The Storm of Life

by Amy Rose Capetta

  She stared up, worry wafting across her rose-gold cheeks. She touched her fingertips to her chest, where the song welled up—the same place I touched when I thought of the magic inside of me. “I haven’t sung in days,” she warned. “And the weather here is not good for a soprano’s vocal cords.”

  Vanni watched as the Eterrans stormed toward us, close enough to see the grim purpose on their faces. “Oh, believe me,” he said weakly. “We’ll still give you a standing ovation if you pull this off.”

  Xiaodan’s voice stitched together a few notes, threading up and down a scale. She inched her mouth wider, and the sound flowed away from us, rippling endlessly, like bolts of rich cloth.

  The Eterrans were close enough now that I could see their breath scarring the air white. Mimì closed her eyes and spat out a prayer, and Vanni took three steps back without seeming to notice. Cielo grabbed for the book, her best protection, though when her eyes caught mine, she did not change.

  She stood her ground. She stayed with us.

  With me.

  Xiaodan’s voice grew higher in pitch and more focused in tone until it narrowed to a point and seemed to puncture the air. The mountain shuddered, as if it couldn’t bear that sound. And then a small knot of snow formed below us, growing larger as it fell down the slope, until it was a nightmare of white.

  The men below us were close enough I could see fear in their eyes as the snow overtook them. It rumbled down the slope until it reached a crevasse, where it plummeted so deep into the earth that I didn’t even see a plume of powder when it reached the bottom.

  Vanni stood up and clapped, giving Xiaodan the standing ovation he’d promised, but she only shook her head sadly, her hands sliding over the air, a sweet motion like a mother smoothing over sadness with a lullaby.

  I wondered if she felt the emotions of those soldiers as they plummeted. Was she trying to bring them peace? Help them rest?

  She sat down and gathered her knees to her chest, the way I’d seen her do at camp the night before.

  With the slope below cleared of Eterran troops and murderous snow, I could finally focus on the streets of Zarisi again. While our attention was fully claimed by the importance of saving our own lives, the Vinalian soldiers had gotten tangled with the Eterrans in the streets. My magic could not pick one side apart from the other.

  Change them. Stop them. Change them. Stop them.

  The magic marched inside of me, barking the same commands until I felt like I was not in charge of the battle, but a lowly soldier who had to do as she was told or face terrible consequences.

  I turned to look for Cielo, to ask my magic tutor what came next, as if this were one of our harmless lessons. I did not have to go far—Cielo was running to meet me at the end of the promontory.

  My strega knew me well. Cielo could see what my magic wanted, the impossible choice it urged me toward. She stood beside me and we both looked down at the battle that was quickly becoming a massacre. “No one will blame you, Teo.”

  “It’s not a matter of blame,” I whispered. “I came here to save them.”

  The Vinalian forces were giving way as the Eterrans pushed, relentless. The snow that had started out white was spotted pink, a surprisingly delicate color, like the apple blossoms of an early spring. When I turned to Cielo, her cheeks and lips were a much brighter shade, the blood under her fair skin a visible reminder of her life. I wanted to keep it from pouring out of her, at all costs. I wanted to pretend that Cielo staying alive was the only thing that mattered.

  “If you do this, you will save the rest of the army, and everyone in Vinalia, from an invasion.”

  “You don’t believe in that sort of thing,” I mumbled through half-frozen lips. “Remember? Foul mathematics.”

  “True, but I am not the one who came here to stop a war.”

  “Teo!” Mimì cried, grabbing my attention and tugging it back to the grisly moment at hand. “What do we do now?”

  My magic was rising past the point that I would be able to calm it, and with it came Father’s voice, hopelessly tangled.

  There is only a side that loses less.

  Instead of closing my eyes, I opened them wider, refusing to blink. Instead of trying to hold back the magic, I called its name, beckoned it, brewed the storm in my soul. It was a power as great as the avalanche, and I could feel it stampeding away from me. On a single sharp intake of breath, the men in the town below us become a burst of dazzling snow.

  No two flakes matched in every detail, just as none of the lives I’d taken were exactly the same. They had been rich men and poor men, Eterrans and Vinalians, great lovers of life and those who sought only to snatch it away from others. From a distance, though, they all looked the same.

  For one peaceful moment, the snow hung in the air. Then it started up a wild swirl, like the snapping of wolves. The wind grew and grew, the town ravaged by winds. The narrow houses of Zarisi sighed, slumped, and started to fall.

  A fresh battalion of Eterran troops came over the northern rise, but when they saw Zarisi being felled by an unnatural wind, they stopped. I did not need Xiaodan to tell me these men were afraid. I could sense it. I knew it was wrong to savor it, but I couldn’t help the pleasure that spread with a delicious moment of triumph.

  We can take them all, my magic said.

  I almost agreed. But if the storm grew too large and I could not stop it, it would take my streghe, too. And besides, we needed witnesses to carry this story back to Eterra.

  I turned to Cielo, whose black hair had become a whipping cloud. “Can you help me rein it in?”

  “Are you asking me to pacify you, Teo? You know that’s a fight no one could win. But I will give you something new to push against.” Her slippery smile made me flush in ways that had nothing to do with wartime victory. Her body broke into ribbons of wind and raced toward the sky.

  When Cielo’s wind met mine in the skies above Zarisi, it pushed—softly at first, and then with growing fervor—until my resistance left me on a sigh of relief. The whirlwind died, and the only thing left was a pure mountain breeze, gathering up the snowflakes and softly, gently returning them to the sky.

  “Is that snow flying . . . up?” Vanni whispered.

  It was—a great glittering breath moving from the ground to the sky.

  I cleared my throat and stood at the edge of the promontory, facing the Eterrans. “Remember this as the day when all tides turned.” The mountains served as a natural amplifier, my voice clanging against them. I wished that everyone who had ever doubted me could see this moment. Luca, the boys of the five families, Father.

  This time, I would even invite Beniamo.

  “The snow has returned to the sky, as your people will return. Home, where you are wanted. Home, to people who love you. Leave us to our lives, or we will take every one of yours.”

  The men turned and scurried back north just as a wind wrapped around me, and then Cielo dropped at my feet, boyish and naked and shivering, so deeply bitten by cold that I could have sworn a wild animal had gotten its teeth in him.

  I threw the cloak over Cielo’s body, then knelt and wrapped myself around him. I wanted to fill him with my warmth.

  Instead, I was startled by the force of the cold coming from his skin.

  He looked past my face, up at the sky, as if it held the answers to all questions. Or maybe he was trying to be certain he’d put all the snow to bed in the thin blanket of clouds. He gave a little nod and finally turned his eyes to mine. “I’ve always heard people say victory or death, and every single time I thought, Why be so limiting? Why not both?”

  He seized in my arms.

  The hollow place where my magic had been a minute before flooded with darkness.

  “Fear, fear, fear,” Xiaodan muttered, or maybe it was only the wind.

  Cielo did not die.

  “You didn�
�t even make it within a mile of death’s gatehouse,” Mimì reminded him several times as she heated handfuls of snow and melted them, infusing her palms with warmth and pushing it into Cielo’s muscles.

  “Where did you learn to work this little miracle?” Cielo asked, sitting up so he could watch her.

  Mimì’s tight spirals of dark hair bobbed over Cielo as she moved from one of his legs to the other. “My mother was a healer, and even if that’s not the form my magic took, watching her work all through my childhood gave me some ideas.”

  Jealousy gave itself the grand tour of my body. My father was a healer, and it had taken seventeen years for him to even admit it to me.

  I had certainly never learned magic at his knee.

  We were back in the flattened town of Zarisi. Beside us was a bonfire made out of plain timber from the sharply broken bones of houses. Vanni and Xiaodan had gone to pick through the piles that used to be shops and see if there was anything left worth eating. That left Mimì to tend to an injured Cielo, and me to worry over the reality that my magic had injured him in the first place.

  “You’re sure I’m not even a bit moribund?” Cielo asked Mimì as her palms seared his skin. “Ow! I mean, I’ve always thought it would be hard to know, since you only die once, so you won’t know what it feels like until you’ve done it, and then the knowledge is too late to be useful.”

  “You have frostbite in two of your fingers and several of your toes,” Mimì said, probably hoping a little truth, however harsh, would halt Cielo’s concerns over mortality. I could have told her that was an impossible task.

  “So my fingers and toes are dead,” Cielo said. “That explains the feeling, actually. It’s a sort of rehearsal.”

  “Please save all of Cielo’s body parts,” I said. “I need him intact.”

  Vanni’s chuckle reached me before I saw him. He and Xiaodan had chosen that moment to turn the corner of the cobbled street, which had held up surprisingly well in the storm, leaving a perfect map of where a village used to stand.

  “We all need to be in fighting shape,” I said. “We don’t know what we’ll find in the Capo’s camp. And besides,” I added for Mimì’s benefit, “you have no idea how much he’ll complain if he loses even one of those toes.”

  “What does it matter?” Vanni asked, squatting to sort the items he and Xiaodan had found, pitching aside ancient parsnips, biting and grimacing at a hard ciabatta, rejecting a basket of eggs riddled with cracks, and gathering everything else in a precious little heap. “If you don’t have toes in this form, just use that book of yours. Be something else.”

  “This body is dear to me,” Cielo said, clutching it like it might be stolen from him at any moment. “And if I lose a piece of myself in this form, it will be lost in any that boasts a similar anatomy. Do you know how many things have toes? I would be doomed to life as a snail, oozing my way from one end of Vinalia to the other. Slowly. Hardly helpful to your cause.” I did not miss the stare he gave me.

  “Be quiet, please,” Mimì said, pressing Cielo back down to rest.

  “Will it help me heal faster?” Cielo asked eagerly.

  “It will help me not kill you,” Mimì said. “So yes.”

  As soon as Cielo was thoroughly warmed, we made our way out of the ruins of Zarisi. Xiaodan spun a circle and tested the air with her fingers, using her magic as a sort of compass. “There are people to the west. They’re . . . well, this is how people tend to feel when they’ve been drinking a lot. Sort of fizzy. About to fall down but happy about it.”

  “So they’ve heard about the victory,” I said. “That’s a good thing, at least.”

  “Until my beloved uncle pretends it was all his doing,” Cielo said.

  “The Capo is your uncle?” Vanni asked, which reminded me that we’d never bothered to tell the rest of the streghe. I’d thought that since Mirella knew, they must all know. But not everyone had her talent at picking through the mud of gossip for shiny bits of information that might prove useful.

  The streghe were all staring at Cielo as if he’d grown several extra toes, instead of losing the slightly frozen ones.

  “It’s true,” Cielo said shortly.

  “I’m going to need more of the story than that,” Mimì announced.

  Cielo grimaced at me, and I could feel his pain almost as palpably as if I were Xiaodan, plucking it out of the air between us.

  “I can tell it,” I said to my strega as we reached a frozen stream. I clutched his hand, and we stepped out onto the thick layer of ice. It answered with a dull, hollow sound. “If that makes things easier?”

  Cielo nodded, keeping his eyes on his boots, as if the ice might crack at any moment, though it was frozen several feet deep.

  When we reached the far side, I turned back to the others, still in the midst of crossing. I chose my words as carefully as I would have chosen steps on this river, come the spring thaw. “Cielo’s mother was the first strega recruited by the Capo before he began his campaigns.” I skipped the bit where she grew powerful killing other streghe and feeding on their power. “She fell in love with the Capo’s brother, a priest in the Order of Prai.” Xiaodan’s eyes grew large, and Vanni slipped a bit, regaining his footing by reaching out for Mimì’s arm at the last second. “And then the Capo forced her to turn her magic on his brother.”

  Mimì drew in a cold, sudden breath. It wasn’t hard to guess that she was imagining someone ordering her to use her magic against Lorenzo.

  “What happened to Cielo’s mother?” Xiaodan asked as the streghe reached the bank.

  I turned to Cielo, who had walked ahead a bit, probably to avoid this conversation. Still, I kept my voice pitched low.

  I remembered all too well the moment that Giovanna turned a dagger on herself. The way she apologized to a tiny Cielo before plunging it deep. “She took her own life. Through the brilliant death, her magic fell to Cielo.”

  That magic, stolen from the Capo’s court, had taken my strega years to learn, to shape with the help of the book, to gain a measure of control over. I had the same stolen magic in my blood now—but I didn’t have years.

  We walked in silence, the early dark of the season bearing down on us.

  “A Capo, a strega, and a priest,” Vanni muttered. “That sounds like the beginning of a tavern joke, not someone’s family tree.”

  A little more than an hour later, we reached a small forest of what seemed to be stunted trees but turned out to be composed entirely of tents. We ducked out of view, and I grabbed Cielo’s hand and pulled him aside, not wanting the other streghe to see the fear that crawled through me, claiming territory. My throat. My lungs. My heart. “What happens now?”

  “I know you wanted to fly in on the wings of victory,” Cielo said. “But perhaps it’s better this way. If you came in here with a portion of the Capo’s army on your side, but you hadn’t bested the Capo himself, you would have a skirmish on your hands. But if you sneak in and overtake him first . . .”

  Cielo’s strategy was elegant, and I wanted to believe I’d taught him this skill from my store of di Sangro lessons, but there was a much more obvious possibility. “This plays into your own schemes somehow, doesn’t it?”

  A moment came back to me, the meaning fully visible now that I didn’t have a battle clouding my view. I am not the one who came here to stop a war.

  “Why did you come to the Neviane, Cielo?” I asked. “And if you say that you did it out of love for me, I’ll know you are lying, because you can love me and disagree with me as easily as you can walk and preen at the same time.”

  Cielo cast a quick eye at the encampment. “I want to pay a visit to the soldiers of Erras.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Are you trying to steal those knives?” My throat was healing, but my magic stung at the memory.

  “I’m not after the Bones of Erras,” Cielo said.

>   “Then what?” I asked, remembering Dantae’s offer of a place with the soldiers of Erras. I didn’t truly believe my strega would defect, but it didn’t stop worry from trampling me like soiled boots on fresh snow.

  “It has occurred to me,” Cielo said, “that if the Bones of Erras are real, other things might be real as well.”

  I grabbed Cielo’s arm when I sensed movement in the camp, pulling us back to the heavy darkness of the pines. “Such as?” The words came out as glittering and sharp as the icicles that clung to the branches above us.

  The hood of Cielo’s cloak was flecked with snow, the points of white nearly all I could see in the darkness. His voice came from some depth in his chest I hadn’t plumbed before, a place of ancient hopes and fears. “There is a story of what happened to Veria after she called the sea to swallow Erras. She was more than just the one who killed him, you know. They had been allies, once. Great friends. Some of the stories . . . well, some believe they were lovers.”

  A chill moved through my bones, slowly, like the shift of shadows as the moon nudged them.

  “Why would Veria love such a terrible god?” I asked. “He killed everyone they both knew.”

  “Erras believed he was righteous, but Veria saw the truth. And those are not always the same thing.” Cielo’s hand went to his pocket, the one I knew concealed his book. “Before that rift, they must have understood each other. There weren’t many in the world like Veria and Erras. Imagine how lonely it must have been.” I looked to the tiny band of streghe I’d gathered, each one looking deeply alone as they faced the great woods, the wide mountains, a camp full of men who did not understand who—or what—they were.

  When I thought of the old gods, I had only been able to see an existence of worship and power, but distrust and fear were just as likely.