Cielo’s voice drew me back to the slashes of darkness that passed for a hiding place. “Whatever the truth of their love, Veria’s heart broke when she killed Erras. To contain her grief, she worked a vase out of moonlight and cried into it for days, emptying her body of a sadness so heavy it almost dragged her into the sea. Those tears are called Veria’s Truth. Whoever drinks them will see whatever is real but hidden and change what they thought of as forever fixed.”
“You want to use the tears of a goddess to reveal the truth of the Capo?” I asked. “To unseat him? There must be simpler ways.”
“You are thinking in miniature, Teo,” Cielo said, breathing on his fingers that had almost been frosted to death. “I want to look into the heart of magic and find a new way to pass it from strega to strega.” Moonlight flitted over his face, drawing deep green from the wilds of Cielo’s eyes. “I want to change the death inheritance.”
The magic inside of me stirred, though I could not tell if it was in favor of the idea.
I did not care.
Cielo carried the same heavy truth I did. As long as magic was passed through death, we would always be hunted. I dared to think of a future when our magic was only a source of art and beauty, and no longer had to be used as a weapon to keep us safe.
But a practical part of me, the di Sangro part, didn’t understand how we could be focused on a hope as old as the empire when there were so many wrongs in front of us that begged to be sorted. “So we are in the business of chasing gods now.”
“You are not,” Cielo assured me. “At least, not while the Capo still rules Vinalia. But he will be deposed before dawn, and then perhaps we can turn our eyes elsewhere.” The casual air that breezed through Cielo’s words proved how firmly he had dug his heels into this idea.
There would be no talking Cielo out of this errand. What’s more, I did not want to. But there were still arguments to be made. “I can’t let you pay a visit to the soldiers of Erras alone.”
“Remember the twenty-seven-part favor you promised me?” Cielo asked.
I’d agreed to this endless string of favors before we left Amalia, and Cielo hadn’t invoked it since we left that city in a burning rush. I touched his face, warm fingers against icy marble. “I had thought parts three through twenty-seven could be delivered in a certain . . . specific form.”
“We can talk about the remaining, ah, bits when I get back,” Cielo said, his breath telling and quick, each white scratch of breath a hope written on the darkness. “For now, you have to trust that I will survive another chat with Dantae, as much as I trust you to face my uncle alone.”
A single mention of the Capo drew us apart like two halves of a curtain.
I wanted to tell Cielo not to trust a word from a strega so willing to punish her own kind. I wanted to ask how I was supposed to overtake the Capo if he was still wearing a ring that deadened my magic. I wanted to grab Cielo away from the shadow of this camp and kiss him with enough heat to thaw the mountains into an early spring.
But Cielo was pulling away from me, drawing out his book, losing himself in its rustle. He looked up at me, the blank white pages reflecting the moon, throwing light on the nervous twist of his smile.
“In the mouth of the wolf,” he said, offering the traditional Vinalian words for luck. The dash of added cleverness did not escape me—the Malfara family crest bore the image of a running wolf.
I nodded and gave the customary response, my words icy with intent. “May the wolf die.”
Cielo turned the page and became a sleek winter fox.
My strega trotted into camp, and if a few men noticed an unexpected creature among their ranks, they only gave a quick glance.
* * *
“We won the battle at Zarisi for those people!” Vanni shouted after I told him I would be sneaking into camp. “We should be able to stride right in and tell everyone we saved their frozen asses from the Eterrans.”
Xiaodan shook her head. “A soprano could hit the highest note that has ever been sung, and it wouldn’t matter if no one was there to hear it. We have no witnesses in the Vinalian camp to swear that we stopped the war.”
“These people won’t believe a bunch of streghe,” Mimì added.
Each word of defeat was a stone tossed at me. I flinched, over and over, but I refused to turn back. We had come too far to have our victory stolen from us. Words were as powerful as wars, depending on who spoke them. If the Vinalian troops wouldn’t believe streghe—what kind of person would they believe?
“The Capo is going to tell everyone himself,” I said.
The streghe stared at me as if I’d loosened my hold on the reins of my mind and perhaps dropped them altogether.
“I’ll turn myself into a soldier in the Capo’s army,” I continued, “and deliver a few boring papers. We’ll have the Capo sign, in blood if you like, and then the second I leave his tent—after they’re signed and his magic-negating ring can’t ruin things—I’ll change the papers into a written confession and abdication. It will be in his own hand, which I can forge magically once I have something to go by, and the signature itself will be perfectly real. The papers will state that the battle at Zarisi was won by powerful streghe. There will be a bit about how he has not proved to be the ruler Vinalia needs. It will be full of the Capo’s sentiments about the good of Vinalia and how it comes first at all costs.”
“Brilliant,” Vanni said. “Mirella told me you were smart, but this is . . .” Vanni formed tiny fireworks with his hands.
“A very pretty plan,” Xiaodan agreed.
Mimì’s smile burned with borrowed moonlight. “Do you think you can work in a bit about Salvi’s independence?”
“Of course,” I said, handing out a sizable promise before I had a chance to think. A second later, fear caught up with me. I wondered if I would have enough time, and enough control over my magic, to make so many alterations.
I distracted myself with more plotting. “When you hear the announcement, can you throw a few light bombs, some fire in the sky? Nothing to hurt anyone, just a bit of pageantry. You know how Vinalians love a good show.”
Vanni and Mimì shared a look of delight.
I turned to face the dark fringe of the camp as torches were lit. “Now all I need is a soldier’s uniform.”
“Oh,” Xiaodan said, fiddling with the furred hood of her cloak. “Costumes are important.”
“And not easy to come by in the middle of a mountain range,” Vanni said.
I thought of my cousin Sofia, the strega seamstress killed at the urging of a bone knife. Murdered by the same people Cielo was paying a little visit to right now.
My thoughts stumbled, and I could not seem to pick them up again. I turned back to the streghe to find Xiaodan sizing me up with her eyes. “What happens when you shift form?”
“She gets broader in the chest, with stockier legs,” Mimì said with a startling confidence. I had almost forgotten that she had met me when I was in a slightly different body.
“Boy Teo is an inch or two taller,” Vanni added.
Xiaodan cocked her head, nodded once, and then strode directly into camp. I almost cried out for her to stop, but Mimì grabbed my hand and pressed it tight. “Don’t give her away,” Mimì whispered. “Let the artist work.”
Xiaodan swayed on her feet, looking mildly lost and very young. She grabbed the arm of a passing soldier, a youth with fine features, freckles like a generous dusting of nutmeg, and a habit of nervous swallowing. “Can I . . . can I help with something?” the boy asked in a lovely tenor.
“My name is Elettra, and I’m here to sing for the pleasure of the Capo and his troops,” she said, the story striding off her tongue as if she’d been practicing it for weeks. “Do you happen to know the way to his tent?”
“Yes, you walk a bit farther down here, and then turn left at the heart of the camp. That path will end at
the Capo’s tent. Though you might want to pay a visit to the Capo’s wife first. She’ll be delighted to know culture has found us all the way out here. She loves opera and fine things.”
I grasped for the image of a woman the Capo could have taken for his wife—and found myself empty-handed. He didn’t seem like the sort to play at romance, even for the sake of spectacle and pleasing Vinalian crowds.
I only knew one thing. She would have to be someone easily reeled in by promises of power.
“I would love to visit both the Capo and his wife,” Xiaodan said, unfurling a shy smile. “But first, well, I’m terribly cold from coming up here in a sleigh. If you don’t mind, can we share something hot to drink in your tent? Or perhaps a warm blanket?”
The soldier looked around, trying to discern if he was caught in a dream. Then he looked back to Xiaodan. “Of . . . of course.” He offered her a hand and drew back the flap to his tent.
When I turned to the other streghe, Vanni’s eyes were wide with impressed shock. Mimì put her hands together to clap, though she kept the sound muted.
Xiaodan emerged a half hour later, alone, with a small bundle under her arm. She hurried to the edge of the woods and set down the clothes. I rushed to pick them up. “How did you . . . I mean, did you . . . ?”
Xiaodan’s face flared with satisfaction. “We mostly kissed. And talked in hushed voices. And then I helped the poor thing realize how exhausted he was, and he fell asleep. Don’t worry, I made sure I tucked the blankets up high so our soldier won’t die of cold.”
“Yes,” I said. “That was definitely my first concern.”
“You made love to a man to steal his clothes?” Vanni asked.
“I made love and stole his clothes,” Xiaodan corrected. She grabbed my shirt and started stripping me with the efficiency of a young woman who had been dressed and undressed backstage thousands of times.
“How did you know to choose him, of all the men in that camp?” Mimì asked, bundling up my traveling clothes as Xiaodan threw them off.
“Oh, that’s simple. When I sense emotions, I can feel which resonate with my own. It causes a lovely, shimmering harmony. That’s how I knew it was fine to join a group of strangers on a trip into the frigid north. That’s also how I was certain the young man I approached would be not only friendly, but lonely and inclined to talk. And just so you know, sentiment against the Capo is already turning in the camp. Some want his second-in-command to take over, but others don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Xiaodan shucked off my traveling skirt in a single motion. I almost yelped as the mountain air pierced my skin, finding its way past all of my boundaries and working deep into my bones.
Vanni turned his face up to the moon and pretended none of this was happening. A moment later, I looked down to find that I was outfitted in green and black.
Xiaodan had changed me into a soldier.
Now it was my turn to keep my promises.
* * *
I walked away from my little band of streghe, toward the camp. Torchlight mottled the darkness; cheers roughened the air. I wanted to head straight for the Capo’s tent and face him before my courage drained away. But first I needed a mirrored surface so I could change myself. I didn’t think many Vinalian soldiers kept such things in their tents. I crept to the edge of the camp and looked around for a source of water—a barrel for the men to drink from, perhaps.
That was when a soldier caught sight of me.
From the startled look in the unfeeling shallows of his eyes, I could tell what he saw. The quick, futile movements of an animal caught in a snare. The riotous curves of a woman’s body stuffed into a soldier’s clothes.
This wasn’t a reflection of the sort I would find in a mirror or a glassy stream, and yet seeing myself as this soldier saw me gave me enough distance to work a reversal. I called on my magic, less afraid this time.
If I was going to use these shattered and stolen bits of other streghe’s magic, I might as well use them against the man who had killed to force them together and shape them for his own use. I had always been good at punishing men who took what was not theirs.
This was my gift, and for the first time since I’d left the di Sangro castle, my magic rose without pain. It still felt impossibly vast—as harsh as the sea, as wide as the sky. It took all of the focus in my body to pinch it back down, to give it shape.
Change Teo into a nameless, faceless boy. My body shifted, whispering in new ways against the soldier’s uniform.
The man stared at me in horror.
“I know you’ve probably never seen a bit of magic in your life, but that reaction is a little much, don’t you think?” I asked.
I grabbed the man by the neck before he could reply, digging through muscle for a point Father had taught me about. My fingers clamped down, and the man fell into the snow. A few other soldiers turned to see what had happened, and I shrugged. “I think he choked on something.”
Perhaps his own stupidity.
“I’ll go get help,” I added.
I moved away as other men gathered around his body. It was a good thing Xiaodan had already found out the way to the Capo’s tent. One long stride at a time, I worked my way through the camp. My face felt strangely numb, but I assumed that was the result of being out in the cold for too long. The entire camp was still humming with the victory at Zarisi, and I nodded heartily as I passed, trying to look as if I belonged here.
Brow after brow furrowed, until I wondered what was wrong.
When I finally passed a water barrel, I stooped over, broke the skin of ice on top, gathered some frigid water in my hands, and used it as a makeshift mirror.
I dropped the water, stunned.
The magic had taken the word faceless literally, and where my features used to be, I saw only smooth lumps. My lips were papered over with plain skin, my dramatic nose all but gone. My eyes were a familiar dark brown, but there were no lashes fringing them, and where my eyebrows should have been were two barren ridges of bone.
No wonder I was drawing so much attention. People had a nasty habit of pasting their eyes onto anyone who seemed different. I rushed toward the Capo’s tent, only a few hundred feet away.
“He must have been in the battle at Zarisi,” a man behind me said, as if I couldn’t hear him.
“I heard it was a massacre,” another offered. “No survivors.”
I paused, in the grip of a new idea. If people believed I was the lone survivor from Zarisi, it played into our plan.
“I was there,” I said, my voice turned thick, words blunted by the state of my lips. “I ran up to the mountains to see if I could take out a few Eterrans from above. That’s the only reason I survived.” Men were drawing in from all directions now. “Their forces were laying waste to ours, and then streghe appeared on the mountainside, like angels.” I was playing it broadly, but war was not a time for understatement. “They used magic to change every single Eterran soldier in the town to snow.”
“. . . snow?” one of the men asked.
“I believe it,” another one tossed in. “Those two in Amalia changed themselves into wind and fire, remember?”
Those two in Amalia.
They were talking about me and Cielo.
“I have to go report to the Capo,” I said, walking away from the soldiers with a long stride, a delicious swagger that came from learning I was as infamous as Cielo believed.
I ducked toward the Capo’s tent, pulling out the papers I’d drawn up on loose pages Vanni had folded neatly in the bottom in his pack to write a letter back to his mother if he got the chance. He’d even brought a small pot of ink and a pen with a nice, wide nib.
“God bless Signora Moschella and her over-packing tendencies,” I’d said as I wrote up a quick, false report from the southern provinces. Making it from the Uccelli had seemed a little too bold, like
it might somehow draw attention to my true identity.
The lines I’d inked were now running with my sweat. Of course, it didn’t matter what the paper said. I would change it as soon as the Capo had signed and I’d gotten safely away from his ring.
He wore that shard of magic always. It kept streghe from hurting him, but I believed his reasons for seeking it out went deeper. He spent so much time around dying streghe, and he didn’t want the brilliant death to turn him into one of us. We were tools, not true Vinalians. We were there to be used and discarded.
A man like the Capo dreamed of becoming an emperor, not a strega.
I ducked inside. As soon as I’d entered his tent, my body shifted seamlessly, without my permission.
I was back in girlish form again, my reversal undone. I spun to leave, but I could not cross the boundary. I cursed until I ran out of breath, and then I cursed silently until I ran out of satisfying words.
With my plan shattered to pieces, part of me wanted to sit down and give up, but I hated the Capo far too much to curl up and wait for his return. I started ransacking his tent for something I could use against him, but he kept his battlefield home as sparse as his rooms in the Palazza. A cot for sleeping, a porcelain basin to wash, a bar of soap that prickled my nose with the surprising scent of lavender. Perhaps this was his new wife’s influence.
On the Capo’s desk there was a mountain range of important papers, but just as I went to rifle through them, I noticed something more interesting sitting to the side. The ring the Capo usually wore, crafted from gold and stolen magic, was sitting in a bowl of water. The water cast the shine of the ring up and across the canvas of the tent, gilding it.
I reached for the ring, thinking I might steal it before the Capo returned, but my magic balked. It didn’t wish to be so near an object whose sole purpose was to unravel its working. Trying to touch the ring again felt like putting my hand to a flame—the drawback was instantaneous. In that moment of hesitation, the Capo drew aside the flap of the tent, smiling at me as if I were some long-lost cousin.
The Storm of Life Page 12