by May Peterson
I knew him well enough to sense the bitterness under his dark humor. And to see it hit its mark. Wry detachment gone, she leveled all her diamond hardness at him. “Yes. I suppose I have you and your incubus to thank for that.”
He shrugged. “Maybe. But I’d save your thanks for Mio. He’s the one who brought Tibario back to life.”
She looked, for a moment, like she was going to slap him.
“Right.” Tibario ducked his head. “I may be just the tiniest bit immortal now.”
When she turned to me, it was like she realized my identity for the first time. “You performed resurrection theurgy? Just how long have you been hiding that?”
As though she wouldn’t know if I had been. “I don’t know if I could do it again even if I tried.”
“To think that had been lurking in our bloodline all this time.” Her laughter was bitten, ironic. When it faded, tears returned to her eyes. She might have reached for my hand, had our mutual emotions not been in the way. “You did right by your brother, Mio. And you’ve made your mother very proud.”
I didn’t know how to accept that, to see her like this, any of it. So much mixed poison and joy. I wished I could run to her, and run from her, all at once.
Her attention moving from me was a relief. “I suppose you’re a fox now, or something flamboyant like that?”
“Cat.” Tibario looked over his limbs. “But a ginger cat.”
The disgust that might have come from her son joining the ranks of the moon-souls would be tempered by the promise in it. An immortal member of the family, replete with strange new powers and unrivaled strength.
I’d also handed much over to her, now that she knew resurrection magic was within my grasp. I’d been valuable as a canary—now I might be the Gianbellicci clan’s personal phoenix. She would see what I could become—but only if she helped Rhodry.
“You’ll never have a problem with mice again!” Rhodry clapped. Then, in an instant his demeanor darkened. “Ghosts are a different kind of pest. Understand, signora. A serial killer haunts this house. He killed my wife, my servants—” a gesture at Rosemary and Cecilio “—and more or less killed me.”
She sighed theatrically. “And the great Lord Orso can’t take care of his own ghosts?”
Rhodry bared his teeth in what was very decidedly not a smile. “Ghosts—most of them—are harmless. It’s what makes the ghosts. As you so aptly named it, my incubus. It chose Tibario for a reason. Two, actually! And the first?”
Rhodry slid his arm protectively around my shoulder, touched my collar. With reluctance, I pulled it down, exposing the dark spot over my throat. My ticket to ride.
“You and the incubus have something in common, Mamma. You both wanted me to sing.” I signed carefully, hiding my bitterness. “I’d like to think I gave a good performance.”
Tibario covered his face.
She took a step closer, then another, until she stood over me. Her expression held her whole identity at once: solemn, merciless, caring. “Then why are you still mute?”
Why? Because the reason I’d made the silence was not yet satisfied. Because I couldn’t put back all the songs I’d stolen. Because I wished I could stay the Mio that silence, and Rhodry, had made. But I merely signed, “I don’t know.”
Rhodry’s arm tightened around me. Possessively. “Reason number two is you, signora. You were a threat to the ghost that killed your son. You still are. The magic you and Mio possess could unravel decades of planning. I think it’d be a shame to disappoint him.”
“Ah.” Sparks played in her ruby eye. “So you want a spell to trap your wayward ghost. A circle of rose petals, chant in Old Portian, and your problems are solved, yes?” Her voice dropped to a whisper through a red-tinged smile, as if she were sharing a trade secret with me. “I could have taught you these arts, Mio. With your gifts, you would have been able to take any ghost you pleased, sealed in a porcelain doll, and you could rock it and burp it, and wouldn’t you have a lovely little friend?”
Yes. Which meant capturing the souls she pleased. Pearls as far as the eye could see. My stomach hurt. “I know. I want you to teach me.”
Cecilio made a nauseous sound.
“That does sound like a party.” Rhodry wafted around me, meeting her gaze. “What I’m proposing is far simpler, actually. And you can trust me, signora. It’s something you will enjoy.”
She merely raised an eyebrow in interest. Her cut-crystal hauteur was closing back around her, effacing the human vulnerability that had showed through. She and Rhodry could have been two predators circling each other, deciding how to strike.
She was waiting for a weak spot.
“General Piero Santonino.” His Malloric accent made the name sound barbed, metallic. “For all of fifteen years, he’s been responsible for the death of almost every single living soul who has set foot on my land.”
She chuckled. “Yet you had no qualm with putting my son in your guest room.”
“As you can see, I am rather bad at keeping anyone important alive.” He laid the whole story out to her, the affairs and manufactured suicides. “Piero’s made it clear that Mio is the next soul to be collected.”
A moment of understanding passed between them, their hard faces reflecting each other. He loved me, and she loved me, and this could be enough to unite them. Please, God, let it be enough.
When he spoke again, all lightness and mockery were gone, replaced with viscid rage. “He commands the incubus that is the will of my curse. Until I remove his hold over that, I can’t beat him. That’s where you come in. Just one wink of the occhiorosso. All you have to do is hold the bastard down.” Rhodry’s grin was black. “Hell, keep him for all I care. He’s killed everyone I love, except Mio. If you want Piero-sealed-in-a-doll forever, be my guest.”
She tilted her head, licking her lips as if savoring the thought. “There is a certain elegance to that. However, you’re appealing to the witch in me. You’re forgetting about the mafiosa, who needs to know something more.”
“You mean what’s in it for you? So glad you asked. Cecilio?” Rhodry gestured. Cecilio rolled his eyes and, as if by unspoken agreement, produced a silver tray from the sideboard. All too dramatically, Rhodry took it, slipped a thick envelope from his jacket, placed it delicately on the tray, and held the tray out for Mamma.
“I want you to understand what I am offering you, quite literally on a silver platter. So pure my fingers are burning.” He pantomimed blowing on his hands. “The head—so to speak—of a decorated general who figured in the war that solidified the government you love so much. You collect secrets? I’ve written every dirty thing I know about him. For one, you’ve already heard that he buggered me about eight times in my garden, before killing my wife. He had multiple partners before me, many of them subordinate officers. This was a man who knew cover-ups about cover-ups. And if this isn’t enough? Consider you’re speaking to a viceregal diplomat of Mallory. I don’t give a shit about your whimpering, destabilized national power structure. You can know anything you want. I’d betray any government on earth if it meant sparing Mio the least bit of harm.”
Part of me wished he would stop. The bargaining table was not the place for all the breakable things that were spilling out of him. But deeper down to my core, I wanted him to never stop. If this were a play, he’d be the devil that the audience ended up caring about more than the hero. He was all promises and impossible courage, and he might still die for it.
I could bear no more. I tugged his jacket, slid up to him and encircled him with my arms. I simply breathed him in until, startled, he returned the embrace. This secret went unsaid in the warm night air, but she already knew. If she lacked Tibario’s grace, I’d deal with that when the time came. When the Rhodry I had left was gone.
He went on. “No matter how you look at it, signora—you win.”
Stone faced,
I watched for her reaction. She did so love to win. It just hurt that this was what winning looked like.
Cecilio studied the fingers of his gloves, and Rosemary closed her eyes as if in prayer. Tibario’s breathing was tense, audible. Mamma gave no sign of pleasure at her holding the upper hand. She considered, unmoving, for several seconds. Then the red eye found me again, and so softly I barely heard, she asked, “And this is what you want?”
It was too soon to call what I felt relief. “Yes. I’m not asking you to trust me again. But you have the power to do this. Please, Mamma.”
“You’re right. I do have the power.” Her brow crinkled. “Yet I cannot help but notice. You frame this as my helping you. However, it appears that Lord Bedefyr is the one who needs help.”
Rhodry said nothing. I stepped to her, clasped her hand. “Then help him. He’s saved my life more than once. He’s—” Saved so much more. How could I tell her that? How could I explain that Rhodry had awakened me, when she didn’t understand that I’d been asleep? “He’s earned it.”
She ruffled my hair, expression fond. Her left eye began to exude light. “I’m sorry, but the answer is no.”
In that instant, I became like lead. I stepped back instinctively.
So this doom she would allow.
Rhodry continued saying nothing.
“Mother.” Tibario was gravid; this must be the tone he took with her when I was not around, when he was her general rather than her son. “This would be child’s play for you.”
“Oh, you misunderstand! The effort is nothing to me. I simply wish to provide no help of any kind to Lord Bedefyr.” As though she were cordially declining a dance.
“You don’t think you might have to?” Tibario sounded steady, but he was shaking as he approached her.
Her honeyed politesse fell away; she rejoined like a whip crack, her vehemence enough to make Tibario recoil. “I have no need of a half-possessed dead man and his maudlin stories to protect my family. His ghost is also nothing to me. The curse is not natural to Mio, and there are those who can cleanse it without my needing turn to the vaunted Lord Bedefyr.” Then she twisted the heat of the occhiorosso to Rhodry. “Did you believe I would be defenseless without my soldiers? That as long as you held Mio as your little bauble, I’d be at your mercy?”
“I believe very little these days.” Rhodry sounded rough and distant.
Light the color of pigeon’s blood bloomed outward, staining her and air with the flower of outrage. Yet it wasn’t merely her outrage. This had been where I had misunderstood her, missed what filled her witch’s heart. It was the outrage of the streets, of the carnage-warped youth and their lost campaign for freedom. She was the last unbent warrior of their generation, one that had also learned the poison of hope. Many things had risen in the fallows of the war—and my mother was fiercest among them.
“Mother. Mamma.” There had to be a chance left. “Please. Listen to me.”
“No. You have brought me pride, Mio. You also destroyed our defense against the House Benedetti, abandoned your family, and endangered your life and your brother’s life. How much patience do you expect me to have?”
And you forced me to violate—I clamped down on that, restrained it. There was no time. Her eye was flaring to a blinding heat.
Tibario grabbed my arm, as if he’d appeared from nowhere, and his left eye shone like stained glass.
I gasped, trying to will my voice to life. I needed to be able to speak to release him. The magic in my throat trilled, resonant and deep. With all my might, I invoked it, begged it to open the silence.
Nothing came out.
In seconds, Tibario forced me to the floor, knee in the small of my back. I could all but hear the incubus demanding, speak!
“Now, now. Brothers shouldn’t fight.”
Tibario was off me almost without transition. Before I could react, Rhodry was spinning him in the air, hurtling him bodily like a missile at my mother. It was a trajectory to break bones. But in the instant it took Mamma to refocus her control, Tibario righted himself midair. He rolled to the floor, landing with feline grace on the balls of his feet.
Before Tibario could rise again, Rhodry had already leapt across half the distance—and brought the coffee table with him. Its breadth was wider than him, yet he slung it with his next motion like a spear. There was something ridiculous about how swiftly it was done, that Mamma could be bowled over by the sitting room furniture. She only had time for a single wink; a scarlet ray smote the table midflight, scattering splinters in all directions.
“That was an antique. There are only fifteen of them on the whole continent!”
In a wave of velour, he pulled the floor out from under them. The carpet ripped down the middle, folding Tibario into its tangle. Mamma pitched backward. Rhodry, twice the size of everyone else in the room, nonetheless seemed to need neither time nor space to move. He was diving at her, full predator’s weight, before she could blink.
He never made contact. A second ray sprang forth, striking him in the chest while she rolled to her back. Mamma braced herself on her hands and gestured sharply. Bands of crimson materialized around Rhodry’s arms.
He bucked against them, the strands bulging like chain links. Her left eye steamed as she conjured a skein of force to bind him, cleaving to the floor like hooks. One new link after another, she engulfed him in ethereal chains and pushed him to his knees.
Mamma’s breath fumed visibly while she tucked her hair back into place. “Tibario, collect your brother. Hospitality does not appear to be His Lordship’s forte.”
Wait. Her breath. I could see it.
I looked at the wine bottle. Yes. A gauze of frost was moving up its neck.
I made eye contact with Cecilio, indicated the bottle. He nodded his understanding.
The candles and lamps puffed out one by one. The windows slapped open, wind pounding the walls.
“Ah, is the lady of the house coming to play hostess?” The vapor streaming from Mamma’s mouth was poisonously red. “I had so hoped she’d make an appearance.”
Eirlys appeared in a tear through the air, wreathed in ice so bright it was indistinguishable from fire. This was not like when she’d come to save me from the incubus. This was the thunder of nightmares, black and white stained with blood.
Eirlys’s outcry was so deafening it could have taken my head off. Icicles formed and broke with such speed that the world became an eternity of breaking, shattered forms flooding forward in an avalanche of claws. She appeared on the crest of the pulse, sword raised.
Mamma shouted, and vermillion lights shaped a sphere around her. Eirlys struck it head on, the clash of nether cold and magic detonating into thousands of crystals.
You die! Her thunder pealed with excruciating clarity. You die now!
“Eirlys, stop! You can’t kill her!” Rhodry had to be screaming to be heard over the blast.
I stopped breathing. Not even my mother could survive this. It was her, or Rhodry. This was it.
I’m sorry, Mio. If anyone deserves to be cursed, it is this fucking monster. Eirlys was one long wail of mourning. Her lunge forward seemed to bring the entire sky down.
Mamma hit the floor in retreat, covering her head from a fall of fresh ice. Still she betrayed no sign of panic. Pieces of broken furniture lifted into motion, animated by her single gesture. A circle of debris formed to shield her, intercepting Eirlys’s sword.
Eirlys hacked each obstacle to splinters, pushing Mamma back against the wall. Spells of force were futile against a ghost, and without some other magical weapon, Mamma would fail.
You won’t help my husband. Very well. You won’t help your son. Very well. Then no one will help you.
Shoots of ice knifed upward like stalagmites, forming a cage on either side of Mamma. Eirlys brushed aside her last defense, grabbing her wrist and slamming her
hard into the wall.
She had to have something. A trick. An escape spell. She had to. She merely stood with arms splayed by her head, nostrils pluming frozen breath. Pinned by Eirlys’s fist and staring straight ahead. Eirlys reeled back her sword.
“Think, Eirlys.” Rhodry’s voice came clearer now, deep with a growl. “This isn’t about mercy. It’s about what happens when she dies. Think what the incubus will do here, now, with its new soul.”
I seemed to have lost my ability to think. Only one thing was certain—I couldn’t reverse a mage’s death even if I could unlock my voice. As far as I knew, only a noble spirit could fulfill that for me, and they never chose mages to become moon-souls.
Eirlys paused. Her sword arm trembled, as though all the weight of her afterlife were bearing on it. The ambiguity on Mamma’s face, the way neither she nor Eirlys moved—they could have been lovers gazing into each other’s eyes.
The wind died. The sudden quiet was as unnerving as skin vacated of its bones.
“You must think of yourself as someone with a great deal of power, signora.” Rhodry, bound to the floor as he was, sounded pitying. “Certainly that’s true as far as Vermagna’s concerned. But I don’t think you know what power really looks like. Power that matters never belongs to you. It’s what makes the earth turn against you. It’s what waits at the end when you finally run out of blood to bleed. It’s why no matter how strong your magic is, the Deep will claim you eventually. Which is why you need to stop.”
Eirlys dropped her hand to one side. The tension left her shoulders.
“No.” Mamma sighed. “This is power.”
Eirlys turned, stiffly, to face us. Her expression was empty.
And her left eye blazed red.
The sight hit me like a fist. Mamma had only been waiting for the right moment.
Whatever secret allowed her to chain Eirlys’s heart, she had known it already as she walked through the door.