The Calyx Charm

by May Peterson

  It was not a memory for us alone. She remade the events of Papa’s murder into a new story, narrating through sorcery that he had recovered. House Gianbellicci stood firm. The scope of the dragon let her touch every mind in the city that had ever known Papa, forging in them the same false memory that he had never died.

  The years since had unfolded with me feeling, believing, that Papa was still alive. He was the shadow at Mamma’s side. All those times I sensed him there, it was sorcery filling in the blanks. I even had false memories of times spent with him in private, warm parental moments, experiences of battling alongside him. These too Mamma had woven for me, continually refining this artificial ghost of a father. It was the only gift she could make out of his death, the thing we all looked for after a loved one died—the sense of them still there, the sound of their voice, the feeling they were with us.

  She gave me what Casilio had denied her.

  If she could not destroy Casilio, she would at least take away his image of victory. That would hurt him enough for now, until she found the courage to awaken the dragon again.

  Because this was too soon. She hadn’t had enough time. If it consumed her now, it would be for naught, as the task was not close enough to accomplishment. If Mio and I were older, she could entrust it to us. She needed time.

  Life itself was falling apart. The dragon was now a poison she raced against, limiting all possible futures. The thing that had given her quest meaning was now the thing taking that meaning away. What did her victory matter, if no one remembered it? If no one benefited from it, endured to carry on the fight?

  Her dragon settled later that night, once Mio and I were soothed with false memories. The next day, she roused herself to face the one person who could help her unravel the paradox. Even if she had to force the truth out of her.

  Violetta.

  Her memory flashed to a confrontation in Casilio’s house, an empty garden where she and Violetta faced off alone. A vulnerable teenager, Violetta had been no match for Mamma in this state. But Mamma hadn’t been able to see it this way now—all signs suggested that the Honored Child was perhaps the true mastermind under it all, slowly taking everything away for some grim prophetic retribution.

  Yet at the point of accusation, the girl had been so confused. “I didn’t protect Father from anything.” Her voice trembled with fear. “What did he do? Serafina. Tell me what he did. Why would he have needed protecting last night?”

  It didn’t matter. More riddles, more seer’s strategems. Mamma surged forward, threw all her rage into the girl’s face. “Stop withholding the truth! Just tell me how I die. Tell me what my dragon is going to do!”

  Violetta’s eyes blew wide with terror, perhaps feeling the deeper implications of Mamma’s rage. Then, a ghastly wisdom swept over her features. The future, showing her the beginnings of the answer.

  And the words came like blows. “You can’t take them with you. There will only be one left.”

  Violetta may not have understood the gravity of this pronouncement, but to Mamma it was the last nail in a coffin. She was going to lose them all, and her attempts to avoid attachment would be in vain. When the dragon finally emerged in its glory, she would have one chance. One person who might be able to carry on her memory.

  Who?

  She exerted the occhiorosso on Violetta, the clang of her will taking over eerie and musical. She altered her memories as well, to conceal knowledge of Papa’s death, but also revoke what Mamma herself had revealed: she was nurturing a dragon.

  But as she worked, Violetta’s mind proved excruciating to gaze into. Three truths struck from within her, piercing Mamma like swords.

  One: she didn’t defend herself because the calyx charm was gone. Mamma had thought her powerful, arrogant, possessed of the upper hand, but she was a helpless adolescent overwhelmed with horror. She hadn’t shielded Casilio.

  Two: Casilio had been unspeakably violent to her. She’d had no idea of what the girl had been through. Her heart quailed to witness it, and this alone was almost enough to force Mamma from her mind in an instant. If not for the urgency of the third truth.

  Three: the future stared back at Mamma. She had none of the seer’s skill for interpreting it. But a few razor-sharp moments of connection showed Mamma enough to break her heart. Years in the future, the imprint of her own dragon, roaring into existence. Papa gone, Mio and Liliana gone, the cold certainty of Violetta’s prophecy sure to become manifest. She would cause her own solitude, and her dragon would consume her whole with her quest unfulfilled.

  She broke the link with a gasp, mortified at herself. Violetta stared up in anguish from the grass, and unable to face the truth she had demanded, Mamma turned and fled.

  This memory too vanished into the dark. It left only the taste of a question, the same question Mamma had always been chasing, without naming it.

  Who would be left when the time came?

  * * *

  I lacked the strength for this, to bear the pain she was unveiling in me, pain spilling over my life and the lies that had built it.

  Grief, anger, pain, resentment, sorrow, need. All the parts of me that could feel were aching, yearning to hold Mamma closer and to push her away.

  The dream of our happy family was already dead. It had died long ago.

  My emotions became too loud for me to focus on hers, and her memories dropped away, a curtain falling over the end of a performance.

  From the distance of my own broken heart, her memory told me a story: she wasn’t grasping to feel close. She was showing me this. The abridged tale of her life, a struggle against time. Papa’s murder hadn’t merely taken a spouse from her, but left a permanent mark of mortality. She would never be able to carry us all safely to shore, no matter how strong she became.

  I was the one left. I had devoted myself to this cause without naming it. She’d known for decades that one day she would disintegrate. And in my infant heart that’d once been connected to hers, I’d decided to catch the dust she became.

  So our lives were entwined, Mamma the leader and me the follower. She used to say Mio was intended to carry on the house of Gianbellicci because he would assume her role as witch extraordinaire. But the real heir had always been me. Her identity and mine, weaving together as one, beautiful and terrible, raw with war and tender with familial love.

  It was an oath I’d sworn before the words were there to swear it. When everyone else is gone, Tibario will be there. It’d been unthinkable to leave her even to be with Mio, even to be with Violetta.

  We’d all borne the same desire, to create the future we really wanted. Except me. The future I wanted was a thing of fear, because it would separate me from the oldest love I’d ever known. I’d rejected that future so deeply it had taken my death to remind me I wanted it in the first place. The future I had fought for was Mamma’s.

  I could not fight for her future anymore. It would destroy me, and leave nothing behind.

  I held Mamma in my heart, called out to her in every way she might still hear me. “Mamma.” She may not recognize the words. But she would feel what I felt. “I will always love you. I’ll hate you, fear you, need you, and love you. Because you made me who I am. You are with me forever.”

  She was hearing me. Images of her converged in our shared consciousness, pieces of her youth and her dreams and the spirit of a dragon. She grasped that I had received what she’d waited so long to send.

  I might never be able to help her. But now I knew how to help myself.

  “Mamma. You have to let me go. You said I’m the only one who needs you, but that’s what you needed. I did everything I could to be what you needed, because you were ready to die. But because of that I started dying with you. I need to live, Mamma. Maybe I’ve never really lived before. If you don’t let me go, we’ll both die here in the Deep. I deserve to live even if you can’t be the one who sav
es me. If you love me, stop trying to decide my fate.”

  Sadness as heavy as stones swept through her, touching my mind through the membrane of sorcery. All the faces of her in my mind’s eye were fixed on me, bright red eyes widening with realization. This wasn’t sadness tilting toward rage, the directionless grief she knew so well. This was the sadness of someone who was finally tasting peace. Of someone who was at last witnessing what they had never wanted to see—but always needed to.

  In an instant, the link broke. The Deep returned to my senses, the inner space of telepathic union replaced with the empty, liberating dark. Some air yet trickled into my lungs. Carnelian radiation pulsed outward like a newborn star forming around her. Mamma was still clasped in my arms, gazing at me with pain and affection and gratitude, tears flying from her face like comets.

  We were finally letting each other go.

  It took several seconds for me to regain a sense of my body, and by then it was too late. I seized the pendant around my throat by reflex. I needed to return to Violetta, no matter the outcome. Mamma and I perhaps had only minutes left. It may be no more than a gesture, but touching Violetta’s amulet brought a profound calm to my heart.

  I could transport us out of here now, find a material location to regain safety. But the dragon-soul stormed on. There were still no safe places in all the world next to the power she had not yet released.

  Her purpose was accomplished, but the dragon swelled into eternity, its vibrant power filling the Deep with spangles like a new firmament. She was preparing to unleash the dragon’s magic for good and all, perhaps allowing her body to dissipate with it. It would detonate across the Deep, but do no harm. No living thing dwelled here to be slain by the detonation.

  Except her and me. And I could escape. If I brought her back to the world, the destruction would be on my head. If I stayed here with her, this would all have been for naught. And if I left her, she would die alone. My Mamma would streak through the endless abyss, the last of her identity fraying, her body becoming light.

  Who knew how long it would take? She may even feel my absence, becoming afraid again before the dragon consumed her completely.

  I had only seconds to decide. And I couldn’t do it. For all my words of bravery and release, of being my own person, of making something of my death. I could. Not. Do it.

  Wild red magic inundated my vision. All thoughts turned to vapor in my head, the complex territory of forgiveness and rage no longer seeming to matter now. I held my mother with one arm, and my beloved’s gift to me with my other hand. The dragon opened its jaws and began to swallow me whole.

  It happened then, so small and sudden I barely noticed it. I surely wouldn’t have if I hadn’t felt this before, another time my life was in peril and Mamma couldn’t save me.

  A flower sprouted on my skin.

  A tiny violet, spun from luminous threads of magic, coolly gracing a spot on my arm. It bloomed like it drew strength from the darkness, calyx opening to shed its gentle light across my body.

  My heart skipped a beat.

  Faster than light, the calyx charm burgeoned from that singular bloom, its soft pink coils surrounding me. Its glow spun filigree into the Deep, snaking me and Mamma together, offsetting the dragon’s red with shivering holy petals. The cold of the abyss lost its bite, and the delicate fragrance of violets filled my nostrils. The locket in my hand hummed with pale energy like it was singing.

  She was here.

  My heart pounded with new vigor. I had abandoned Violetta, left her to her own fate as part of my abandonment of myself. But when death took hold of me once more, when I needed her more than I had ever needed her—she was here.

  And she was invincible.

  Mamma could restrain her grief no longer. She sobbed with the force of volcanoes, agony tearing across the Deep a thousand voices strong. With that grief pulsed magic, the magic that was no longer under human control, but rode the impulses of a primeval dragon. She cried out the long wound of her life, a nova of boundless power that could have leveled cities. The explosion was vast and blinding. A starburst of red and white and heat and sound, so mighty I could not see the end of it in the distance. Had we been back in Vermagna, this blast would have been the death of us all.

  It should be the death of me now. But it rolled over the calyx charm, its tender power unstrained against even this. The dragon poured out catastrophic currents of animal pain and loss, and the calyx charm soaked it up like harmless water. Bullets and arrows became no more cruel than flowers, and the rage of dragons no more dire than the wail of a lost soul.

  The marvel of her power’s return was beyond me, but it didn’t matter. Somehow she had found what she needed, and reached across time and space to say no. She refused to abandon me.

  It gave me a way out.

  The dragon’s energy must soon convert Mamma into magic. But before that happened, I had time.

  Time and a syringe of lachrisynthe. Trembling, I trusted the calyx charm to preserve me. I plunged the syringe into Mamma’s side, pressing down until the dose was delivered.

  Her face materialized in the blur of color. She gasped and her body went limp. A moment passed in which I feared it hadn’t worked, but then the endpoint of the detonation came into view. Gradually, the radius of the blast receded into afterimages.

  The calyx charm held me while the tide turned back. In minutes, Mamma was unconscious in my arms, her body whole and the flame of the dragon once again inert.

  I said a prayer of thanks to Violetta. Then opened the darkness to climb back into the world of the living.

  * * *

  We appeared back in the cellar. My mind raced with inchoate possibilities, dreading what I might see.

  What I saw was a miracle.

  The cellar was as blasted and cracked as I’d left it. Bodies littered the floor, accentuated by grisly streaks of blood. Hunks of rock and steel were missing from the ceiling, where the ground floor appeared to have caved in from the shock of the battle.

  Those chunks of rubble hovered midair, a violet glow enclosed around them.

  The entire room shimmered like the inside of a seashell, pink iridescence gently licking the floors and walls. The water in the basin sparkled. Cracks now opened small chasms in the base of the cellar, spidering into faults in the walls. The wreckage suggested the house itself might come down. The calyx charm suspended it all in effortless buoyancy, tendrils of luminous magic webbing over the ruin.

  Violetta stood in the center of the room, face turned toward me as if knowing precisely where I’d appear. Her eyes glowed with amethyst light.

  Her hair floated around her shoulders like the tails of enchanted fish, floral fire pulsing through it.

  At her feet lay Liliana, propped up on her elbows. Bloody smears marked her coat, but she looked clear-eyed and hale. Two twisted bullets rested on the floor by her side. They must have been extracted from her, the extent of the calyx charm in achieving its end seeming almost limitless.

  Casilio was on his knees, several paces away. An orbit of haggard rocks levitated above him, but he looked unharmed. Of the men that had accompanied him, only a handful remained. Some of them shuddered at his back, while others blinked in awe at the Honored Maiden in her fullness.

  “Tibario.” Her voice was wonder and witch-fire, penetrating my senses. “I felt you call. I will always be there when you call. Because I don’t care anymore if it’s a dream or if it’s real. What’s the difference if it matters to us? I want to give my dream a chance.”

  I laughed, longing to run to her, hold her in my arms. But Mamma was breathing softly, and I wasn’t ready to leave her be yet. The tears streaming down my cheeks turned the cellar into an impressionistic medley of lights, so I slumped to my knees and simply cried with joy.

  There was no other name for this. I felt joy.

  The sight of her power retur
ned to her may as well have been a dream. But like the prophecy that’d brought us here, the line between vision and substance seemed to matter little.

  She’d been there at the moment of my death, a vision calling me back to my life. The life I had abandoned, given away for peace that could never last. Now she had called me back once more, turning aside the Deep itself to preserve me. It was the place of my death, but also my rebirth.

  “Fina.” Liliana shuffled, sounded like she lay back down again with a grunt. “She’s alive? How?”

  If only she knew what Mamma had showed me. Maybe she would, someday. Maybe it would make no difference. But I hoped she’d have the chance to know.

  “I dosed her with lachrysinthe before the dragon could dissipate her.” I sniffed, awkwardly speaking through tears. “I don’t know what happens now. But she tried to release the dragon. You said it could be reversed. If that’s true, I don’t think she’ll evoke it again.”

  I wiped my eyes, tried to get a better view of the aftermath.

  “Rosalina and Weifan are safe.” Violetta’s expression told me she was viewing this now through the lens of prescience. “Father sent soldiers to the Rose, and she invoked me with her amulet. They can’t touch her now. Not her or anyone in the flower district.”

  How strange it must be for the people of this city, to see the lost calyx charm once again lighting up a street of Vermagna.

  Our collective attention shifted then to Casilio. He seemed oddly helpless, empty, without his monopoly on his daughter’s power.

  Violetta splayed out the fingers of one hand and closed them again. The aura of the charm around him silently winked out, leaving him lightless and exposed once more.

  He covered himself, pushing back into one of the corpses of his men. “What—what are you going to do?”

  Violetta gazed down at him like the witch she was, full of mystery and old intuition. “The fight between us is done, Father.” Violetta chimed with ceremony, not commanding but pronouncing what was already true. “You have lived a stolen life, taken from lives you shed. Many souls in this land have waited for the hour when they could make it right.”