Enragedi Is Attacked and Ibai Is Abducted

The attack on Engrasi and the abduction of Ibai turn a family home that had seemed a refuge into a scene of violence and loss. In the storm-darkened Elizondo, Ros and Ernesto discover Engrasi wounded and the house wrecked; Ibai is gone, and flooding threatens to delay the help Engrasi needs.

The Storm and the Breach

Rain has fallen over the valley throughout the day, with thunder repeatedly swelling over Elizondo. The town is without electricity, and only lightning and the restless movement of flashlights make its presence visible. Against this darkness, Ros runs through the streets with a lamp, her hair plastered to her head by rain and Ernesto’s footsteps close behind.

At the house, the door is ajar. Ros’s strength gives way as she grips the rough, cold doorframe: she recognizes the violation of a place that had sheltered the family from cold, loneliness, pain, and even the spirits of the night associated with the Baztán. Ernesto takes the lamp and enters. Though the house remains warm, the sharp smell of recently extinguished candles hangs in the darkness; embers in the fireplace reveal a room thrown into disorder. A chair lies overturned, the vase of fresh flowers Engrasi kept on the table is smashed across the floor, and an armchair has been pushed toward the hearth, where a stronger fire could have set it alight.

Discovery and the Abduction

The flashlight catches the old woman’s legs where her robe has ridden up; the rest of her body is hidden behind the armchair. Ernesto moves the furniture aside. Ros has been certain since crossing the threshold that her aunt is dead, and she asks Ernesto to confirm it. His examination overturns that first, dreadful impression: Engrasi is alive, but a massive blow to the head has left her bleeding and in urgent need of medical care.

As Ernesto calls for an ambulance, the telephone rings in Ros’s coat. Her eyes are blurred by tears, but she recognizes that Amaia is calling. Ros struggles to relay what has happened: Engrasi is badly injured, the house has been wrecked, and Ibai has been taken. She describes Engrasi as having fought fiercely, yet the child is missing. Outside, the valley’s flooding has turned rescue into a race against access as well as injury: the ambulances are already occupied by the emergency, and even the firefighters do not know whether they can reach the house. The assault has thus left two immediate crises at once—a gravely wounded woman waiting for help and a child abducted into the storm.

The News Reaches Amaia

The call carries the crisis beyond Engrasi’s house: as Ros tells Amaia Salazar that Ibai has been taken and Engrasi is bleeding while help may be unable to reach them, Amaia’s body seems to collapse under the news. The narration renders her shock as an apparent heart attack: pressure bears down on her chest like an ocean, and she becomes acutely aware of a heartbeat that has not come. Alongside the conviction that she is about to die comes the bleak relief that the pain will last only a second before it stops. Ros’s panic has become, at a distance, Amaia’s physical emergency; the abduction is not merely a missing child in a storm, but a blow that reaches his mother before she can act.

The Larger Threat

The attack also sharpens the account of who is directing the danger. Before the discovery at Engrasi’s house, Amaia Salazar had watched security footage with Sarasola and recognized that Tarttalo had gone with Rosario voluntarily. He could manipulate enraged beasts, but the comparison established a limit to his power: Rosario was the more formidable manipulator, and he was not in control of her.

That judgment gives the abduction a longer horizon than the storm-bound emergency. Rosario had pursued an objective since the birth of her identical daughters, and for more than thirty years no one had turned her from it. The attack therefore closes the scene not with a solved motive, but with a measure of the threat: the child’s disappearance belongs to a conflict shaped by Rosario’s sustained purpose, while the people around her are still struggling to understand its full reach.