tiles. María holds her ground, just to prove she can, but there is nothing to see now, the caravan has rounded the bend on its way into town, so she finally complies, and jumps, landing in a puddle that splashes her skirts. Felipe is just as dirty, but Rafa directs the full force of his glare at her, and her alone.

Before María can dance out of reach, he grabs her by the shoulder.

"You could have fallen."

"Nonsense," she says. "I would fly."

"I do not see your wings."

Excerpted from Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by Victoria E. Schwab. Copyright © 2025 by Victoria E. Schwab. Excerpted by permission of Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.