The Calyx Charm

by May Peterson

  “Tibario will be there!” She strained to breathe, perhaps already feeling the danger of this environment. “He’s my son. He’ll always be there for me. When everyone else is gone, Tibario will be there!”

  I had no answer. It was the singular truth of my existence—when it came down to it, when it was time for me to face Mamma, I had no answer.

  “I need a way back.” She spoke manically, escalating with emotion. Her crimson light webbed around me like a net. “I can be strong for Tibario. I’ve always been able to be strong for Tibario. He needs me. You don’t fucking understand, damn you to hell, he’s the only one left who needs me.”

  “I do need you!” My control broke, tears shattering my voice. I held on, made her look me in the face. She radiated anguish like heat. “It’s me, Mamma! It’s Tibario! I need you!”

  Her eyes widened, became points of ruby force. She only stared, comprehension deepening in the field of those eyes.

  “Don’t go.” She shook her head, rapidly, grasping at me. “Don’t go away. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  Amidst this litany, a sensation snaked through my body. A very familiar one.

  No.

  She was using the occhiorosso on me. Linking with my mind, the feeling of her psychic hands trying to join our consciousnesses back together.

  Intuition flared into meaning. She was trying to do what I had wanted. Reforge the mindlink that had once given me such peace. She knew she was dying, and knew it would be alone, because the dragon would erode her human mind. She might forget everything that ever mattered to her. She was holding on with all her strength to the one thing she had left: me. In spirit, in mind.

  And the grip of sorcery rendered me unable to control my body. I might still have been able to carry us somewhere to safety, help her stabilize her dragon. But not now. I couldn’t cat-step with her in control of my actions.

  Mamma. Mamma!

  She didn’t try to force my limbs or words, didn’t seem to be trying to compel me to take us from here. She was simply holding me as tightly as she knew how, the rarefied politics of our lives stripping away. We were no more than human animals, family by instinct, holding each other in the face of doom.

  In the next instant, the darkness became bright.

  * * *

  My senses twisted around the image of my childhood home.

  Logic said at first that she must have been fighting the Deep, exerting magic to change it, and it was producing illusions. Then I got it. No. Her mind was bleeding into mine.

  This was one of her memories.

  I beheld the memory from the peculiar vantage of it being hers, her focal point being what I experienced vicariously, but still as an outsider. It was like reading her story, but one step removed. I was a formless presence in her past, witnessing her like some watchful spirit.

  She was holding me, her hair down around her shoulders, looking easy and young. I knew it was me in her arms because she knew. It was a baby. Tufts of unruly blond hair, a round face gurgling with innocent delight. Her first child. Papa was at her side, also shockingly young and tender. He smiled down at my infant face, wiggling fingers to amuse me.

  Even now, she and I sensed each other. I felt her love for me, in the same unvarnished way I felt the air, the light, the warmth. It had no name, was just the background condition of existence. The air went into my lungs without me naming it, the sun fell into my face without me naming it. And Mamma loved me, without me naming it.

  “I think he’s going to be a charmer. Look at that smile.” Papa cooed, giggling with excitement.

  The memory of him flooded me with gentle sorrow, almost sweet in its painful delicacy. I had never witnessed my parents so young. How long had it been since I’d seen my father? What had happened to us?

  “Oh, no doubt he’ll have many charms.” Mamma radiated pride and contentment. “And I am going to protect my boy from this big bad world. Isn’t that right, my little dove? Mamma is always going to be there for you.”

  The fragrance of her memory was not sweet. It was like a sword through the gut, piercing and agonizing and sharp. She was looking back at her earliest memories of me, and realizing she had failed.

  * * *

  The mindlink flashed again, and a new memory played over my consciousness. I was still racked with emotion from the first one.

  Now what flowed by were pieces of multiple memories instead of a recognizable scene. I had trouble telling the difference between when some ended and others began. It was all a blur of emotional weight.

  Mamma and Papa, sitting in silence while Mio and I slept on their laps, the atmosphere heavy with poverty and struggle. Our childhood home had been small but pretty, idyllic, in the green-dusted bayside districts of Vermagna before the war. We had moved out before Mio turned three, and moved to a much smaller, dirtier building closer to the mercantile center. Mamma and Papa had needed to be near their compatriots among the enfranchised houses, and this home linked us with the larger community of mafia families keeping each other alive while the Colombi bled the city dry.

  So many moments shot by, none of which I’d felt through my sensitivity to Mamma. She had been adept at concealing from me the emotions or memories that could have harmed me. Instances of she and Papa holding a man at knifepoint, Mamma cutting open an opponent to send a message to his rival family. Brawls in the alleys or in gambling houses where mafia councils convened. Mamma and Liliana, young and still in love despite their separate marriages. Seconds cut into fragments, the two women communicating with glances across smoke-filled room, across a city of gray and stone. Mamma could still reach out and touch Liliana’s mind, and Liliana could touch back, and for the space of a few breaths they could simply be alone again, remembering what it had been like when they’d hoped.

  The next slice was earlier, going backward in time. Before I was born. Mamma looked smaller, less toughened by her experiences. She was still wry and diamond-like in cleverness and grit.

  Liliana sat across from her in a dusty little room, her own hair short back then, as it was now. Liliana had looked so lanky and androgynous, affected as an esoteric modern artist. A cigar dangled from her elegant lips. She smiled ambivalently at Mamma. “If you love someone else, I’m not going to hold it against you. I don’t want to own you, Fina. You’ll always have a place in my heart, but I need you to be honest.”

  Ah. So this was when they had decided to part ways.

  “I don’t love Gino more than you. That’s just it.” Mamma’s expressions were so vital back then, so much less guarded. “What I’m saying is...this might be hard to understand, but I need more than love. So do you, Lily. We need a path in life. I don’t think you want to be on the same path I do. Gino does. I’m trying not to force you into a life you don’t want. Gino’s political, quick with a gun, and ready to go away against the world you and I both hate. And he’ll look damn good on my arm when I deal with the other houses.”

  Liliana leaned back, puffed on her cigar. “What you’re saying is that this is your way of shielding me.”

  “Tell me what’s wrong with that? Most people would do anything for protection.”

  I didn’t witness Liliana’s answer, because that wasn’t the focus of this memory for Mamma. She was concealing the truth of why she had done this, so long ago, a choice that had defined the rest of her life. It resonated through me now as emotion, revealed in the way this memory made Mamma feel.

  She had given Violetta a raft of logical reasons for her decision. But she wasn’t choosing between pairs of shoes, one colorful and one durable. And Mamma had never been a woman who shied away from the hungers of her spirit.

  She was distancing herself from Liliana because Liliana represented the soft places of her heart. She loved this woman with a tenderness that frightened her, because her only defense against life was hardness. To walk into the life she planned with Liliana
at her side would’ve been like striding into battle unarmored. Better for Liliana to be somewhere safe but not too close, somewhere she could be guarded but not in the thick of the fate Serafina was taking on herself.

  So she chose Papa. Someone who would follow this path with her, and who she also would not fall in love with.

  The memory fell into ashes, became a whirlwind of colors and the scent of flowers. Violetta’s face appeared in the storm, cycling through many versions of her Mamma remembered. The emotional significance attached to Violetta was striking, almost terrifying. In the cracks between her memories that I was beginning to feel, Violetta loomed large. A violet halo surrounded her childlike head, and then expanded into the image of the adult Violetta that I had left behind. In a few breaths, I grasped why. Violetta represented inevitability. The future was always a few steps away, powerful beyond any other force in existence. Save one.

  The dragon-soul.

  Because the dragon-soul had been growing in her even then. Mamma had not always been aware of it, but before the war had even begun, magic had been knotting inside her soul. Perhaps it was the exigency of living in a country so worn by oppression, Mamma’s need to push her witchcraft continually to stay abreast of the enemy. The enemy included the Colombi, but also every disarrayed political faction swarming to be the next great power in the vacuum created by the War of the Doves. We had changed old oppressors for new, and the path remained unchanged. Mamma had to keep going if her sacrifices were to bring her to the goal: liberate her country.

  So her powers had become fearsome beyond reckoning, intensifying her already burgeoning presence as the most potent witch among Portia’s contemporaries. The Honored Child had made victory against the Colombi possible—now Mamma had to do the rest. Kill the oppressor, no matter what form they took.

  It wasn’t until the war was won that she began to understand the force attaining fullness within her.

  A dragon-soul may be the one power that could accomplish her goal. But it could also destroy her. She needed to soothe it, allow it to build slowly over the years, or she would dissolve into its limitless expanses. If not for Violetta’s doom prophecy, she may have had years left.

  Mamma had lived on borrowed time. The dragon-soul was always there, in the background of reality, promising to burn. And Violetta announced its impending descent like a ticking clock.

  When she had prophesied that Mamma would separate herself from all those she loved, it had seemed like the seer was toying with her. If you know what this will lead to, tell me! The dragon-soul would fulfill her words, if nothing else. It would take her out of her own life, perhaps leaving no trace behind.

  But she had to know if she would have time.

  If the girl knew what was coming, why hold anything back?

  How was the story going to end?

  * * *

  Another memory snapped into place. This one was familiar to me. Some years after the war, a night came when Casilio’s men and Papa’s had fought in the streets. I had never known precisely what the fight was about, only that Mamma had brought Papa home with serious wounds. Mio and I had been so afraid, but Mamma had patiently put him back together, gotten him care, shown strength in the face of danger. We knew by this time that Casilio was not our friend, at least not anymore. The underground network of witches were threats to his new power, where they once had been resources.

  The memory played a few times across my senses, exactly as I knew it. Then, it began to change, like paint wearing off a building.

  Mamma remembered it one more time.

  Mio and I waited for her in the drawing room, spying out the window for her appearance. I had remembered her surrounded by loyalists that bore Papa in on a stretcher, already having stabilized his wounds. Mamma wore hell on her face, the wrath at this injustice a thing I would see more and more in coming years.

  Now, in the version Mamma remembered, she appeared in our front garden alone. Papa dangled from her shoulder, body limp, and Mamma heaved with the strain of carrying him. Blood soaked the side of her clothes.

  It wasn’t hell on her face this time. It was nothing. She looked untouchable, beyond the reach of any emotion. Because inside, she was screaming.

  I threw open the door, rushing out to help her carry him in. “What happened to him? Mamma? Is he all right? We’ve been waiting for news. Are you hurt?”

  She said nothing. The interior of her heart was a solid boulder of nothing. Casilio had struck at her most vulnerable place—her family—and so her defense was to become invulnerable.

  Mio’s little voice sounded like keening from inside the house. “He’s bleeding. I don’t feel anything.” As I had once been able to do when linked with Mamma, Mio’s psychic sensitivity should have told him if Papa was still alive.

  This didn’t make any sense. Of course Papa was still alive, this night long ago. Because he was still alive today.

  Wasn’t he?

  Mamma pushed past us, ignoring our panic, and muscled her way through the door. The texture of her inner world seeped through the memory, joining the experience from my perspective into hers, as if I was feeling both myself and her at the same time. I stared on in growing horror, and Mamma ignored it as hard as she could, clenched her will around being unmoved.

  She collapsed with Papa on the sofa. Nothing moved in the house. Fuck, she needed rest. Time to regroup, regain her body’s strength so her mind would work. But there was no time. Time had run out an hour ago, when the fight had cleared—and Mamma had had to make a choice about what to do with her husband’s body.

  Wait. His body?

  In the Deep where my heart was still beating, my breath caught. The force of this memory leapt across time to crush my heart in the present, reducing me to a helpless child once again.

  Papa was already dead.

  My teenage self was putting it together. “There has to be a way to save him.” I roughly shoved Mamma away from his body, pumped his chest. I checked his pulse, listened to his breath. Nothing. There was so much blood on him. How was that possible? The two versions of this memory clashed in my mind. He had recovered. I remembered him recovering. He had never lost this much blood.

  The two Tibarios drank the truth in, lungs filling up with the emptiness that had lain in wait in the soil of my life. Emptiness that was catching up to us.

  Papa had never recovered. Mamma recalled it too clearly for it to be a mistake.

  Reality split in two. The present Tibario became numb. The memory was playing over me like a thing I could see but not care about, not react to. Mamma’s inner world filled my attention, my own perspective fading.

  She gazed at her eldest son, suddenly fragile and breakable in the hollow gloaming, and her grip slipped on her invulnerability. I had met her gaze, and said, “Are we...are we alone now? What’s going to happen to us without Papa?”

  That broke her.

  It cracked her invulnerability in half. The stone within her became dry wood, erupting into the scattered flames of agony, hatred, pain, need, loneliness. She had worked so hard to prevent anything being able to get at her. Armored herself in every way possible. And still the fingers of time, aided by Casilio, had found their way in.

  Tears of rage defused her vision. And a solemn place in her heart woke up fully for the first time.

  The dragon.

  It had always lurked, a smoldering force intimating its potential. It was not potential now. Staring down her grief-stricken children, her own exhaustion, the threat of Casilio’s menace, the potential flared into outrageous possibility. Magic scoured her nerves, infused them with a consciousness she had never felt before.

  That consciousness flooded outward like a tidal wave, weaving through the city. She rippled across minds as if they were surfaces of water, connecting them across thousands of distant thoughts. She normally had only been able to link to minds a few at a
time, and through the avenue of shame which fueled her occhiorosso. No such limit stopped her now. The dragon enflamed and magnified her powers, so that she seemed to be glaring down at Vermagna through every eye in it at once.

  But only one mind interested her now. The instinctive certainty of the dragon guided her to it, the mind she most wanted to dominate and slay.

  Casilio’s.

  She already knew why his men had let her go. Papa’s death contrasted with her survival was not an accident, but a message. It was the same message Casilio had been sending her ever since he married Liliana, since the War of the Doves. He wanted Mamma’s power, her obedience. But he wanted to scar her. He wanted to scar everyone who had ever contested his supremacy, remaking their lives and bodies according to his will. He dealt her not simply a threat to her safety, but a new life. A life in which her vulnerabilities were proven, and could be violated at any time. If she struck back, her children might be next. The stripping power of time expressed itself through him. Eventually all precious things would be devoured, and only Mamma herself would remain, within her shell of invulnerability.

  The dragon lit her up, enabling her to pass through the barrier that had normally shielded Casilio—his lack of shameful secrets. Empowered by this moment of transformation, she reached out to crush his spirit.

  But a mysterious power stopped her. One not even this dragon seemed able to thwart. A familiar power, one she’d felt before when driven out of someone’s mind.

  The calyx charm.

  So Violetta must have protected her father, effectively siding with him—or so it seemed to Mamma. Retracting into her body with defeat, she howled her outrage, frightening me and Mio. Her dragon’s power wasn’t used up.

  She had to resist its pull, bring its magic back into dormancy. But she could accomplish one thing with it before that was done.

  She touched me and Mio, linking to our minds once again.

  And began spinning a different memory of this night.