The Calyx Charm

by May Peterson

  It wasn’t as if I could fault him, either of them, or even wanted to. Heaven knew my father happily employed me for far worse. I was his favorite toy, and it was only a matter of time before he wanted me back.

  Tibario’s gaze hadn’t flinched, but softened strangely as if with sympathy. “Whatever happens, I thought...it might be better that I told you, rather than having to find out by prophecy.”

  I drew a breath, held it, shaking. Because it might work. They might be able to take him down. If Mio could unlock father to her, Serafina could exercise his power as prince elector, damn near sovereign of the land as much as he had the government in his pocket. Or she could just kill him. Force him to run headlong off the balcony, with the murder weapon never to be found. Even if he rose again as a ghost, the sheer potency of her sorcery would bind his spirit from reprisal.

  The taste of my want for it—for absolute, permanent freedom from him—nearly eclipsed all my other senses. But my resentment was personal, private, lying under my skin like venom. A poisonous part of me wanted to be the one who killed him.

  “Is that why?” I asked, throat dry. “She knows I’d have found out eventually, so there’s no harm in telling me?”

  Tibario’s mouth opened slightly, dearly, storm clouds making fists in his eyes. “I don’t think there’s any danger in you knowing. I trust you, Mercurio. I suppose I also wanted you to know...in case I don’t come back—”

  That sat there, thick and wet and stinking, between us. Because that might happen too—an assassination attempt gone wrong would mean more than imprisonment, Mio and Serafina burned for sorcery, Tibario and Gino executed for treason.

  I hadn’t wanted him to see any of my tears, any of the ways I was so profoundly falling apart. But a few stinging beads made themselves known just then, tearing tracks of fire down my cheeks.

  He rushed to his feet, hands abruptly on my shoulders, warmth of his breath against my skin. “I have to make sure Mio gets out of this alive. And that you won’t be held back, whatever you need to do. I believe that Liliana is out there. Your mother is tough. And she would not abandon you.”

  Tremors quaked me, under his touch, under his regard. He was also good at this. A wild-animal faith, intuitive knowledge dew would conspire to sustain him, that the sun would not be defeated by darkness and would surely rise each morning. Was it because he knew he couldn’t see the future that he believed?

  What if she had abandoned me? What if she knew what father had done, and just couldn’t bear it?

  I swallowed the rough edges of my pain, let it scrape gravity into my voice. “No wonder Father hates your family. You’re all so obscenely talented.”

  Humor tinged his expression with color. “Say a prayer for me. And on the night of the concert...please, don’t come anywhere near the Imparviglio.”

  I nodded, thoughts congealing in my head. “But you have to do one thing for me. You have to come back here one more time before it happens. All right? Give it probably five days, if you can. I’m going to have something for you.”

  He quirked a brow, but didn’t press it. “It’s a deal, then.”

  This exchange, like a magic secret passed between us, signaled the end of the night. He was putting his jacket back on, leaving his bag of goods where they lay. At the door, he turned and said, “Mercurio. Please believe I’ll come back.”

  It was a long time that I stood, in the flat he’d anointed with his sweet and burning presence.

  Then I went to the drawer slid under my bed, and found the locket Mother’d left for me. One of the few I didn’t have the heart to sell. White gold with a fine chain, and a clear, empty locket.

  I cut off a lock of my hair. It stung, just for a moment.

  * * *

  Though the time I’d set was five days, I waited each evening for him to appear again.

  While I waited, I prayed. Not to a god, or a dragon, or any spirit that may possibly deign to hear me. I prayed to something far deeper, older, that had once thrummed with force in my infant belly.

  The calyx charm.

  The future alone knew how many possible deaths awaited Tibario on his mission. I could once have spared him from all of them. Before the calyx charm had faded.

  Some of my old power had to be left, hiding in the recesses of my being. I lay still and tried to find it, reaching through my sensations to that place of calm that had once opened up in me. I had thwarted doom upon whole populations, held up my hand and blessed cities and armies with protection from fate. Maybe some spark of that magic would come back to me if I only knew how to identify it, enough to shield one single person.

  The lock of hair might be the key. If he held it close to him, let it touch him when he was in danger, I would feel it.

  In the confusing labyrinth of the future, the magic of my hair wound a thread back to me. I could find a piece of hay in a haystack, if it invoked me through the link of the Honored Child’s cut hair. This had always been the surest way to awaken my calyx charm.

  I tucked the lock into the locket, so that once I gave it to him, he’d always have a piece of me nearby to summon me. Perhaps, if I pushed my limits, I could reawaken the power that would answer his call.

  But he did not come back. I believed. Against the grain of my despair, I did what he’d asked and believed, and prayed for the calyx charm to return to me.

  He did not come back. Not in five days. Not in ten.

  Horror bloomed in the pit of my stomach, stifling my insides with its tendrils. The temptation became unbearable to demand of the future what happened to him?

  Before I could give in, there was another rap on my door.

  My entire body became sharp with cold. A force pulsed behind the door, spotting my intuition with red. Every nerve in me shouted this divination, that I knew the name of this visitor. And it was not Tibario.

  The devil had come to visit me.

  I mustered what composure I had and stammered, “C-come in.”

  She admitted herself without pause, limned in red like incarnate sundown. A bone-white coat decked her limbs, thick as if she were girded for battle, and a carnelian glow fumed venomously from her left eye.

  Serafina Gianbellicci.

  “Violetta.” Her tone was soft as shadows brought to life. “I hope that you are well.”

  She knew my true name, and like any respectable witch, she knew when to use it.

  Normally her hair was tightly coiffed, face sleek with austere finish, like a dragon with freshly polished scales. Tonight a delirium seemed to dog her—hair disheveled and undone, complexion flushed as if she’d been running. Her singular blue eye looked vacant, glassy.

  I stood immobile, as if turned to stone. I may as well have been; air locked in my chest. The urge hit to run to my back room, hide, become as small as the dust motes between the floorboards. But even that wouldn’t shield me from her.

  After a breathless chain of moments, she said, “I want you to prophesy for me.”

  Maybe it was the simple ridiculousness of the request, considering what my prophecies about her had been like. Maybe it was my terror for Tibario. Maybe it was the knowledge I was fucked anyway and couldn’t make things worse. But I laughed. Softly at first, then with scorn, vigor, pain in my belly. She watched, unblinking, a silent strobe of menace, until I calmed down.

  Holding my stomach, I said, “Serafina. I can’t take the song and dance. I’m not your son. If you want me to do something for you, you already have access to my mind. It’s not like I can stop you. What’s the point in pretending I can say no?”

  “I won’t—” She paused, took a breath, raked a shaking hand over her face. “I won’t do that again. I promise you. Never again. But I need this. Please.”

  I must have been a goldmine for her. Riddled with shameful secrets like bullet wounds, a thousand vulnerable places her crimson infection could
enter through. I still wondered what the key secret had been. Was it my brittle anxiety about being a mollygirl? Was it my obvious, helpless love for her eldest son?

  But Serafina asking anything, instead of commanding, was miraculous as a river of gold. Her face was nigh unreadable in the haze of her eye’s glow, but she seemed frighteningly serious.

  “No.” I gulped. “There. Prove you won’t force me. The answer is no.”

  That appeared to roll around inside her for a minute, her fists clenching and unclenching. Then, as if chewing glass, “Very well. But it isn’t for me. It’s for Tibario.”

  My breath caught, intuition flaring into a hundred jagged shapes. “I see.”

  “That’s exactly it.” Her sigh was heavy. “You see. Only you see. I should have listened to you when I had the chance. But for now, I must know—what happened to Tibario?”

  So I was to be oracle again, whether I liked it or not. Because it was not within me to refuse this now. Of course she didn’t need to use the occhiorosso. All she had to do was tell me the truth, and the result was the same. “Is he missing?”

  “No. I know exactly where he is. Was. But I—”

  Didn’t know if he was still alive.

  I gestured at the table. “Sit down.”

  Her speed to obey was surreal. I had to admit, there was a dreamlike weightlessness in being able to say “do this” to one of the devils who terrorized me, and for her to listen.

  I rummaged in my drawer and produced a deck of cards. Sliding the cards out on the table, I sat opposite her and began shuffling.

  Her occhiorosso had lost none of its light, but from here, her face was easier to make out. A wrinkle creased her brow. “I didn’t think you needed this trickery to prophesy. The girl I remember was perfectly capable of spewing doom without assistance, like a proper witch.”

  My gaze flattened. “How badly do you want me to do this?”

  She raised her palms as if in apology.

  “All right. This will make it harder for me to divine everything by restricting what I feel in the future. It’s a good trick and I’m going to use it. It minimizes...influence on the future. Much safer.”

  “Hellfire.” She frowned. “As you were.”

  So I began drawing cards into a spread. My hands trembled, each card face seeming to shout meaning at me. The symbolism was fairly universal—it was hardly the parlor trick she thought it was—but as I drew, I allowed the susurrus of the future’s voice to sweep in. It was like stepping into a pool, and with a shock of cold, my intuition cracked into focus.

  I let the sensations rise into my mind, where they became as immersive as a dream.

  Tibario falling through a freezing atmosphere, ice crystals gathering around him. Scarlet pounding from his head, the mark of the occhiorosso. A wrenching sensation of agony, malice becoming solid as steel. It was like being bitten from the inside, scouring through my organs and exposing me to the wintry air. A rush of images scrolled across my mind, without context to give them meaning. Except for the scalding beat of intentions, fear, dearness, urgency. Tibario with a gun, Mio standing fragile and cold under his arms. A tall, dark man and a lady who burned like a spirit of snow.

  The Lovers card. Choice. The Prophetess card. Insight. The Moon card. Transformation. The Ace of Blades, the Dragon card, and the Castle card. Intention, judgment, and disaster.

  Then, in the last spot of the spread: the Death card, its figure pale and bearing a naked sword.

  Serafina fixated on the final card. “Death. It can mean other things, can’t it? It’s symbolic.”

  But I couldn’t bear the sight of the spread anymore, or the future’s intensity. I turned from it, massaging my temples. Knife-stabs of tears sprang to my eyes.

  “It’s not symbolic this time. Tibario...died.”

  The feeling sprawling through all those images, through my guts, was absolutely sure of it.

  Her hand went to her mouth. “Then it...no. No.”

  Silence curled around us like vines. A terrible weight was gathering in my chest. Serafina didn’t move.

  Tibario was dead? Just like that? He...hadn’t even come back to me.

  Without thinking, I glared at her through the mounting blur. “What did you do? You controlled his mind! What did you make him do? By every fate, is there not one thing in this world you respect?”

  The hand had fallen from her lips, but she remained unmoving. My anger broke on her like water, and I dissolved down into my chair. Tears and restraint wrestled violently under my muscles and she did nothing.

  It wasn’t until she moved at last—slightly, wiping her face—that I realized she was crying.

  “I know who is responsible for this.” Her voice was like rock. “And I will kill him. A thousand times, I will kill him. I will cleanse every trace of him from the earth.”

  It didn’t matter. Nothing would bring him back. What did any of it matter? I held myself, lost the fight against pain, and sobbed into my hands.

  After a few minutes, she stirred, stood up. The sound of her opening the door was as if from a great distance. “I will avenge him, Violetta. You can be sure of that. Thank y—”

  “Don’t.” I had to choke the protest out. “Don’t thank me. Don’t make promises. Just get out. And if you come to me again, it had better be to kill me.”

  She was still a moment more. Then, without a word, closed the door and was gone.

  I grabbed the locket where it hung around my neck. The gold seared like a coal.

  Chapter Two

  Tibario

  My death was hilarious.

  I was wrapped up in Mamma’s mind like a blanket. This had once been the way I felt safest, the most connected. Instead, now, all I could feel was like I was choking. In the last fading moments of mortality, the irony was truly funny.

  Let me set the scene: my younger brother, Mio, had run away. This was a slight problem, to say the least, seeing as we rather needed Mio’s powers of mind reading to expose Casilio Benedetti, enemy number one of the Gianbellicci household.

  Of the whole country of Vermagna, one might argue, but details. Details.

  Casilio had to die. Reasons abounded for this judgment. He was a shit ruler of a shit new government that a witch-powered revolution had helped put him in charge of. But one reason I held to my very own, in the back pocket of my heart, as a very personal spite for Casilio.

  He was evil to Mercurio, my dearest friend, enough to push him to run away from home. As far as I was concerned, cruelty to Mercurio was on the same level as eating live kittens or insulting someone’s mother. Failure of a basic test of humanity.

  But Mamma didn’t have any dirt on him, which was her only way to hook her occhiorosso into someone. Assassination of such a public figure would be a ludicrous risk, but not if you could do it through sorcery, magic that controlled minds. All Mamma needed was a way into his heart, a shameful secret that would open him up to her powers, and it would be so easy.

  So the plan was simple. I find Mio, bring him back home safe and sound, soothe him and help him securely get a peep into Casilio’s heart. Then Mamma could do her business, have him walk off a cliff or something tidy like that, and we’d all be free of the fucker. Mercurio could even go home to his mother.

  I hadn’t expected this. To have hunted Mio down to a decidedly haunted-looking house, where he was in the arms of a dashing gentleman of immortal persuasion. Saying scathingly vulnerable things about love and gender and guilt that caused me to rethink dragging his lovable backside back home. Things that told me I may have never understood my brother after all, including his reasons for running away. Including whether he was actually a man or boy at all. Including why he might be unhappy to see me.

  I wasn’t a total fool. I understood some people simply weren’t the gender handed to them in the cradle, like a pair of ill-fitting c
lothes they were forced to wear. The secret heartbeat of the city, the artists and crafters and storytellers and smugglers, flowed from places full of mollyqueens and androgynes and tomkings, and with queer lovers of all kinds. This realm of Vermagna had always been a kind of dream world to me, a fantasy kingdom full of unreachable possibilities.

  But I must have been partially a fool at least, because I had not expected to feel this while spying on Mio, hearing him speak sweet vows of devotion to his mysterious lover, seeing his eyes widen in terror as I appeared to sweep him back home.

  I hadn’t expected to feel this sting of pure, acidic jealousy.

  Not the kind of jealousy that would lead to me wanting Mio to suffer. Never that. But jealousy enough that I didn’t feel so very bad about pointing a gun at his lover’s chest. That it was a shameful twinge of satisfaction, rather than guilt, at pulling Mio to my side and saying he had to come home with me.

  Had I always been this person? Would I always have so stank of bitterness, seeing Mio claim a freedom that I couldn’t?

  The image of Mercurio shot through my head like a bullet. His shy smile, the way his cheeks flushed so easily, the lightness in his fingers, the girlish bubble of his laughter. The image hurt like a bullet. It tore and burned and destroyed like a bullet. It left a wound behind like a bullet.

  It wasn’t until death was fully upon me that I realized just how much of a fool I was.

  “I’m only here to collect a few trifles. My boys,” Mamma said through my mouth, the brim of her occhiorosso hot in my mind. Her psychic voice brushed against my senses, communicating in a feverish hum.

  You hate that man Mio has run away with, don’t you? I can feel it in you. I hate him too. I want you to know I have no intention to show mercy on him. He’ll be ground into dust like all the others, like Casilio, for daring to lay a finger on our dear Mio.

  The man didn’t look so easy to hate. He was tall, handsome, inflected with an aura of dashing melancholy. I probably would have found him attractive, in the secret compartments of my heart, though no man or woman ever compared to Mercurio.