“We have to stop them,” I said.
Maybe I should have waited until Cielo was clothed for such a grand statement, but it couldn’t wait.
“You escaped the Capo’s service only months ago,” Cielo said, crossing his arms over his chest, as if that covered anything—notable. “I thought you didn’t want to be anywhere near the front.” I worked hard to keep my focus on Cielo’s eyes, which had gone mostly gray, a color that came out of hiding when the strega was in a heightened state. Anger, sadness, passion of any sort.
Cielo took a step toward me, capturing my chin between two fingers. My breath changed, as pitched and short as if I were climbing a mountain.
“I refuse to win wars for the Capo, but I can’t allow . . . this.” I shook my fingers at the troops marching toward the Neviane.
“Those men are allowed to do whatever they please, including join armies, Teodora,” Cielo said.
“What about streghe, then? Now that magic is no longer a secret, who knows how we will be treated by an invading power? They might want to rid the world of our magic or claim it as their own. The Eterrans could break through the pass and march on Amalia at any time. We have to act quickly.”
Cielo’s fingers worked at my buttons, slipping me out of the tired, dirty shell of my traveling clothes. “I was thinking that, too.”
Cielo took a single step closer, and full contact came with a sigh that my throat released gratefully. The feeling of Cielo’s skin would have been enough to distract anyone except a di Sangro. I pressed down harder on my point. “If we had more streghe on our side, we could win the war ourselves. It would show Vinalians that we’re to be trusted. And the Capo is not.”
“A strega army,” Cielo said, trailing a finger where he had just undone my buttons, tracing and retracing. “Is that what you dream about at night? You make such triumphant little noises.”
My dreams had not been warlike, but I got the sense Cielo already knew that.
“It wouldn’t be an army,” I insisted, my voice thick in my throat as Cielo’s hands settled over my hips. “More of a campaign.”
“Ah, yes,” Cielo said. “Should I salute you now or later, General di Sangro?”
I leaned over and bit his shoulder, an attempt at punishment that he seemed to take as a reward. His eyes flared delightedly, and his fingers doubled the strength of their grip.
“There’s the slightest hint of a problem,” Cielo said. “Streghe usually turn down social invitations, especially ones that might end in their death.”
My mind stormed through possibilities, but my usual di Sangro ways wouldn’t help in this matter. “If I threaten or bribe streghe into joining me, I’m no better than the Capo.”
“You are better in every way that can be named or numbered,” Cielo said, stepping back to look at me. “If they ever paint your portrait, and I have no doubt they will, it should look exactly like this.” He nodded at how my hands capped my hips. “Goddess, naked and arguing. Now please stop talking about the Capo. It’s ruining the moment.”
“What moment?” I asked, pretending at innocence.
Shyness moved over Cielo’s face, changing it as surely as clouds cast their spell over the sky. “I believe it’s time to put the magic we’ve purchased in town to good use. I’ll . . . ah . . . just need a moment.” The strega reached for his cloak and the hidden pockets of the inner lining.
“Don’t you have it?” My body was in a charmed state, but my voice sounded far away. Teodora di Sangro couldn’t be here, in a cave formed by magic, a lifetime’s expectations of marriage to a noble young man shed as simply as my clothing.
Not that Cielo and I had been anything close to virtuous in the past months. But there was a bridge we hadn’t crossed yet, mostly because of the looming toll neither of us wished to pay.
“Of course I have it,” Cielo said, thrusting his hand in each pocket, more frantic as each turned up empty. “I wouldn’t come all this way and then lose such a necessary thing. This is not the time or place to have children.” He looked around with a scornful air. “I know I’m not an expert in families, but I believe a nursery should have walls. And fewer nightmarish shadows.”
In Pavetta, we had visited a strega Cielo knew of, with knuckles as large and shiny as walnuts. She kept a shop of herbs and poultices—or at least, that was what she sold to most people who knocked.
When Cielo and I asked for her help, she looked back and forth between us, no doubt trying to figure out which one the magic was for. Her eyes settled on Cielo, whose girlish form was carved of confidence.
I missed my boyish form, even more now that I didn’t need it simply to command the respect of the five families. If I shifted into another variation of myself now, it would be for me alone, a tempting notion. But with the unwieldy new power in my body, I was afraid to work the reversal of magic needed to shift. And the truth that I’d found in Amalia, the warm glowing knowledge that I held close to me now, was that my body could bring me comfort or frustration, distance or delight, but it didn’t dictate who I was. That boyish side was with me, no matter how I looked to the world. No matter what rested between my legs.
Yet people like the strega in Pavetta saw only one side of things—and what she saw were girls, at least one of whom wanted to avoid bearing children.
“If you tell certain people about this, I’ll be arrested. Or worse.”
“Don’t worry,” Cielo said. “Certain people can leap off a cliff.”
“Use it before, not after, you hear me? The effects should last for six moons. You’ll bleed less, too.”
Now Cielo unwrapped the package the old woman had given us, his hands gentle and slow. It contained six vials of milk, each a slightly different color, ranging from an icy bluish white to the near tan of an eggshell.
“What now?” I asked.
“You’re supposed to drink one,” Cielo said.
I nodded as I inched the first vial out from its small loop of cloth.
I sent thoughts of my sister Mirella, who must have given birth to her first child by now, scurrying away.
“What if it’s stronger the more you take?” I ask. “Won’t milk spoil if we leave it for so long? Should I drink two?”
Cielo shook his head, and his certainty felt like the solid rock beneath my feet. “You might sicken if you take too much. The milk won’t curdle—it’s magic. And we want these to last. Who knows how long it will be until we pass through Pavella again?”
“Pavella,” I said, hammering the town’s name into place in my head. We had been wandering Vinalia in such a frantic haze that I did not know where my feet took me anymore. But when Cielo’s hands settled on my thighs, softly stroking as I downed the tangy-sweet milk, I knew precisely where I was.
I could draw the shape of what I wanted.
I pushed Cielo down onto the stones, on top of his silky cloak. I slid myself onto him, and he lifted his hips slowly, eyes half-closed, a catlike rumble of warmth in his throat. I kissed him on a rush of pure delight, and then I kissed him with a great wildfire need, and then I couldn’t hold back a second longer. I hovered over him, aligning our bodies. When I stared down at Cielo’s nervous smile, I felt too small to hold the sum of every feeling that had been building as we waited for this moment—anticipation and wild joy and a single prick of fear.
It overwhelmed my blood.
It called out to my magic.
Power came crashing out of me. The mountain above us had been weakened by the holes I’d blown in it, and now it ground its stones together, a great gnashing of teeth.
“I believe our rocky friend is displeased,” Cielo said. His voice was delicate and not particularly urgent, but I knew we needed to move. The more danger we faced, the politer the strega grew.
Cielo grabbed his book and cloak, while I took hold of whatever clothes I could. Stones began to fall from the c
ave’s ceiling, and I was almost crushed to powder as I doubled back to grab the precious vials of milk.
I left the cave, following Cielo, his bare ass showing under the shirt he’d hastily tugged on. We pelted for the safety of the fields as rocks roared down behind us. Only when I felt certain we wouldn’t be caught in an avalanche did I grab Cielo’s hand and pull him to a panting stop.
We turned and found that the mountain was now a crater, puffing granite dust.
As if that wasn’t enough, my body announced that it was not delighted at being cut off from the pleasure I had been so intent on. By the depths of Cielo’s frown, I gathered that he felt the same.
“Well,” Cielo said, surveying the wreckage. “At the very least, we have made our mark on Vinalia.”
“People will believe it was an earthquake,” I said with conviction that did not sink its roots all the way to my heart. Any strega who saw the remains of that mountain would know it had been touched by magic. I hoped the Capo hadn’t been able to recruit new streghe who would be able to track us.
I could not keep my magic quiet anymore.
The hazelnut fields on the route to Alieto were home to rows of skinny trees, their bodies split into forked trunks. We were headed west, even though I knew that our true business lay to the north. The sight of those soldiers had turned the war from a vague danger looming over our heads to a blade poised at our necks. But Cielo was right—streghe didn’t have a good enough reason to come out from the shadows and fight.
“If we could get the five families on our side, the streghe would follow,” I said, my mind refusing to let go of the grand plotting that might save us. My magic had grown to epic proportions, and my scheming rushed to keep up.
“If you could get the five families on your side, you never would have left the di Sangro castle,” Cielo reminded me.
The five families would rather let the Capo crumble Vinalia to ruins than accept women as leaders, and streghe in their ranks. Cielo was as honest as he was frustrating, and what’s more, he didn’t seem to notice. He was sniffing at the hazelnut trees as if they might yield lunch.
“Father could be won over if he felt it was safer to live openly as a strega,” I said. “There’s no way he’s the only one in the five families with magic. There must be others who are hiding it, like I was for half of my life.” And I might be able to help them live openly, without paying as steep a price as I had. “I’m sure there are others. Think of the brilliant death.”
“And the bodies that pile up wherever the five families take a stroll,” Cielo added.
I swerved around the obvious invitation to fight. “Sniffing out streghe in these little towns has given us practice. We could do the same with the five families, and then Father would have no ground left to deny his magic. All I need is a meeting of the families, some kind of wartime conference or festival or . . .”
“Wedding?” Cielo asked.
“Yes. Exactly.”
The strega’s nose scrunched in a highly suspicious manner.
“What do you know?” I asked, turning the force of my attention on Cielo, and leaking magic. The trees around us no longer bore leaves, but a collection of knives that glistened under the midday sun.
“Well, that’s a new form of intimidation,” Cielo said sotto voce. “While you were busy talking to that strega who changes warts into wishes, and wishes into warts, I might have been at the tavern, and over a very nice plate of boar ragù I might have heard that a daughter of the five families is to be married in three days.”
“That could be any number of girls,” I said, though my mind stuck to one with the stubbornness of a thistle. Cielo gave me a look that said he knew more than he was telling. “Even if Mirella is the one getting married, you know I can’t go to my sister’s wedding. I would kill Ambrogio all over again.”
“That is where the story takes one of those interesting turns that spits you out into an entirely new landscape,” Cielo said. “Mirella isn’t marrying Ambrogio Otto. If the gossip of a slightly drunk traveler and a barely interested tavern keeper is to be believed, a girl who has recently given birth to an Otto baby is marrying an altogether different son of the five families who lives in Castel di Volpe.”
“Vanni?”
“It looks that way, if you squint at it hard enough.”
Vanni Moschella was not the worst of the young, newly minted family heads I’d met in Amalia, but when I tried to pair his bright red hair and merry ways with my darkly lovely and ever-careful older sister, my imagination stumbled. Of course, I had no way of keeping up with the changes in my sister—or any other di Sangro, for that matter—since our lives had been blasted apart. I had moved away from my old self in leaps during that time, my magic and my days utterly transformed.
Why shouldn’t Mirella, who was newly a mother, be several degrees different by now?
Frustrated at knowing so little about my family’s lives, I swung back to Cielo. “You knew that my sister was about to be married to Vanni Moschella, and you didn’t say a thing?”
“I thought it would dredge up the muck of certain memories,” Cielo said. “Things that you didn’t wish to dwell on.”
Father.
My hand went to my neck, where I used to wear a small ring of iron on a leather cord—a shard of Father’s magic. It had been formed on the night my mother died. Father’s healing powers had failed to save her after she gave birth to me. When his heart broke, so did his magic, creating the shard: a trapped piece of his power that anyone could use.
It would have helped me to feel it there now.
But how could the memory of his cracked heart heal mine? The great Niccolò di Sangro had loved me enough to want me as the next head of the family but not as a strega. Not when the world saw me as a daughter instead of a son.
I’d given away Father’s necklace to help Cielo in Amalia. One more piece of my life, my story, that I would never get back.
But for the first time in months I felt hope stirring through the broken shards of my life, looking for new ways they might fit together. If I found streghe within the five families, I might be able to convince Father to finally accept his magic, giving his healing abilities a chance to flourish. And if that worked—who knew what was possible?
“Cielo,” I said, “how do you feel about weddings?”
“I’ve never been to one,” he admitted. “Streghe don’t have great big affairs that are aired like so much laundry. But a wedding night might be interesting. I’ve heard there’s infinite carousing, and everyone ends up in someone else’s bed.” Cielo gave me a smile that made his hopes clear. More than clear, in fact—vivid. The memory of what had almost happened under the mountain came back in relentless, dizzying detail. My thoughts burned as I pictured all the ways we might make use of an actual bed.
“This is a five families wedding,” I said, letting us both down before our hopes built past reason. “There will be drinking and dancing, but you’re more likely to find a knife in your throat than a visitor in your bed.”
Cielo sighed, then waved a wilted hand. “Two out of three will suffice.” And with that, he whirled off his cloak and drew a new constellation of silken threads, a shining road to Castel di Volpe.
* * *
The Moschella lands ran as far north as the bold rock faces of the Neviane, but in the south they were capped by the long, placid stretches of Lake Dietà. Cielo and I reached its shores as night smothered the day.
We camped by the lake, just inside the bounds of the woods. Cielo turned into a fire and burned a quick supper of fish, and then we formed a warm nest of our cloaks and traveling packs. The strega slid close to me, but I feared that if I slept with my body where it preferred to be, pressed against Cielo’s, I would burn with magic and we would wake up beside a lake of flames. I kept a careful space between Cielo’s back and my chest, filling it with frustrated sighs.
When I woke, I felt cold and slightly irritated, but at least the lake was properly blue.
Cielo—who had slipped back into girlish form—joined me at the water’s edge, pitching a small stone that broke the surface of the water. It healed over in an instant, a property that my soul envied.
“Lake Dietà is known for its brilliance,” Cielo informed me. “Though, much like dazzlingly bright humans, it becomes hard to look at for long.”
“It’s a good thing we’re not terribly smart,” I said, thinking of what we were about to attempt, breaking into a wedding hosted by the five families. Declaring that I was a di Sangro would only get me killed faster if a guard loyal to the Moschella family chose not to believe me. “Do you think we should approach Castel di Volpe by land or water?”
“I think we should go to Alieto, which I’ve made as clear as the finest Amalian glass.” Cielo’s hand lit on my shoulder, a nervous bird ready to fly at the first sign of trouble. “But I know how much it means to make peace with your family.”
“This isn’t about my family,” I said. “This is about saving all the streghe in Vinalia.”
Cielo gave me a look she had refined until it was both dubious and attractive, eyebrows round as triumphal arches.
“Well?” I asked. “What’s our best approach?”
I hated giving over the reins of a scheme, but Cielo knew the Moschella territory better than I did. With the exception of the Uccelli, Cielo knew all of Vinalia better, thanks to a patchwork childhood spent in the homes of many streghe, while I had been shut in the di Sangro castle like a treasure in a stone box, hoarded and kept safe. That sort of safety did me no good now. I had been able to survive the Capo’s court, but while traveling in the open country I often felt as useful as a slipper carved from marble.
The Storm of Life Page 2