by S G Dunster
Thessaly remembered now. He’d been a few years older, and not much interested in her 13-year-old self. Hunting and hawking, she remembered. She would have at least a few things to talk about with him, then. Feeling slightly better, she rose and allowed him to lead her out.
He was a masterful and sinuous dancer, leading her along so she felt a part of the beautiful music, taking her in close, then whirling her out so her skirts spun becomingly. By the end of the first song she was laughing, and his cheeks brightened with answering smiles.
“What brings you back to Milan?” he managed to ask during the next song, as the music slowed to something more stately. The dancers still did not carry the stiffness of Joao’s court; instead the steps were delicate, graceful. The gown of the woman in front of Thessaly was seeded with pearls. They mesmerized, swaying on the rich blue velvet and her hair, braided, reached past her hips. Thessaly wondered if the hair was all hers.
At a nudge from her partner, Thessaly started, and smiled again. “We come for trade. Papa’s been shut out of Portugal. He irked king Joao.”
Her partner seemed startled, a little taken aback. Then he laughed. “You speak like a man,” he said. “I forgot that about you. Small, solemn, and words unexpected trickling from you at any given time. Dare I ask what you’ve been up to these years away?”
“You may dare,” Thessaly said, and realized it came out more saucily than she intended when his eyes glinted mischief. “That is, I’ve had learning. And refinements, of course,” she said, drawing back carefully. “And bits of other things.”
“Like?”
“Falconry,” she said, remembering their shared interest. “And I’ve been learning longbow, Latin, and Greek from my English tutor. The usual.”
He lost the step and tipped his head back, roaring with laughter. It interrupted the flow of the dance, but he managed to get the pace again, skipping steps to make up. “Falconry. Greek. Of course. No embroidery for Thessaly-o-the-saggio.”
“Of the sage?” Thessaly asked, and then smiled. “Oh. Yes. I studied with my Aunt Umbra when I was here. You know that.”
They know, here, Thessaly thought, feeling a sudden wonder descend. Umbra’s known to practice the craft. She’s out in the open. Free.
The idea had sudden, dazzling appeal.
“A most ladylike wytch, Umbra. And ever more powerful at court.” He quirked a brow. “You’ll make yourself a good place, studying with her.”
Thessaly chose not to respond to this. She was beginning to feel uncomfortable. His outburst had brought eyes, and now they followed her. A new woman, foreign, obviously, and she was getting too much attention. When the song ended, she thanked him—prettily, she hoped—then excused herself back to the table.
Guzal clasped her hand. “Fine-looking,” she said.
“Aye,” Thessaly said. She glanced at her father. His face was stone—he watched carefully, his attention fixed on their surroundings. And then rose suddenly. “Francesco beckons me,” he said. “Keep a watch over her.” He nodded to Jacome. Bellccior, Thessaly noticed, was gone. Not even in the room.
“I’d like a walk,” Thessaly said, keeping her voice studiedly light and casual. She rose from the table. Jacome groaned but left his almond pastries behind and followed her and Guzal out into the courtyard.
Sage, Thessaly thought, taking a deep breath. Yes. And lavender, hyssop. Aloes. Anise and . . . ah. Acacia. Low violet. Toadflax. She owed her recognition of them to Umbra.
The moon cast the blossoms in a queer gleam. It felt magical, sparkling. Deep.
Thessaly had forgotten how thick the air was in Milan. Heady, and scented with wine. She quickened her pace almost to a run. Jacome and Guzal kept up easily. “Why do we run, Thessaly?” Guzal gasped. “Oh,” she answered her own question as they came to a stop at a weathered gate, climbed all over with roses.
Thessaly fingered the latch.
Memories flooded. Sunny days spent in this place that smelled of everything sharp and clean, heady and healing. The symbol carved in the lintel—a nine-pointed star. Bound magicks.
She walked through. The door to the small apartment opened at the same time.
And there she stood.
She wore a gown of night-dark velvet, sparkling jet jewels, with shadows of black silk and lace. Her hair was piled on top of her head in an intricate plait, studded with stones that gleamed several colors when the candlelight hit them. Moonstones, Thessaly thought.
Sharp nose, ridged cheekbones. Paper-pale face, ink-dark brows. A wide, thin mouth that curved into a perfect bow. Dragon’s eyes.
Umbra. She stood aside as Thessaly entered her little apartment.
Thessaly could barely breathe for a moment. The power that emanated from her—it was so palpable, she felt like she was underwater. Her movements slowed, her body thick and clumsy as the piercing gaze raked her over.
A glamor, Thessaly thought. Flesh magick. Scents used to ensnare.
“Stop,” Thessaly gasped, and broke free, breathing in several quick breaths and letting them out, flowing them through the room and shoving the curls of intoxicating air into the corners.
A spark of gold, a gleam of silver. A flash, so fast Thessaly almost felt it was a trick of her tired eyes. But she knew it was magicks—the gold of loose magicks countering her aunt’s silvery bound ones. Hot, liquid silver, and scent, and power.
Memories were flooding back.
Umbra’s mouth curved in a smile. “Brava. You’ve continued your studies.”
“Why aren’t you at the feast?” Thessaly asked.
“I was making my way there,” Umbra replied. “But come in, child.” She eyed the other two with a look that was less-than-welcoming.
“Wait for me, Guzal,” Thessaly murmured, seeing the girl standing in the doorway, wide-eyed. “Outside.”
Guzal hesitated, then obeyed, shutting the door behind her.
Thessaly felt the lump of the pouch under her skirts for reassurance as she entered her aunt’s apartment.
It was elegant, just as she remembered, furnished with the costly and the ancient. Pictures hung on the walls—one, she was certain, was the work of Da Vinci himself. He’d been a great friend of her aunt’s, though he’d treated Thessaly coldly.
Umbra led her to a small table in a little alcove off the main room, set about with four chairs that were overlaid in silver leaf. Thessaly sat, feeling suddenly as if she were 13 again. Umbra sat across from her: dark, grand, and penetrating.
“You’ve grown,” she said abruptly.
“Girls do that.”
“In more than inches,” Umbra said. She loved the understated, her aunt. They both knew exactly what she was talking about.
“Aye,” Thessaly said. “I’ve learned and grown in the arts.”
“And,” Umbra hesitated, piercing her with a gaze, “you’ve chosen?”
Thessaly was tempted, for a moment, to lie and say yes, she’d chosen loose magicks. She’d chosen the byssus. But her aunt would know the lie, and it would do little to help her. Still she felt wary. Nervous. Feelings simmered inside her. A crackling of energy, a floe of . . .
Passion. Flesh. Passion and flesh, the arts her aunt worked so well in. The arts that had gained her quiet notoriety, and the trust of more than one Roman Pope.
Thessaly thought, if she were wise, she would choose this path. It would be protection because power was protection. And apparently, here, wytchery was acknowledged. Influential. Even respected.
She could be a powerful woman if she chose flesh and fire and allowed Umbra to take her in.
And didn’t she ache at the thought of losing that connection, that tap into the feelings and passions around her? Didn’t she love to see the sea from Nur’s eyes and feel the thrill of flying in her?
And hadn’t she saved her father by entering his flesh and stirring his passion?
Bound magicks had power.
“Tea?” Umbra said casually, taking a pot from the table and pouring
out into two cups—china, delicate as petals. Her girl-servant, head tied with a white linen cloth, hurried in and took it, replacing it with a fresh one, then disappeared back into the small kitchen Thessaly knew lay beyond the alcove—shelves stocked with things to cook and also things to brew. She had spent hours there, stirring pots with her aunt looking on.
Thessaly accepted a cup, watching her aunt through slightly squinted eyes, and lifted it to her lips.
Then immediately, and very carefully, put it down. “That is not honest,” she said, pushing her chair back, standing. “You—you can’t compel me in that way and expect that—“
“Hush, child,” Umbra said, pulling the cup back to her. “If you hadn’t been able to sense the floes in that cup at this stage, you’d not be much use as a worker of magicks. A test, yes. A trick, no.” She turned and took something from a cabinet behind her, locking it with a key when she closed it.
She opened her palm and dropped it into the center of the table.
Silver, Thessaly saw. A mesh of filigreed silver wire twisted around to look like stars and petals, all nine-pointed, woven into an intricate locket the size of a hen’s egg.
It was stuffed full of the herb cereus, a night-blooming flower, the most potent of the herbs.
And the source of pure bound magicks as byssus was the source of pure loose magicks. Thessaly hadn’t known that before, but watching the silver halo chase over the bits of detritus poking through the sieve of the locket, glittering in the candlelight, she knew.
And now she remembered how, as a child, when she reached up for the white, ghostly blossoms when they’d bloomed in her fortress of cactuses one warm June night, Umbra had grabbed her from behind and forced her to the ground.
“Do not touch,” she’d hissed, the moonlight painting her face in stark contrast, turning her eyes into pools of pitch. “Do not touch unless you are choosing. And you are too young.”
And now, it was in the center of the table.
Offered to her.
Thessaly’s heart beat in her temples, throbbing, warm and strong.
Flesh and passions. Earth and fire.
She looked up at her aunt.
“If you choose, that ends it,” Umbra reminded her, sitting gracefully. “You will no longer have access to loose magicks. You will let them blow away like the petals of the bitterwort, and your road will lie with the bound. I tell you this because I must, but I have no need to tell you which route is the superior one.”
Thessaly knew what Umbra thought.
Influence. Material goods. Umbra was tied to these desires. She didn’t know the power of loose magicks—the joy of seeing for leagues around and weeks or months ahead. Of watching the stars turn and understanding hints of what they said about the future. Of music, bringing images, and the sea, swelling underneath a small piece of wood and rattling sails.
With loose magicks she could move the movable. Sea was blood and breath. It rolled in tiny particles that made up masses of power—she felt the glimmer of each one as she sank her own floes into it. And air? The gusting of hot and cold, spinning together and apart. The beauty was dazzling. The power there was also dazzling. Futures. Omens. Prayers answered.
What did she want?
Suddenly, she was dizzy with options. Dizzy with not knowing.
Protection, Margarida had said. And she was right—choosing Umbra’s life in the Sforza court, becoming her initiate and student, would provide her a life of all needs met. All unpleasant or unwanted things banished.
But she couldn’t let go of the freedom, the exhilaration she felt, gusting on wind, swelling in water. Sending breaths of calm, being stretched over distances. Seeing with more than her eyes alone, but knowing what may lay ahead, and understanding what went before... connecting to something great and loose and free.
Both, she thought suddenly.
I want both.
What if . . . .
The thought guided her hand. She didn’t even form the idea in her head before she’d reached under the voluminous folds of her skirt, throwing them up and out of the way. She reached for the leather pouch.
At the same time, she extended a fingertip toward one of the tiny gaps in the silver netting where a shriveled strand of cereus herb poked through.
“What are you doing?” Umbra eyed her disarrayed skirts askance.
Thessaly hesitated for just a moment.
Then she touched them both.
At once, any icy coldness and a bursting warmth coursed through her body—one at each arm, where she’d touched byssus and cereus. They met in a crash in her center.
She stood, gasping. The heat, the cool. It shocked inside, it paralyzed. It mingled together and coursed in rapids through her lungs as she tried to breathe. It spread to stomach, bowels, and roared through both legs. Pockets and streams. Ice and fire. Moving in a furious whirl past each other, as cold and warm tended to agitate, as deep and shallow tended to foam with rapids . . . as flesh and blood . . . breath and fire . . .
The room spun.
A sudden grab at her arm—iron, and then a hiss. Thessaly fell to the floor.
“Child,” Umbra’s voice boomed in her head like it was a cathedral cupola, radiating sound so loud it hurt. “Child! What have you done?”
The room faded, then brightened, then diffused—swirls of color and light. Thessaly rocked on a sea of brilliance under a sky of pressing darkness. They folded around her, tightening, tightening at her vortex. They pressed from all sides. Pulled from all sides. Inside out, right-side out… inside… outside…
The room steadied and sharpened. The ceiling above her, painted with a wreath of fleshy, spiked blossoms spiraled around a silver-gilt moon. Thessaly breathed in, then out.
It was like drinking strong spirits. The feeling of burn, of exhilaration and pain, only all over her.
“Thessaly,” her aunt said, her voice husky.
Thessaly slowly sat up.
The colors in the room were brighter. The shadows, darker.
She could sense her aunt—feel the swirls of her blood, the currents of her thought. The firing of her nerves, tiny sparks all over.
She could sense, too, a gathering of forces off to the west. Another storm brewing. But not in this harbor. Out further. In the middle, the sea’s middle. Far, far away.
She thought of Nur, and immediately it was the smell of giblets that collected in her nose; the taste of capon’s livers, and the sense of feathers brushed around her eye sockets.
“I did it,” Thessaly said, grabbing a chair’s back to lift her up with one hand, then the other. “I did it! Aunt . . . .” She was full of triumph, full of wonder. And the pleasure. The deep and surface pleasure, the throb of it through her whole body. The tickle of it on her skin, chasing like the charge in a thundercloud.
She stepped back.
Umbra was staring, pale. Her mouth was drawn down, brow drawn together. She looked old, Thessaly thought.
And worried. Worried? Umbra did not worry. She had power. She never worried.
Umbra moved toward her suddenly, fiercely, as if to strike her. Thessaly flinched and stepped back, but Umbra simply turned the chair—the one she’d pulled herself up on—and stared.
There, on the chair’s back, were two handprints—Thessaly’s. One was dusted in silver, like she’d taken a handful of jeweler’s dust and slapped it on, and the other shone in clear, bright gold, as if an artist had gilded it there.
Thessaly stepped back. The prints gleamed, searing spots in her vision. Her skin buzzed with cold, and the heat inside her burned against it.
It hurt.
She whimpered and fell back against the wall.
It hurt. It hurt.
“Thessaly,” Umbra said hoarsely, “what have you done?”
Chapter 6
S
hem froze, shivering, chattering. Then her skin would finally numb and a rosy afterwarmth took, the flames started in her core, burning, burning out and through her, meltin
g her apart, firing her veins so she screamed. And then the buzz and burn would dull, and she’d begin to feel the pleasure of it; containing all that fire, when the ice started at her center again, freezing, spreading with a lancing pain.
She froze. And burned. Froze, and burned. It came in waves, sometimes at the same time in different corners of her: freezing and burning in opposition to one another.
Thessaly was falling to pieces. She leaned against the wall, moaning with the fire, yelping with the cold. Her awareness of reality faded, taken over by the waves of pain inside.
A blanket wrapped around her. Shivering, she took it gratefully, and then burning, flung it off. Shivering, grabbed it back.
Umbra muttered a string of words in Italian, then left the cottage, her odd, clean scent and the soft ruffle of velvet robes leaving with her, making the room feel oddly empty. Bereft. Weeping, Thessaly slid down the wall and collapsed on the floor.
Another, softer series of footsteps, and a pair of arms clutched her tight, tight, rocking her. Guzal’s voice breathed into her hair. “Oh, Lady. What did the wytch do to ye, eh? What’s wrong, Lady?”
It helped, the rocking. The awareness of something outside.
“Holy God,” Jacome shouted when he stepped in. “Is she gone cranke? D’that harpy do something to her?”
“No,” Thessaly said, only it came out a shout, as a wave of cold took her. “No. It’s my own doing. My own fault. I’ve taken . . . poison.”
“It’s the magicks,” Guzal’s voice was hard to catch. Thessaly couldn’t make out her next words. The room faded again, blurred. She saw colors—gold and silver, against her eyelids. Beams of it. Floods of it. She was shaking now. Her teeth rattled, the sound loud in her own ears.
“Thessaly,” A voice growled. Then a pause and a hissing curse. Antonio knelt beside her, took her roughly from Guzal. “It’s happened, then,” he said quietly.
“No,” Umbra snapped. “No. It’s not my doing, this. It’s hers. She partook of both. Loose and bound have claimed her.”
“Yes,” Antonio’s voice, oddly, was calm. He rocked her in a rhythm she remembered vaguely from her young childhood. “Yes, I know. Her mother—“