“We should go over the lake,” Cielo said. “Not as fishermen, though. I don’t look good in those big, dour coats or the flapping hats they wear.” Cielo pulled out the book. “Do you think you can still manage a reversal?”
My magic ached to try it, but I’d just seen that a loss of control could be catastrophic. If I used the same power to change myself, the results might be even worse. Unless I made these inherited pieces work together, I could crumble like that mountain had.
“Can’t you change me yourself?” I asked. Cielo had used a reversal on me in the Uccelli, an intimate bit of magic that I was eager to re-create.
The excitement on Cielo’s face was immediately doused. “That sort of fun is exactly what triggered your last outburst of magic, and I doubt you’ll want to draw eyes to your sister’s wedding.”
“I’m not sure I can . . .”
Cielo had already turned away and was opening the book with a flick. I knew that sound so well, and the way it seemed to make the world shiver in anticipation. In Cielo’s place, a rush of blue-gray-green water unspooled down the rocks, flowing toward the lake. The leather book bobbed along the surface.
Cielo made it look so simple.
“Fine,” I muttered. “Let’s take this one step at a time.” The first thing I needed to work a reversal of my magic was a reflection. I took a few steps to the water’s edge and looked down at myself in a shallow pool crowned with sharp rocks. The girl beneath my feet bore a scattering of deepest brown beauty marks on sun-browned skin. The lines of her arms and legs were hardened by travel. She had wide hips, abundant nutmeg-colored hair, a rocky slope of a nose. Until I’d learned to change myself with a reversal, this body had bothered me. Now I had a fond spot in my heart for its softness, its stubbornness.
“Next step,” I said. “Distance.”
I had to think of this reflected image, not as myself, but as another person altogether. That girl in the pool was a stranger in some ways. She was no longer a di Sangro since she had left her home in a whirlwind of defiance and disgrace. She spent her days seeking out allies instead of her family’s enemies. She only had two things left to her name: Cielo, and the magic simmering under her skin.
“Change this person, please,” I said. Carefully. Politely. I didn’t want to demand more of Delfina’s magic than the world had already taken. I didn’t want Azzurra’s magic to balk at a show of disrespect. And what of all the other streghe who had been lured in by the Capo? I could only imagine how angry my magic would be if I’d died for his cause.
Power overtook me, fierce and rushing.
What if I became an ocean and drowned all of Vinalia? What if Mirella’s wedding was swept away to sea?
I felt a snapping, all of the stays on a corset loosed at once. But the corset was my body, and I flowed away from it, joining the rest of the water.
Now that I’d worked a reversal successfully, I was upset that I’d waited so long to try. I loved being free like this, neither girl nor boy. There was so much waiting past the boundaries of what people understood, past the lines of the body I was born in.
Traveling in this form was loose and light, with a sense of blurring at the edges. I felt myself split around the rocks and creatures of the lake, always coming back together. I avoided the wooden hulls of fishing boats and kept moving until I reached a finger of land crooked out into the water. At the very end was a castle.
I pressed toward it, and at the same time the hands of memory pulled me backward. The di Sangro castle was different in every detail—spilling and sprawling where this was neat and trim, round battlements where these were in the swallowtail style—but they called to me in the same voice, speaking of home and comfort, banked fires and pots simmering with broth. There was one true difference: the di Sangro castle no longer stood.
Azzurra’s magic had ended it.
The magic I now carried.
I shivered against a thread of cold in the water. In this form, I could feel the edges of myself as well as the currents that moved through me. I could feel that Cielo was flowing behind me now, a rush of water following in my wake.
My human senses weren’t entirely gone—I was both water and Teo at once. I could smell fish and see the approaching walls of the castle. I could point myself toward a series of small half-moon openings along the bottom of the walls, where water flowed in to be used by the castle servants. Each opening was fitted with a grate, and though few would ever have cause to see the ironwork, it looped and flowered in a way that Fiorenza, my beauty-loving stepmother, would have appreciated.
No matter where I went or what form I was in, I brought her sense of the brilliant life with me.
I slid over and around a grate. After a plunge into damp and darkness, I became part of a small underground river diving below the castle. The passage was low, the water pushing its narrow way through the dark until it reached an open room with a high stone platform on one side. I let go of the reversal and came back into my girlish body with a cold shock. The platform scraped against my fingertips, but the current had the hold of a cruel lover, ripping me away. I reached, arm over arm, against a tide that slammed the river into another iron grate.
“Cielo,” I said, pulling myself up onto the stones and seeking out anything that could be used to cover me. “We made it.”
The underground river spat out Cielo’s book, and the cloak followed, wet silk splayed on the stones. Cielo appeared last, caught in the current of the river. Girlish body, then boyish, struggling toward the stone platform, dragged down by changes that came too quickly to be controlled.
“Hold steady,” I said.
My body, racked with cold, told me not to get back in the water. I resisted its good advice, dipping down to my waist and straining every thread of muscle until Cielo and I were almost touching. Our fingertips brushed, but then he changed again and went under. Cielo came back up in girlish form, halfway to the grate. If she reached it, she would bash mercilessly into the iron.
I had seen Cielo flick back and forth like this only once, when facing painful memories of her mother. “Tell me what’s wrong,” I shouted.
“Your family,” Cielo gasped.
“They won’t harm you!” I promised. “We don’t actually stab everyone we see.”
“It’s . . . not that,” Cielo said, fluttering back and forth in a single moment. “I have to meet them.”
Understanding came, an overwhelming wash of sadness. “And you don’t know who to be.”
Cielo nodded, and her chin dipped below water level. I wanted to tell Cielo that my family would see one truth no matter Cielo’s outer form—that I loved the strega deeply— but as her body sped toward the metal grate, those words dissolved on my tongue.
My family hadn’t accepted me as I was. How could I promise they would accept Cielo? They had been willing to break my heart, and I was one of their own.
“Please,” I begged my magic in the moment before Cielo met the grate. “Something soft.”
The magic turned the water around Cielo into a tangle of soft blue-green bedsheets, saving Cielo’s body from the worst of the impact. She still met the grate with a dull thud, shaking the bones of the Moschella castle.
Guilt trampled Cielo’s usual proud expression.
Footsteps sounded on the stone stairs, and I threw Cielo’s cloak over me as a trio of guards came into view. The five families had anticipated trouble at the wedding. Did they fear Beniamo’s arrival as much as I did? Or was it Ambrogio and the Otto family they wanted to keep away?
The guards took in the scene in front of them—one girl in a flimsy cloak, another in the river, one shoulder up against the grate, her pale body swirled up in blue-green sheets.
I gave them a quick eyeing as well. Hired guards came in three categories: the eyes, ears, and hands of the five families. Here was one narrowed set of eyes, slicing the room to the smallest morsels of
information. Here was a slight man who walked without sound, gathering the gossip that the world was always offering up, if you knew how to listen. And here was a thick set of fingers, ready to wrap around the nearest neck and squeeze.
The last of the three men moved to the edge of the stone platform, offering a hand to Cielo and pulling her in with ease. Cielo drew away from the man as soon as she reached the safety of the platform, wiping the places he’d touched her as if they were slicked with slime. “How generous of you to save me from drowning before cutting my throat.”
“What do we have?” the ears asked, his voice soft as combed velvet.
“I am the bride’s sister,” I said, claiming all of their attention, mostly to keep it away from Cielo.
“Why didn’t you take the bridge?” the ears asked.
“I didn’t wish to be obvious,” I said. “My arrival is a surprise and using the bridge in plain sight of the tower Mirella resides in—the one with the view of the church and the town below—would have ruined it.” I had made a calculated guess about the rooms Mirella would choose, based on the one she’d picked in our own castle and the assumption that Vanni wanted to please her.
The guards traded looks.
“She talks like one of them,” the ears whispered.
“But she doesn’t wear their color, and there’s no token to show she’s di Sangro born,” the eyes said.
“You don’t think she’s the one they’re talking about?” the ears asked. Those words plucked at the air, sending ripples that hit my cold skin and raised bumps.
“Too pretty to be one of those magic types,” the eyes said, as if he had the right, given by God himself, to decide how pretty I was—and what that meant I could or could not be.
The magic slid viciously under my skin. “If I’m not a di Sangro, and I’m not a strega, what would you call me?”
The ears slid over to me, peeling back the corner of the damp cloak and helping himself to a generous glance of my body. “Good enough for the night.”
“I’ll take the tall one,” the eyes said, with a thin slit of a smile. “To the wedding, I mean.”
The two men laughed as the one with two cuts of raw meat for hands waited to be told what to do.
Cielo nodded over the head of the rather short man standing in front of me. “You have my permission to turn them into mushrooms,” she said. “Not the delicious truffly sort, either. Short, damp, foul smelling.”
I whirled toward Cielo, my bare heel slick on the stones. “I don’t need permission. I do like your idea, though.”
The guards drew their knives, and I savored the moment when it became clear they had no clue where to point them. They could draw forth my blood, but they couldn’t cut out my magic. It was firmly knotted to my entire being.
I turned to the eyes first, eager to put a stop to the way he stared at Cielo. Magic flew from me, and where the man had stood, a hundred tiny mushrooms—with dark gills and caps as white as fear-bright eyes—sprouted between the stones. In the time it took me to blink, they spread. Soon they would overtake the room.
Cielo sent me a coded stare, asking if I was worried.
I looked to the ears, who had started to beg softly for mercy.
“Carry this message to the leaders of the five families,” I said. “Eyes, ears, and hands might seem like plenty of protection. But what if your enemy can look like anything, sound like a rustle of wind in the tapestries, and slide out of your grasp?”
The ears turned and ran, his feet soundless on the stones.
I spun to the last of the three men. “Now,” I said to the hands, who was slowly backing away, palms folded and raised to heaven as if someone up there might help him. “Since I’ve proven I’m the strega the five families are whispering about, take me to my sister.”
* * *
As it turned out, I had chosen wisely. Mirella kept a small set of rooms in the Moschella castle, in a tower that did not point out toward the lake but cast its gaze over the town. Castel di Volpe was a fishing village woven from stone streets, with roofs of overlapping white and sienna tiles that bore patches of mossy green.
“Is this really your sister?” the guard asked, ready to cuff my arms at a single word from Mirella.
Her face was a lantern, pure brightness against the gray cast of the afternoon. Mirella’s sisterly love was a nearly blinding force—and so was her disappointment in me. They shone together, and I wondered if I could ever change the way she looked at me, since I’d drawn disaster down on the di Sangro castle and then run away.
She would not care that I had to save the streghe of Vinalia. Mirella would tell me that family should come first. Standing in her presence, shivering from love and regret and the frozen caress of an underground river, I nearly agreed.
She nodded at the guard, dismissing him. Then she slid a single hair back into place in her long, elaborate braid. “You’re here, Teodora,” she said, as if those words were highly volatile, a compound in one of Luca’s less safe experiments.
She paced as one of our cousins, a di Sangro I vaguely remembered playing with as a child, rushed to adorn Mirella’s face with powder. “Let’s pretend that your appearance will make everyone gathered today delighted, because it is my wedding and I will tell them they are delighted.”
Cielo leaned toward me. “I feel like I understand you fully now,” she said in a dizzy whisper. “It’s like finally seeing a book sitting on the shelf with the rest of its series.”
Mirella marched forward, too caught up in her own pronouncements to pay attention to Cielo. “Let’s also ignore, for the moment, that the five families have declared this a day free from streghe and magic.”
“What?” I cried. “Were they trying to keep me away?” I choked down the next question—was this Father’s doing?
“Not everything in heaven and earth is about you, Teodora,” Mirella said, with a sweetness that cut against her words, honey and vinegar in the same bite.
“Interesting,” I mumbled. “A few scant months ago, I would have said the same about you.” Mirella’s wedding to Ambrogio had been the center of our family’s lives for almost a year, the sun around which everything else revolved.
Of course, I had ruined that as surely as I’d crumbled the castle itself.
Mirella sat down on a beautiful chair, each leg carved into the likeness of a fox that could be seen echoed throughout Castel di Volpe. “The ban against magic was decided by four of the five families, the Otto family being left out of this happy occasion.” The control in her voice was impressive, but she would not meet my eyes.
“Ambrogio must be . . . irked,” Cielo said, “if we’re all using our talents for understatement.” The strega was as good at holding back her honesty as I was at bottling my magic.
Mirella stood, and though her height was not great, and her body had taken on a sweetly curved shape from carrying a child, her expression was so severe I thought even the Order of Prai would fear her. “If you speak that name again, I will have you thrown out of my sight. I don’t care how much magic you have at your disposal, Cielo Malfara, and I don’t care who your uncle is, either.”
I had never seen Cielo turn such an unnatural shade.
“I wish Mirella would lend me a canvas,” I whispered to the strega. “I should paint you right now. Goddess, wearing a bedsheet and a face of pure mortification.”
“How do you know my name?” Cielo asked, shaking off my teasing words and getting back to the mysteries at hand.
“We might not get our gossip fresh in the Uccelli, but it does reach us eventually,” Mirella said. “Stories of how you two escaped Amalia were the centerpiece of every passeggiata for a month.”
Cielo’s anger turned her beautifully righteous—even as her bedsheets slipped a bit. “If everyone knows a di Sangro daughter is a famous strega, why the decision against magic?” she aske
d, a challenge rising through her voice like steam.
“The families wish to make sure that my match to Vanni is free from influence,” Mirella said.
“You mean, unlike the one to Ambrogio?” I asked, catching on ten seconds later than I should have. I was out of practice at the art of insinuation. Father must have told everyone that Ambrogio had used his association with the Capo and his streghe to lure Mirella into bed. If magic had been involved, it gave her a window to escape her engagement, where most families would have forced the marriage as quickly as possible.
I had to admire this plan for its brilliance in releasing Mirella from an unbreakable bond to a horrible man, as much as I loathed the light it cast on the magic of streghe. Is this how people would treat us now—blaming us for their own troubles, twisting our magic into excuses, and then calling us untrustworthy?
Two parts of me tugged against each other, causing magic to rise in a flash flood. I bit down on my lip, and the ground beneath my feet grew slippery. With a glance down at a fast-spreading stain at the hem of Cielo’s cloack, I realized that I’d melted the carpet into water. Mirella snatched herself back, gathering her dressing gown and glaring at me.
My di Sangro cousin, who had been trying to stay invisible in the corner, looked down at the floor with a hand held to her mouth.
“Don’t look so scandalized,” Cielo warned my cousin, “or Teo will turn you into a little boat.”
“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” Mirella said, moving to an ornate wooden crib in the corner. “You will not use magic today, not until the moment you leave Castel di Volpe.”
I thought about the true reason we’d come: to find streghe and recruit the aid of the five families. We didn’t exactly need to use magic to find them, just Cielo’s heightened sense of who carried magic. “I can agree to that.”
“You are here today as my sister,” Mirella said as she lofted a set of blankets from the crib. “And his godmother.” She angled the bundle toward us, and I was caught unguarded by the sight of a newborn’s face. He scowled at me with eyes that reminded me, startlingly, of Luca’s—not yet deepened to brown, but already solemn. I could not see Ambrogio in him at all. He had been overwhelmed by di Sangro features.
The Storm of Life Page 3