The Storm of Life

by Amy Rose Capetta

  Mirella settled the bundle of blankets and baby in my arms. “His name is Luciano di Sangro,” she said, with dazzling pride.

  “Luciano,” I repeated, my voice scratchy with the wool of some emotion I could not name. Ferocious happiness balanced with the invocation of our half brother, Luca, buried in a roadside grave, and our mother, Luciana, a woman I did not remember and yet loved with all my heart. So many pieces of our family were tucked away in that name. It made me feel like a di Sangro again, even though I’d banished myself. But godmothers were no small business in Vinalia. Had Mirella gone against Father’s wishes to choose me? “How can I be his godmother? Hasn’t he been baptized yet?”

  “We’ve made it part of the wedding ceremony,” Mirella said.

  “What if . . . what if I hadn’t come today?”

  Mirella put a hand on my shoulder, as if she was proving to herself that I was solid—and standing still long enough to accept. “Here you are.” I marveled at her trust in me, and at the same time guilt grew thick vines in my chest. Mirella could never know the true reason I had come here today. I wished that celebrating her marriage and Luciano’s birth were the only two items on my agenda, but my life was not that simple.

  “We will add Vanni’s name after the wedding,” she said, bobbing the child and putting her nose to his smooth, perfect cheek. “This boy was born a di Sangro, and Father wants to keep it that way.”

  “Of course he does,” I muttered. After I refused to stay in the Uccelli, in a body that looked boyish enough, Father desperately needed an heir.

  I looked back down at Luciano to find his gaze fixed on Cielo’s face. She was beaming an astounded smile at the baby.

  “Who are you to my sister?” Mirella asked, finally swinging her attention back to Cielo.

  “I am whoever will be allowed to attend your wedding at Teo’s side,” Cielo said.

  Mirella blinked at Cielo’s use of my family nickname. “And you trust this person absolutely?” she asked me.

  “If I didn’t, would she be standing so close to your son?”

  Mirella nodded and took the baby back from me, babbling at the tiny child in an invented language—or perhaps the oldest language of all. Luciano grabbed for a strand of Mirella’s hair that had fallen free.

  “I have to keep up with preparations,” she told me, and then nodded to our cousin. “Sofia, will you show them the way to the thermal baths? And make sure they’re given suitable clothes for the evening?”

  The three of us left the room. As soon as the door closed, Cielo flickered back to boyish form. Apparently, my strega was still nervous. Sofia stared at Cielo’s body, less with the look of a devout woman witnessing a miracle than the appetite of a starved traveler sitting down to a good supper.

  “Oh, I’ve done it again, haven’t I?” Cielo flickered back into girlish form, and Sofia’s eyes lingered.

  “To reach the baths, you take the back stairs and the walk that circles the castle,” she said without moving her gaze an inch. “I’ll have dresses sent after you.”

  “How will you fit us?” I asked.

  “I’ve been a seamstress as long as I’ve been able to hold a needle, Signorina,” she said. Even if this cousin ranked below us, I found the use of a formal addresses ill-fitting. I had just slept in the open country the night before. Traveling as a strega made me want to shed as many layers of pretention as possible.

  “Call me Teodora,” I said, stopping short of offering Teo. I did not want her feeling too familiar, not with the way she was wolfishly devouring the sight of Cielo.

  I pulled Cielo down the hall, toward the stairs. “We’ve found our first strega,” she whispered.

  “Mirella?” I asked, hope welling fast. It would be a blessing to have my sister at my side as I faced the Eterrans and the Capo.

  “Not even a bit,” Cielo said. “That girl with the powder puff and the di Sangro scowl.”

  “The one who was looking at you with her eyes leaping out of her face?”

  “Was she?” Cielo asked, smoothing her bedsheet as if it were the latest fashion from Vari.

  A small growl formed in my throat. I wanted an army of streghe, not an army of Cielo’s admirers. “At least we have one potential alliance in our pocket, and that was before you bathed,” I said. “Let’s see how many streghe you can lure when you don’t smell like the bottom of a lake.”

  The thermal baths that lay within the walls of Castel di Volpe were lush with steam, scented by jasmine blossoms, and they somehow made mud seem like a luxury. As Cielo and I were both in girlish forms, we were allowed to bathe together.

  The sight of Cielo’s body dipping into the slate-gray pools sent me into a haze of pleasure, thick and warm enough to rival the mist that rose from the water’s surface. Only the presence of other bathers stopped me from slipping toward Cielo and finding my watery way into her lap.

  When we were finally roused from our places to make way for new bathers, I found a red dress waiting for me. A servant helped me step into a lace skirt that had come all the way from the country of Sevice, and then laced the front and back of a matching corset.

  I finished first and waited for Cielo to dress, looking past the castle walk out to the lake. Did the five families have guards along the shore? Even as I savored the feel of the gorgeous dress against my skin, I calculated the number of men that would be needed to keep my brother away. He had been vicious when he was only a boy. Now he had the senses of an owl and a taste for heartless killing.

  Cielo’s voice rose from the other side of the door as she dressed. “You know, I rarely have patience for these garments. They’re so fussy, I start to feel fussy, as if the property has passed from the dress to my skin. But I suppose there’s not much to be done about it, unless you think Mirella will let me wear boots to the wedding? No one will see them under the bell of this skirt. It could swallow a continent.” There was a groan, and I wondered if Cielo had been attacked, or only fastened into a tight set of buttons. “As deeply charming as it is on you, I’m glad that I wasn’t made to wear di Sangro red. That bloody hue would make me look like one long gash.” She emerged, fiddling with the low-cut neckline of her dress. The velvet was so soft, it called out to my fingers. My canny seamstress cousin had chosen a green that verged on black, the color of the deepest woods, making Cielo’s skin shine like snowy fields. The skirt was studded all over with seed pearls.

  “You look . . .” My throat corked itself, and my breath was trapped.

  “Like a noble pincushion?” Cielo finished.

  That was the moment Father overtook us on the castle walk.

  If I hadn’t been keeping track of the time, I would have believed he was ten years older than when I’d seen him last. His hair had both thinned and grayed, turning almost as cloudy as his expression.

  “Teodora?” he said. That one word, in his most deeply suspicious tone, told me that he’d been convinced his second daughter wouldn’t come to the wedding. It felt like even now, as I stood in front of him, Father wasn’t sure I was who I claimed to be.

  I’d ruined his picture of me, the one I’d been drawing my entire life: the portrait of a loyal daughter who cared only for di Sangro matters.

  The impossible truth was, I still cared about those things. But I could no longer pretend they were all I wanted.

  My eyes stayed impressively dry. “Father.”

  I thought we would have an encore to the discussion that had chased me away from the di Sangro castle—or else Father would inform me that he no longer needed my services now that Luciano had been born. Instead, he gathered up all of his displeasure and dumped it on Cielo. “So you are the one who stole my daughter.”

  Cielo’s cheeks pulled into a tight, false smile. “Oh, Teo did all the stealing. I only lit the capital city on fire for her.”

  Father clearly had no response prepared for that.
He slid his jaw to one side, then the other, making us suffer his silence. Then he mumbled something about finding Fiorenza and went on his stormy way down the castle walk.

  I let out a low hiss of a sigh. Father and Cielo had met, and we had lived to tell the uncomfortable tale. I could only imagine what Father would have added to his accusations if Cielo had been more boyish in appearance. Which showed how little Father knew me—Cielo was just as dangerous to my virtue in this form.

  We walked past the castle and toward the ancient-looking abbey. Guests were streaming in from all directions, and I found my little sisters, Carina and Adela, weaving around people like bright ribbons. Adela was still as tiny and commanding as ever, but Carina had taken a leap toward womanhood in the months that I’d been gone. I startled to see how the dark red dress of her childhood pulled at certain necessary seams.

  Everyone flowed into the abbey and found seats in the shining walnut pews. The nave of the church was enough to fit both the entire Moschella and di Sangro families, important members of the Rao and Altimari clans, and half the village of Castel di Volpe.

  Mirella and Vanni stood at the altar, Mirella’s face covered in a heavy fall of lace. Vanni’s was bare and shining under his red curls. His soft brown eyes glowed as he stared at my sister—and nowhere else.

  Vanni loved her.

  It came as a welcome shock, settling through me like a sip of mulled wine when I had expected cold water.

  Cielo swept a glance over the crowd. “Should I be looking for streghe?”

  “Not now.”

  I wanted to watch Mirella’s wedding, even if the scene left a scraped hollow where my heart should be. I didn’t understand the pain at first. My sister was marrying well, and I was escaping the fate of a di Sangro daughter, the sort of narrow match I had never wanted. But it was a cruel twist of the knife, knowing that I would never be able to stand with Cielo like this, in front of my family and all the world, as well as God. The church would never marry two streghe.

  There was so much Cielo and I would never have, simply because of who we were. What we were.

  And I wanted to marry Cielo. Not today, but someday. Not with quite so much pomp, and yet, I wished to be sealed together with the strega in an unbreakable way.

  “Are you all right, Teo?” Cielo whispered. “I know the whole thing is a bit tedious, but you look like you’re in actual pain.”

  My eyes grappled with selfish tears. My hand reached for the strega’s, even though I never took my eyes off the ceremony. I didn’t want Cielo to know how much this scene hurt me. What if the strega believed that my interest in marriage was a silly vestige of my di Sangro upbringing? Worse—what if it seemed to Cielo that I thought our love was not enough on its own?

  The priest called on the godparents of Luciano di Sangro, and I bowed my head as I rushed down the aisle. Usually, godparents were a married couple, but my family would never have accepted Cielo. Instead, I took my place opposite Vanni’s next-oldest brother, another red-haired Moschella boy, whose pale skin bore none of Vanni’s delicate olive tones. His eyes held the dull fear of a goat that had gotten into the wrong pasture.

  I had to curl my tongue to keep from asking how I would raise a child with such a person if the situation arose. The priest intoned sacred words as I dipped Luciano’s soft head into the water, and his face turned a deep, painful red. When I pulled him up, he wailed at my betrayal.

  I wanted to tell him this was only the beginning of the ways his family would hurt him and call it love. I wanted to promise him he would be safe, that I would fight every power in Vinalia and beyond to make sure of it. Those two feelings staged a pitched battle in my heart, and Mirella and Vanni looked at me with alarm. At first, I thought I had used magic without meaning to, right there at the heart of their wedding ceremony. But it was nothing so damning. My tears had broken free.

  I was crying into the holy water.

  The priest looked down at me with pity. This priest did not wear the charcoal robes of the religious order that had turned hating streghe into a vocation, but he was still a member of the church that allowed such things. What if he knew who I really was? Would he snatch the baby away from my blasphemous hands?

  Vanni’s and Mirella’s vows came quick on the heels of the baptism, Mirella’s head bowed under lace that, for all of its airy beauty, looked stifling. But as soon as Vanni lifted it, her smile came out like the sun from behind a bank of clouds.

  I did not know if my sister loved Vanni, but in that moment, her happiness was plain. Still, as I shifted the baby in my arms, I felt an old pain like a stitch that wanted to burst. I was holding my breath, waiting for the moment when Beniamo appeared in the doorway and tore all of this to pieces.

  Bells tolled the first notes of celebration. Vanni leaned forward to kiss Mirella with one long, unbroken breath.

  * * *

  Festivities cascaded through the Moschella castle, spilling over the bridges into the town beyond. The pounding heart of the party was in the great hall, a place filled with laughter and food and wild dancing.

  “It’s time now,” I said as Cielo and I made the rounds with our wine goblets. She tipped hers all the way back, and I winced. I knew Cielo felt nervous around my family, but finding a bottomless cask wasn’t the solution.

  “What about him?” I asked, pointing at Vanni’s great-uncle as he passed. “Her?” I whispered, pointing out the Moschella matriarch. Now that I was a strega, I felt eager to claim everyone I saw as one of our number.

  “Not a strega,” Cielo said. “No, no, absolutely not.”

  “Who is, then?” I asked.

  Cielo pointed at the girl who had just come in on the arm of Lorenzo Altimari, head of the family that ran the island of Salvi. His deep brown skin and tight curls glowed in the light of the chandeliers, and Mimì looked wondrous in a bright blue gown. I knew Mimì—not well enough to claim her as a friend, but well enough to wish that I could.

  “Really?” I asked. “You’re certain?”

  Cielo nodded richly, knowingly. “Oh, she’s got power tucked away under that gracious manner.”

  “I don’t know how she will feel about being asked to fight for the good of the streghe,” I said. “What if her loyalty is to Salvi first?”

  “My loyalty is to this wine first, so you will have to ask her yourself.” Cielo hiccupped, and I held my breath, afraid that she would accidentally change into a bunch of grapes. When her form held, I let out a small sigh and took my own glass of wine over to greet Mimì and Lorenzo.

  Lorenzo clapped me to him, the same way he had when I was the di Sangro heir in the capital—and a boy.

  “Teodora,” Mimì said, dropping a curtsy.

  I couldn’t see anything past her brilliant gown and matching smile. The scar running a thin line from beneath her eye, curving all the way to her chin, stood out pale against her dark brown skin. Her hair was pinned in a half circle along the back of her head, a waterfall of tight curls spilling artfully over one shoulder.

  “You should call me Teo,” I said.

  “I’ve heard that you’ve been busy since last we met,” she said. “I’m sorry that your work has not yet brought you to Salvi.”

  Did she know what Cielo and I had been up to in the towns we visited? Had she known I was a strega since the night we met at the Capo’s ball? When I flicked through memories, I saw she had been warm with me in a way that went past the strict measures of politeness.

  Knowing someone was a strega made me feel an immediate bond, a tightening of strings that lashed us together in an invisible storm.

  “You missed our betrothal festivities,” Lorenzo said, beaming as if the sun needed an understudy.

  “Lorenzo finally talked his mother into liking me,” Mimì said, but I knew that it was more than that. Lorenzo had been slated for a marriage to a girl from the five families when last I saw
him.

  Between Ambrogio’s betrayal, Father’s scramble for an heir, and now this, the families were weakening every day. My loyalty to them flared like an old wound. And yet I could not begrudge Lorenzo and Mimì the same happiness that I’d sought with Cielo.

  “We’ll have to celebrate all over again,” I said. Before I could find a way to bring up the subject of streghe and the impending attack on the pass at Zarisi, Lorenzo shot a hand out to my arm. “Oh, look,” he said, with a rare attempt at sarcasm. “Your greatest admirer is here.”

  He pointed to a table I’d noticed the moment we came into the room, filled with honey-drizzled figs and small olive oil cakes flavored with blood orange, pistachios, and specks of the darkest chocolate. As someone who had lived on a traveler’s meager rations for months, I coveted each and every one of those cakes.

  But Pasquale Rao was lording over the sweets, looking deeply pleased with himself. Favianne, his bride-to-be, was not at his side. I imagined she was turning the deep blue tide of her stare onto some unsuspecting noble.

  I flushed to remember how well that trick had worked on me.

  It looked as if Favianne wasn’t the only one exploring new flirtations. Pasquale addressed most of his words to a slender girl in a gown of silver, shot through with sunbursts of gold. Her long black hair was set in curls as large and shiny as cut-glass tumblers. The set of her features and the bronze tone of her skin suggested she was Ovetian, or a Vinalian descended from that part of the world. The Moschella lands were the farthest north in Vinalia, and their family did the most overland trading. One of the Moschella men might easily have left in search of fine paper and gold to trade for our wine and bittersweet fruits and fallen in love with an Ovetian woman along the way.

  “Who is that girl?” I asked. “I’ve never seen her before.”