by May Peterson
So many things I didn’t think of during escape. My last night with Mercurio was a kind of escape. Now that I could fulfill my promise to return, I was afraid of what I was bringing back.
I opened my eyes, brushed hair from her face. Breath rose and fell gently in her chest, through her lips. Thank heaven, she was alive.
And there was no mistaking this face. The delicate smatter of freckles, the shape that was carved into my memory. I’d never been closer to anyone without the aid of magic.
Her necklace vibrated with a quiet energy, like a heart beating. I could feel it even through my clothes. But the chain around her neck was broken, and the locket seared my hand like silver. I didn’t have room in my head to consider what it meant, so I halfheartedly stuffed it in my pocket.
For a moment, relief drowned out my fear. Sobs clenched my throat. I let myself wrap my arms around her.
How could I have believed this would work? That I could do as Mamma wanted with no risk, no collateral damage?
It didn’t matter now. I had to take her somewhere safe. Somewhere she would be among friends, and nowhere near the Gianbellicci family.
Only one place came to mind. Rosalina’s place. The Fragrant Rose.
* * *
Mamma paced around me distractingly. “I don’t believe it. Mercurio may have had it in for me, but I don’t think for a second that—that any member of Casilio’s family is on his side. It couldn’t have been the calyx charm.”
Hm. There. I hadn’t noticed it before, but over a day ago, Mamma had also avoided using a specifically gendered term for Mercurio, just as she had now.
So she knew a little more about Mercurio than I did, and I would wager that was not by Mercurio’s choice.
And I needed to see her again. Her necklace was burning a hole in my pocket, at least figuratively, and I had to give it back.
We sat in the kitchen together, my wounds healing with rather shocking speed. Martina was feeding me, one plate at a time, as if to fatten me up. My strength was returning, but tension had me stiff as an icicle. “I’ve never seen another magic that can do what the calyx charm can.”
She seemed to be ignoring me, perhaps because she also lacked an answer. “I’ll boil Casilio alive, burn him, kill him, have Mio bring him back to life as a gnat-soul, then squash him with a silver boot. Fuckster.”
Martina stifled a tight giggle, and I pursed my lips. I’d changed back and forth to and from cat-shape to force any pieces of bullet out of me. It hadn’t been pleasant or dignified, but I was bullet free. And sore, and sweaty.
At least I’d hidden the locket. Looking back, it didn’t make sense that I’d kept it. Mamma wouldn’t have let me hear the end of it if she’d seen it. Maybe I was hoping for an excuse to reach out to her again.
Mamma seemed to be calming; Martina exchanged some practical conversation with her and left the cellar. Mamma approached, arms crossed. “Please tell me he didn’t see you with the mask off.”
I blinked. “No. No one did. Or heard my voice.” The lie was effortless, light, the way a bird took to air as if nothing could stop it.
She nodded. “Good. The idea of a public execution was...compelling, when it’d seemed the killing blow would be the easy part. It isn’t as if you’d be the first place to be searched for an assailant who could materialize out of fuck all. If I’ve played my cards correctly, no one except me and mine should even know you were dead, let alone a cat.”
I bit my tongue and acquiesced, looking down. Now that ace was well and truly spent, and any more like it would only reveal the nature of the con.
Mamma sat with me a while, her dressing gown drawn around her, and the crawl of encroaching morning began to tingle across my nerves. She had, amusingly, produced a flask from within her gown and sipped it as she grumbled half-formed plans, as much to herself as to me.
I felt closer to her now than I had in years, the two of us alone in the underbelly of our strange trauma, vengeance, and loneliness. It was almost like Papa had stopped existing, or like he was adrift in whatever soft ether that Mio wandered now. She and I rode together, my now cold body the only other sharing the night with her. If I had not been so coiled in my fear, I’d have casually reached over and clasped her hand.
Inspiration struck. I cleared my throat. “Mamma. Are mollyqueens always women?”
Her head tilted, a squint turning on me as if I’d burst into song. “I could swear I am the one drinking.”
I chuckled. “You are. I mean that if you meet a mollyqueen, or you’re fairly sure they must be, does that mean this person is a woman, or are there mollyqueens who aren’t? Should you just...ask?”
A frown webbed over her brow, and she set the flask by her foot. “It’s common sense once you consider it. Mollyqueens and tomkings are all sorts of people. Mollyqueen women, yes, and tomking men, but that’s not all one can be. You remember my friend Antonio? He was at my wedding, not that you’d have seen that, naturally. Tall as an angel, sang like one too, wore the most splendid emerald gown. People called him he sometimes, she others, but I am fairly sure he never called himself a woman. And one of your father’s associates is a tomking, a hired hand who used to work at the docks. They in truth have no gender at all of any kind, but says he and they address are all the same. So you’d have to ask, yes, but be careful who you ask in front of.”
That drew an unquiet shiver from deep within me. “What do you mean?”
The air she sucked through her teeth sounded meaningful, pointed. “If you don’t know, concern yourself more with safety than with accuracy. It may not be your business to know. So if someone seems to not want attention on themself, hellfire’s sake don’t draw it. Your curiosity can wait. Saying she or he will probably do for the moment to be discreet, and there’s no need for any comment in mixed company. Think about it: how many questions do you like strangers asking you?”
That was surprisingly deep advice. But Mamma had a deceptive intimacy with the streets. The only flaw was that Mercurio was no stranger to me. Yet this lesson may be exactly the one I needed all the same.
It may not be my business to know.
This thought spooled around me depressingly, but with the lightness that came from finally seeing something through a haze.
She may have had good reasons for hiding it from me.
Chapter Six
Violetta
I woke up to a hand on mine. The hand was so warm it had to be real.
God, it felt good. One of my eyes opened.
“Good morning.” Rosalina. Her voice was rough with sleep, but she didn’t sound particularly harried. We must have been somewhere safe.
The sight of her in my bleary vision was bliss. Hair soft and undone, curling at her shoulders. Smile warm and dear, a silken dressing gown about her shoulders. I glanced at myself, the similar dressing gown I’d been wrapped in, my hair loose over a pillow, blankets pulled up to my chest.
My locket was gone.
“Hi, beautiful,” I croaked, squeezing her hand again.
Her chuckle was like a finger up my spine. “Beautiful yourself, you silly girl. Sleep like the dead?”
“You could say that.” Sunbeams strode through the window of Rosalina’s room, cascading liquid afternoon on the rosy carpets. “What happened? Because if I find out I lucid dreamed the past day and a half, I’m going to be existentially pissed.”
She laughed, sat up on the bed next to me. She’d been lying at my side, another blanket around her waist. With a stretch, she stood and widened the curtain. “Unless you remember something other than nearly drowning in the bay, you were in the waking world for most of it. As to what happened...”
I quirked a brow, sat up halfway. A somber expression was settling on her face.
“Someone came here, asked me to take you.” Her tone was almost apologetic, as if she didn’t think I’d like thi
s explanation. “I’m not sure what I saw, because it was so dark. I was woken up in the middle of the night. But... I think it was Tibario.”
All right, future. Ring the damn bell. You’ve made your point.
It had been him behind the mask. His arms holding me. He hadn’t felt like a ghost.
She spoke briefly of how it had happened, how he’d appeared with me in his arms, soaking wet. Then he had simply disappeared into the darkness like a smoke cloud.
“The vanishing rather says ghost to me.” Standing in the afternoon light, the shimmer on her lavender robe, she looked somewhat phantasmal herself. “There is a certain poetry to someone coming back to haunt you, especially if it’s in a good way. But Vi, please. If he was pulling you from water, was it because you...”
Because I’d jumped in the bay? She was asking gently, but the tension under it thrummed. I sat up further, made sure she could see my unguarded expression.
“No, Rosalina. I didn’t jump in. Well, I did, but”—I dashed a hand in the air—“not for that reason. I was fully hoping to come back out again.”
In the cracked shadows of my memory, a part of me almost liked the idea that I might not have come back. That if Tibario was dead, then sinking into those mercifully black waters meant I would find him, in the end.
But that was only a feeling. Feelings harsher than that would rise within me in darker hours, but I had made the choice to live.
Rosalina sighed. “I don’t mean any judgment. The victim is not to blame, not in this house, not wherever I have power. Suicide is murder by a hand that happens to be away at the time. But I want you to live, Vi.”
Her voice trembled with vulnerability, and I leapt out of the bed, woozy for a moment before hobbling through the beams and hugging her. “I love you, Rosalina. Can you forgive me for frightening you?”
She nodded, chuckling, but brow furrowed. “This is what I do, silly girl. I was right there with you. Also. You seem surprisingly collected, considering what I just told you about your beaux-to-be who seems to be haunting you.”
I hummed. “That’s just it. I don’t think he is a ghost. I’ve been touched by ghosts before and it’s more... I don’t know, ethereal. Chilly. This was very much a firm body, with some heat in it.”
Her eyes widened. “Well. I’ve never known a prophecy of yours to be wrong before.”
“I don’t think it was.” The cards I’d drawn played across my vision. Moon-soul. Lovers. Death. “I think a noble spirit resurrected him.”
Rosalina and I chewed on that together like sour candy, the daylight growing cool around us. It was rare, but this city had once been full of moon-souls.
I looked into her eyes, and could not keep the joy from my voice. “He’s alive.”
* * *
Down in the tearoom, I was all right.
Maybe I was. I had washed, dressed, and was now gorging myself on oatcakes and yogurt to sate my cavernous hunger. I sat by Leo and some of his friends, all but floating off the floor.
I must have been all right. Because that lightness was elation, golden and luminous and full of the scent of life. Tibario was alive. Alive enough to rush across the space on a dark wind, as if he’d heard me calling.
Leo and the others didn’t touch their food as I described what happened. Leo had tears in his eyes; Tibario’s death had been miserable for him too.
I must have been all right because I had tears in my eyes too. Grateful tears. When you had a lifetime behind you of the wounds of being right, it was the gentlest miracle to at last be wrong.
But if I was all right, then being all right hurt. It hurt like nothing had ever hurt. Hurt with excitement, with long dead magic, with meaning and fire and fear.
Rosalina had taken me aside on the way down the stairs. “Do you realize what this means? You can go to him. You have a chance to tell him.”
Yes. The future that held Tibario was here once again, sharper and sweeter than honeyed wine.
And I was terrified of it.
“Casilio’s going to come looking for you.” Leo had taken my hand; we’d both calmed down and were sharing a jam-slathered oatcake. “At least if he thinks you went off with this mysterious masked assassin.”
There was that to think of. Father, flawless behind his new invincible armor. “I hope he thinks I drowned in the bay. There’s no more Honored Child to tell him what everything means anymore.”
Maybe he would at last mourn the son he had so wanted to shape me into.
But the calyx charm remained. It was no longer in my power to call it, yet it had come to his aid. I had no idea what it meant, except that Father was a more significant threat than even I had feared.
I had to be all right. Because I had to be ready for what was coming. Weariness swept over me like a monsoon, and I rested my head on the table.
Then Rosalina strode out of the kitchen, frowning at the front door. I perked up, intuition drawing familiar marks across my senses.
Wait. It couldn’t be.
Someone was outside the teahouse. Someone we hadn’t seen for a long time.
I met Rosalina’s eyes, shot up to run with her to the door.
When she opened it, Weifan stood across the threshold. Her short hair gleamed like obsidian, and her fist was raised as if about to knock. A bag drooped at her shoulder.
Her eyes were wide. “Dammit, have I told you how off-putting it is that you keep opening the door on me before I knock?”
I covered my mouth with one hand. Rosalina threw herself into Weifan’s arms, producing an oof and knocking the bag to the stones. Weifan righted, spun her around, and drew a giggling Rosalina into her embrace. Weifan in her gallant white shirtsleeves and suspenders, Rosalina with her gown of scarlet and gold; they could have been lovers in a painting.
There, on the doorstep, Weifan kissed Rosalina, all but dipping her as Rosalina arced into the kiss. A low cheer rippled through the tearoom. I couldn’t hold back a laugh of delight myself, and slowly the response gave way to a smatter of applause.
When they drew back, Rosalina had whole galaxies in her eyes. Weifan leaned in again and caressed her chin. “If it isn’t my favorite flower girl.”
A pair of the boys helped her carry in her burdens, which amounted to two bags that sagged as if full of jewels. Rosalina ushered her in, closing the door, and the crowd in the tearoom hustled to circle around Weifan.
I stepped in next, so overwhelmed by the last day—Father, Tibario, her—that I must have been gaping like a child. “You. You’re here.”
She turned to me, smiling like the sky, and took me into her arms next. “Well well, my other flower girl.”
I embraced her back, holding on longer and tighter than I probably should have. She seemed to sense there was a reason, and squeezed my shoulders, not letting go until I did. I couldn’t stop shaking. She and Rosalina joined hands again, and I tried to contain myself.
“I...” I wiped my eyes, sighing. “I just had a dream about you.”
She sucked air through her teeth. “Oh, Vi. Portents of doom, on my first day back? Please, no.”
Laughter felt good. “Not that kind of dream.”
She leaned in, close enough to whisper. “It’s going to be all right, yeah?”
Yes. The vibrant new weight of all right was pressing, hard, into me.
Weifan’s return may as well have been a festival day. One of the other girls and I began loading goodies on the table from the kitchen, bringing some of Rosalina’s for-company stock out of the larder on unspoken signal. Weifan drank and ate and accepted pats on the back and ribbings; then, like some myth-studded figure of joy, she hauled her bags to the tableside and began distributing gifts.
First it seemed like a procession of courting gifts for Rosalina: fragrant teas, perfumes, a delicate gold and ruby necklace. Quickly it expanded into goods for the t
eahouse. Sugar, malt, dried spices and herbs, tea blends of every persuasion, fabric, dye, thread. Weifan filled the table with rounds of fantastic riches, all to the glory of the Fragrant Rose. Smuggled riches, that very few other than Weifan could have smuggled so efficiently and safely. The bounty of the Ghost Thief had the room exultant.
Next was one of the greatest riches of all—medicine. Classic herbal compounds and more recent, potent tinctures. Hormonal medicine, elixirs and pills and injections and creams, suited for tomkings, androgynes, and mollyqueens of all different needs. Some of it sparked with the magic of healer witches, but it was all charged with a unique power all its own: magic to deepen voices, to sculpt shape, to put any of us through the adolescent changes we had once wished for.
This was difficult, and costly, to keep ready for the community Rosalina wanted so much to nurture. But the Ghost Thief had come through again, with a wink and a rakish grin, and the celebration couldn’t have been more sincere.
My locket’s absence was suddenly ominous. The amulets with my locks of hair had used to be for others, but in a way this one was for me. I had prayed for the calyx charm to return. Maybe it was.
The fun exploded into a proper feast, with more wine and pastries and cheese appearing as if out of thin air. Rosalina and Weifan had vanished for a brief time, and when they reappeared, Rosalina was fussing over something by the kitchen, and Weifan was straightening a collar stained with spots of lip color.
I swept in and poked her shoulder. She grinned and sat, patting a chair next to her. “How has this little violet been? I would have written that I was coming, but you know, enemy of the state.”
I shrugged. “The state acts like you’re the only one to have attempted to assassinate a lord prince.” Tibario had joined a long line of enemies, the kind that wartime tended to create for powerful men like Father.
Weifan’s cheer dimmed, as if reading my thoughts. “Rosalina told me that you’ve had a hard time lately.”