by May Peterson
Weifan clasped my hand, energy rising in her gaze. Mother nodded, smiling faintly. “Precisely what I want to hear.”
I turned to Weifan. “Then you should go back to Rosalina. She shouldn’t be wondering what’s happening to you now. And you’ll be there for her if we don’t’ come back.”
She looked at Mother, then at me, and nodded. “Make sure you do come back.”
Chapter Seventeen
Tibario
Mamma was easy to find.
The cat-step cut through barriers like butter. Casilio’s manor on the hill was the first place I investigated. Signs of a struggle in the main hall, guards at the gates and doors. It took nothing to slip through shadows and appear on a wall, peer down from a sill, and put the pieces together without being seen. Night poured all its advantages on me while leaving my enemies on their back feet. Darkness was gentler to see in, and it shrouded me from watchful eyes. I wove the quiet around me like armor, stalking men to see where they went in the house.
She was in the cellar, as if she were a rowdy animal. Message received, Casilio, and fuck you kindly right back. It had the air of a workshop or storage facility, maybe a place to store vehicles or some other apparatus. Must have a lot to keep straight when you were the military overlord of a new government.
But this room had the tang of underground, stone walls bending toward vast ceiling studded with electric lights. An electrical lift led down to the cellar—I checked—and a steel door shone at my back as I found a place in the thin shadows.
The room seemed empty. Let Casilio try a gimmicky moon-soul catching device with silver or whatnot. If that was all he planned, this would be easy.
The shape of the floor, however, was what struck me. It slanted down into a basin, an area lower than the rest of the floor, with fixtures containing hooks as if they were grooves to bind prisoners. A dais in the center above the rest of the room, giving it all the impression of a buried, inverse throne room.
No throne lay at the center of the dais. It was a cage. Rectangular, and made not of bars but of glass, unnervingly reminiscent of a display on an ornate table.
It housed a pillar, above which electric lights glared a reverse halo on the floor.
Strapped to the pillar was Mamma.
Her hair fell over her face, and she was slumped forward, arms bound to the pillar. A moment of alarm passed in which she seemed not to move, but then I detected a faint rising and falling of breath.
I’d thought she’d come to fight Casilio, not give herself up to him. How had he captured her this easily?
Her head stirred, and a groan swelled from her. “Well, fuck me.” She looked up. Redness flickered from her witch eye, and scuffs marred her face. She looked like a clenched fist, but a twisted grin brought a touch of life back to her features. “Looks like this gambit did not play out. I should have assumed that of course telling you not to come would bring you here. An insight that will prove true in more situations than you can count, Tibario: sometimes there is truly nothing you can do to change something.”
I studied her, the fatigue evident in her muscles, the sense of defeat behind her bravura. “I don’t understand. I came here expecting to see a showdown half underway, maybe a few dead bodies for decoration. You can sure as hell break out of this, Mamma.”
Her grin became tight, then faded gradually into an expression I wasn’t used to seeing on my mother’s face: pain. “I know. I don’t want to.”
“Horseshit. I don’t care what you want. I’m cat-stepping you out of here, and Casilio can lump it.”
She sighed. “Tibario. This was why I asked you not to come. It isn’t the kind of battle you believe it is. Ask yourself: why hasn’t he killed me yet, if I was this easy to bind?”
I scanned the room, listened for movements. Something was above us. It was distinctly likely that ears were trained on the passages to this cellar. Mamma didn’t seem cautious about being heard. But one thing now was true perhaps as never before—I was not afraid of Casilio Benedetti. “Tell me. Because I wasn’t asking. I don’t care what resolution you’ve come to, I’m not going to look away as you throw your life in the gutter. I, selfishly, want you to survive. You aren’t entitled to a noble death that robs me of the chance to someday make it right with you.”
Her laughter dissolved into a cough. She winced—had they bruised her ribs? “Oh, Tibario. It means the world to me that you want that. But believe it as you may, this wasn’t a dramatic gesture to manipulate you. Casilio is more afraid of me here in his cellar than ever before. Do you know what we really are before we come into this life, my son?”
I stiffened. “No. There’s nothing that makes any kind of greater metaphysical sense to me now than it did before.”
But that wasn’t entirely true, was it? Hadn’t everything about life changed because of death?
“Because there’s nothing to make sense.” The light of her occhiorosso pulsed brighter. “There isn’t anything before this life. There is no true thing we are underneath it all—Serafina and Tibario are only masquerades. We are our lives. Even becoming a ghost or a moon-soul is simply a new role, not a return to innocence. Casilio understands that, and is holding on to this life with everything he has.”
Suspicions attained substance in my mind, the rivalry between her and Casilio now infused with an almost spiritual significance. As if she and Casilio were fighting over whose meaning of reality would win out.
“Get to the point, Mamma.”
“We both also know that our lives can turn us into something.” Shadows veiled her features with sinister gravitas. “Something that only becomes apparent right before death. He is very afraid of what I will become if he tries to kill me. I can outlast him, Tibario. I made myself into something that can outlast anything. But to do it, I have to be alone. I bought you a chance to escape. Take it.”
That shook me. Of course she hadn’t come on some sentimental impulse. This was another of her calculations. But I could smell the difference in purpose under it.
I almost agreed, left her and stepped right back into the Deep.
But the door behind me clanged, a vibration moving through the ground. The lift opened. And Casilio stepped forth.
He wore pure white, surrounded by a cadre of men in nondescript masks. The aura of the calyx charm shimmered on him like flames.
The sight of him nigh stopped my heart. It all felt different, as if my life up to now had been a dream, and only now was I finally awake.
He smiled mechanically. “We have caught ourselves a stray cat, boys. No disguise this time?” He tapped on one of his men’s masks.
I ignored it. “You haven’t caught shit. I don’t care how many silver bullets you’ve armed your men with, it is going to be trivially easy for me to leave this place exactly the way I came. And I’m taking my mother with me. Sorry to break up the battle of wills between you, I understand it’s been a long time coming.”
Mamma remained silent. But a glance back at her showed only her luminous eye, violent in its perfect radiance. The hatred fuming off her was so exquisite it could have been religious, mystical.
“Oh, you miscomprehend, my boy!” He splayed his hands in mock surprise. “I don’t intend to force your hand with such crude means. No, what I propose is quite civil. Even your valiant mother agreed to this farce, precisely as it is. I’ll tell you what I want you to do, and you’re simply going to do it, because that’s how adults resolve things, yes? There’ll be no need for ugliness.”
A mystical hatred of my own thickened in me. “Casilio. I am many things, but one thing I will never be is your boy. Have a good evening.”
I turned, briefly considering how best to time my transport into Mamma’s cage, and Casilio simply went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “See those grooves in the floor? You are going to lie down in one, and my men are going to chain you in. Silver chains, you kno
w, to be sporting. Then they’ll open a sluice that fills this indentation in the floor with sacred water. You are going to lie there, by your own choice, as I quench your immortality right in front of Serafina. And she isn’t going to do a damn thing to stop it.”
My disgust moved me to look at him, at his mortal soldiers, his patina of stolen magic. “And why, exactly, would I do a single one of those things?”
Mamma’s voice was sharp as broken steel. “Ignore him, Tibario. Leave me be and go. Go as far away as you dare.”
“Yes.” Casilio chuckled, and his men echoed, a shared moment of machinelike amusement. “She can handle me. You run along now, and hide somewhere with my daughter. I have time. I have time enough for everything, because time itself doesn’t touch me now. So by all means, you are invited to leave my house. But you won’t. Because if you do, your mother will sit down here and rot, without so much as a drop to drink. Knowing that if she breaks free, I will come for you and take your immortal body apart while it still lives.”
The audacity of his demand made my mind blank with rage. I stared at him and breathed, the air becoming eerily cold.
He stepped closer again. “You see, there is nothing I have to force. Let’s say you both escape me. We will end up here again, exactly as we have now, and the choice will be there again. You have your powers and your friends and your sorcery and immortality, and it means nothing because I have the only kind of power that matters. This country follows me, by law and by agreement, and if I declare you all enemies of the state, not a soul can contest it. Because I am what the Colombi could never be: truly immortal, not simply living-again. The calyx charm makes me proof against time. In a hundred years, I will still be ruler of this land, with no power left to gainsay me. So I give you this choice. You let me kill you, and Serafina can even try to stop it. She can enter your mind and make you escape. Only this will truly force you from this place. But if she does, she will be culminating the conditions of Violetta’s prophecy. That is the ticking clock. Run from me, and your doom is at your feet. Face me now, and you stare right into the future foretold for you.”
I turned back to Mamma, the naked beauty of the occhiorosso staining the glass red.
The trap was built around Violetta’s prophecy.
Because Casilio was right.
It had always been in his power to simply swat us off the table, hire assassins or manipulate laws or deal in social currency until Mamma was pushed out of Portian society. I had imagined us as either too nimble to be easily dealt with, or beneath the horizon of his true concerns. But now I saw: the past twenty years had been a prolonged dare, a test of who would break first. Mamma risking the consequences of social ruin by taking down the country’s highest lord, or watching Casilio erode her into nonexistence.
Erosion had been the stronger sword. Look at how close to destruction our family had already come, simply trying to outthink Casilio, without him having to lift a finger.
The test now wasn’t whether I could outmatch Casilio’s will, but whether I could move Mamma to change the outcome she was willing to accept. She was doing this for me. She’d done it for me for years, no matter what other selfish or poisoned motivations also colored her actions. But this time she had to give up on being superhuman.
I met Casilio’s gaze. And smiled gently. “All right.”
“What?” Mamma snapped.
Casilio lifted a brow. “Oh?”
I nodded. “I can cat-step through silver chains and sacred water. It will not be pleasant, but I can stop this whenever I want. I’ll play the game. But first you unbind Mamma.”
Casilio signaled to one of his men, who swiftly moved to unlock Mamma’s hands. “Easily,” he said. “Her true bindings cannot be removed now.”
She rubbed her wrists, kneeling as if weary to her bones. The hateful light in her eye did not go out.
But she watched, without moving. As Casilio’s men prepared to kill me.
* * *
This was a game.
I reminded myself of this as Casilio’s men clasped me into the chamber. Silver manacles, biting as they closed around my wrists. I reminded myself as they uncoiled thick silver chains and began winding them around me like I was a package being prepared for delivery. It hurt. Each touch of silver seared like frozen fire. The piercing sensation of the sacred banes thrummed through my nerves, reminded my supernatural body that it could still die.
This was a game. I could stop playing at any time. I knew this as Mamma’s roiling red rage filled my vision, reducing the air in the cellar to a field of curdled scarlet, like a star bleeding out on the floor.
I could stop at any time, and so could she. That was precisely why I had to play it. One of us had to finally stop playing. If it was me first, she never would.
She hadn’t come here to die.
It was an old game between her and Casilio. Their game was over who got to define victory. But the game between Mamma and me was older.
Our game was more like hide and seek. Its goal was to finally find each other again. Not in the world, not in physical proximity, but within. Long ago, we’d been one heart and mind. Time had split us apart, and left me continually searching for the place where she used to be.
I wanted to save her not simply from love. It was because if she died, I would never finish the game. I would never find my way back to her, to the mother that held my heart safely in her hands, showing me I would never truly be alone. I could accept dying while complete. I couldn’t accept dying without her, separated forever.
Maybe her touching my mind would prove the prophecy inevitable. But wasn’t it anyway? Wasn’t that what Violetta had tried to teach all of us—that our quest to change fate was arrogance?
At what point would we finally learn the lesson? Violetta had given me the closest thing to grace there was: the chance to see. See how incomplete I was, how complete I might have been, and now to see this. For all my rage at Mamma’s misdeeds, I refused to die alone. Which meant she couldn’t either.
I wouldn’t fucking let her abandon me again.
Casilio loomed over me. It must have been twenty soldiers gathered with him, but Casilio’s presence flooded the room like a viral cloud, infectious and sense altering. His sheer whiteness sapped the vitality out of the atmosphere, even Mamma’s ruby glow. “I am rather curious to see what you will do. I understand that if I don’t pierce your flesh with a sacred bane, the water alone will take some time to kill you. It seems this process would be memorably painful, but slow. Moon-souls can last a long time even in the few conditions that are lethal to them. Your mother’s starvation would also not be quick. One of you will die first. Or you both fight back, abandon this, perhaps find a way out together. But there must be a reason you agree to now. What say you, Fina? What will it take for you to cough up your dark secret?”
Her reply was a flare of magical radiation, refracting in the glass as if they had captured fire. But she said nothing. The aura of her power was as heavy as a drug.
“She understands, Tibario.” Casilio produced a cigarette, lit it, took a few puffs. “The point of this isn’t to beat her. It isn’t to kill her. It isn’t even to kill you. I don’t care about either of you as threats. Bring an army of moon-souls and sorcerers and the calyx charm will render you all as useless as kittens. What I want is to scar you. I want you to be different people because of me, so you always feel the marks I’ve made, right up to your final breaths. I want you to know I did it on purpose and there was nothing you could do to stop me. All I have to do is be inevitable.”
Mamma finally answered. Laughter, scalding with coiled animosity. It was strangely thrilling to hear. “I’ll translate, Tibario, because I’m fluent in self-absorbed cow shit. What my old friend here means is that he is interminably wounded that for ten fucking years his wife was still pining for me while she was married to him. He is wounded that I gave her more ple
asure in this life than he has ever been capable of even experiencing himself, and his entire personality is bent around punishing me for it. Let us all shed a sad tear for Casilio.”
Casilio’s eyes narrowed, and unceremoniously, he tossed his lit cigarette into my face. I thrashed to knock it away, until it finally rolled to the floor. Fucker.
Mamma rolled on. “Here’s what you’re going to do, Tibario. You’re going to stop fucking around. You’re going to get whatever sense of heroism you need to get by enduring this and then you’re going to obey me and get out of here. This is a game to him.”
I gasped for a few moments, gathering strength. Fucking shit, that silver hurt. I had overestimated my ability to bear this gracefully. “Mamma. That’s the entire problem. It’s a game to you. It’s a game to all of us. Games are the things we play when we think we have time. When we believe we’ll get a chance to be serious next time. We played life like a game because we believed as long as we had more chances, this time or that didn’t count. I spent half my life playing a game with you, hoping that next time it would count. You can’t always win, Mamma.”
“I don’t have to.” The brittleness in her voice was changing, becoming smooth and unbreakable. She was mounting determination, and the realization shot fear down to my toes. Mamma became almost emotionless at her weakest, and at her strongest. Her words rang in my head: He is very afraid of what I will become if he tries to kill me. “I only have to solve this. And I can. That’s why I came. That’s why I asked Violetta for help one more time. I can beat him. I can avert the prophecy. I’m the only one who can.”
A disquieting sound touched the edge of my senses: running water. A glance around showed that clear water was seeping inward from the edges of the basin. Slits at the edges poured out pale streams, and they were making their way toward me. “Mamma. You keep looking right at the truth and not seeing it. You always think you’re the only one who can. So you believe you have to pay any price, go to any extreme, because what would happen to the world if you weren’t there to save it? Mamma. The world and its fucking wonders don’t need you. I need you! You want me out of here to take on some heroic task, but you will die. This is what Violetta has been telling us as loudly as she can, and I finally understand. We don’t get any more chances.”