The Storm of Life

by Amy Rose Capetta

  * * *

  I flew for hours, following as my strega drew a dark streak across a sky as pale as a fevered brow.

  I had always thought storms looked swift from the ground, but in this form of clouds and wind, I proved to be a great, lumbering thing, unable to move without noticing every disturbance I caused below. I rustled trees, toppled carts. The men and women of the northern provinces squinted up at me through distrusting eyes and I thought, This will only worsen when Beniamo’s message spreads.

  My brother would slander us—tell stories of two streghe with magic grown ravenous and wild.

  And people would believe him.

  My anger rattled down as rain, lightning, thunder, until I had nothing left. I traveled in an emptied-out quiet.

  Vinalia shed her skin, the raised flesh of hills giving way to smooth fields. From this height, I could see—no, I could feel—the roads. So many of them, built of dark and enduring stone, sliding people and goods toward a single point. This was how the ancient empire had poured blood into its heart, by creating roads unmatched throughout the world, all leading to a single point.

  Prai.

  The ancient capital burst into sight, prickly and glorious, clad in every material imaginable: brickwork, stone, tile, painted wood. The white and pastel marble found in so many Vinalian cities was here, but it had competition. Along each lively, jumbled street, homes and churches and shops shouted their existence to keep from disappearing. At the center of Prai stood the vain but undeniably grand dome of the Mirana, home of the church. At the outskirts of the city, the markets and temples of the old empire, slighted by time and weather, kept watch.

  From so high, I could sense how this place was different from Amalia. The Capo’s chosen capital had been laid in straight lines and squat arches. This place held a little bit of everything, the best from all corners of Vinalia stolen and tossed together. If Amalia was an earnest soldier, Prai was a pickpocket.

  I thought we would fly straight over the city, but as we drew close, Cielo wound around the tops of the buildings. I followed, doing my best not to blow tiles off roofs and crosses from the tops of churches.

  People tilted their necks, confused by the strange and dangerous dance taking place in the sky. Cielo slid toward the ground and I followed, calming my winds as best I could, but even so, women’s skirts fluttered and water in fountains trembled at my touch.

  We came to a street lined in tall houses, a proud few painted in persimmon or marigold. Their sides were furred with dark green vines, which shushed me as I tossed their leaves. When we slipped into the alley, I tore a great deal of laundry off the slanting lines.

  Cielo slid through a second-story window. I blew open the curtains and tumbled, naked, onto a hard wooden floor.

  Cielo had come back in girlish form and was somehow half-clothed in an underskirt and a linen corset with none of the stays done. She kept one eye on me as she dug through a trunk and tossed me the first thing she found—an overlarge silk shirt. I brought it to my nose. It smelled of garlic and the rose perfume of the last person who had worn it. I pulled the shirt on slowly, silently.

  “Are you . . . all right?” Cielo’s voice was a smoky rasp. It sounded far too quiet.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “Prai,” Cielo said.

  “Be more specific.” I was being blunt. Harsh. But now that I was back in the body that Beniamo had attacked, I could feel every spot he’d touched me, and there was no room in my body for tenderness.

  Instead of giving me more clothing, Cielo sat behind me and covered me with her arms, pressing her chest to my back. Her tenderness melted a reserve of tears, and they flowed out of me silently. “We are in a nameless house that certain streghe know of, where both travelers and those who are in danger might stay for a time.”

  “The Order of Prai doesn’t know this place?” I asked roughly.

  “Of course they do,” Cielo said. “We have them over for anise biscotti every Tuesday.”

  Another fear wedged into my heart, which I had thought was full. “Do you think the streghe made it out safely?”

  “I’m sure they did. Beniamo didn’t know they were there, and they should have been able to vanish back into the woods without being discovered. Remember? They were waiting for our signal, which never came.”

  I breathed raggedly at the thought of my failure, and the whole ridiculous plan, which felt so tiny and easily crushed now that Beniamo had returned. I put my head to the floor, my cheek against its rough grain, overwhelmed by misery that had chased me all the way from the Neviane.

  Cielo rubbed my back, her hands moving in large, generous circles. “What happened in the camp? In the Capo’s tent?”

  I told her.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. Or maybe she was speaking at her usual strength, and that was part of the problem.

  “I will not let you take one drop of blame for my brother,” I said, forcing my tears to a stop.

  “Not that,” Cielo said. “I thought I understood about Beniamo. I knew you used magic against him once, but you were so protective of Luca, and he had thwarted your brother’s inheritance. I assumed Beniamo’s bout of violence was a spectacle, a one-night-only engagement, if you will. A show of foul manly behavior as well as disgusting owlish ways. I never imagined . . .”

  “How bad it truly was,” I finished.

  It had taken this much time for Cielo to see my brother. To understand the kind of terror I’d grown up with, gnawing at my days and infecting my nights. Of course, Cielo’s ignorance was partly my doing. I had never wanted to speak of what Beniamo had done to me. I had wanted to shove my memories of him to the side, in the hopes that his life would never touch mine again.

  “I was so upset over my lack of a family that I might have been a bit foolish about yours,” Cielo said. It was true that the strega had never been able to understand that my deepest hurts, as well as my greatest pride, came from being a di Sangro. “I might never have figured it out unless I saw . . . unless . . .”

  “Don’t worry, at some point you would have talked until you crashed into an understanding,” I said. A small smile awakened the muscles deep within my face, the ones Beniamo had dug into with chapped fingers.

  Cielo’s hand flew at the first sign of my pain, touching my bruises with feathered gentleness.

  It did not surprise me that Beniamo had started out with marks that proved he could hurt me, but would fade in time for him to add a fresh set of wounds. There was one injury that might not heal itself, though, as if my brother had left an invisible promise of what was to come.

  “My ear . . .” The skin around it was burning and tender, but that wasn’t the worst part. On the inside, it felt like a mattress stuffed with too much ticking, sound muffled to the point of vanishing.

  “What’s wrong?” Cielo asked, the worry on her face coupling with the anxiety I felt at her faint, faint voice.

  “Maybe it’s not permanent,” I said. And then I remembered what Cielo had told me: how any loss would persevere no matter what form I took. I stood and slipped into the more boyish version of myself that I’d been in the Capo’s court. The reversal slid out of me seamlessly. I no longer needed to stare at myself from a distance to know that the girl in the reflection wasn’t my only possible form.

  Whatever happiness came with that knowledge was torn in half when Cielo announced, “It looks like you’re becoming fluent in the language of reversals.” Her words felt miles away. My hearing was as dull now as it had been before.

  I raged to one end of the room and back again, finding myself caught against Cielo’s chest, wound in her long, bare arms. She stared down at me, her eyes as wide as open doors, sadness passing through freely. “What?” I snapped. “Stop giving me that funeral look. I’m hurt, not dead.”

  “I have twelve decent reasons to kiss you right now, Teo,
but I’m not certain I should.” A new desperation fastened onto my thoughts. If Beniamo got his fingers around the way Cielo felt about me, and strangled it, I would never recover.

  A kiss came on with such force, I didn’t even feel our lips on each other at first. I was a gale, rushing into her. Then my mouth opened against Cielo’s, the way the sky cracks wide at the start of a tempest.

  Cielo needed no more convincing. She tugged at the shirt she’d given me a few minutes earlier, and I worked her up against the wooden walls of the house. As we kissed, groans brewed in her throat, so strong I could feel them rumbling in her skin.

  “I thought this place was a secret,” I said, plastering her neck with kisses. “I can only imagine what that sounded like with two working ears.”

  “I don’t care if every single priest in Prai hears us,” Cielo said. “In fact, it would do most of them good.”

  “I think everyone heard you, and that includes the retreating Eterran army.”

  “I haven’t seen you this way for months,” Cielo said, slipping around me and taking full stock of my body, a quick but obvious glance measuring the effect she had on it.

  “I didn’t know it was something you missed,” I said, unable to hold the distance between us. My mouth found its way to her back, pressing along the wrought-iron lines of her shoulder blades. “You don’t mind if I keep changing sometimes? You like when I take different forms?”

  Pleasure rubbed against unexpected worry. It had been one thing to work a reversal in Amalia, but what would Cielo think if I used my magic to change forms, not because it was needed, but simply because it felt right? My strega had always changed outward shape, flickering in and out of forms. What if my reversals seemed different to Cielo, less natural? The wrong way to live outside of the world’s strict boundaries?

  “I like it when you are Teo, whatever that means,” Cielo said as she fingered her undone corset laces. I felt the worry in my chest ease, and then slide away as easily as the cloth that bound Cielo’s breasts. “There are times when you are more a storm than a girl, and I’m not speaking of the Capo’s camp.”

  As she let the corset drop to the floor, I pressed in to cover the newly bared territory. Cielo poured out approval in warm, wordless sounds.

  I closed my eyes and entered a place that was only darkness and pure feeling, and there I discovered a truth: the forms that pleased me most were the freest ones, with no boyish or girlish aspects. I had come to love my girlish body, but it was not the whole of me. I found comfort in this boy’s form, but I couldn’t imagine swearing off every other just to please a world shaped by men.

  Cielo reached back with her fingertips, running them up and down my sides, drawing out deep shudders that felt like the frayed ends of my pain. “When we met, I’ll admit it bothered me you had to appear a certain way for other people, in order to hold power that should have been yours in the first place.”

  “That is the way of the world,” I said.

  “That may be true.” Cielo’s voice skipped darkly over the words. “But if we cannot change the ways or the world, why bother with magic at all?” She spun around, pushing me against the wall, the strength in her slender arms blazing. “You and I have already scratched out a few rules that I’m sure most people thought were inscribed in stone.”

  She worked my legs open and settled herself between my hips. When she lifted the hem of the shirt, my body leapt to greet her hand. I strained forward into her loosely closed fist as she poured a river of kisses down my neck, the strong lines of my stomach, and lower.

  And then I could do nothing but cry out, as loud as Cielo had done, and louder.

  I stepped into the feeling as if it were a steaming bath, the first few moments almost scalding with pleasure, which settled into a deep, soothing warmth. My hands skimmed through Cielo’s hair as my hips canted forward. With each long sweep, my worries and fears faded. They would return soon enough, but I would not live without this feeling. I would not live without Cielo. This, our brilliant life.

  I tapped on her shoulder, politely first, and then urgently.

  “Do you still have the vials?” I asked.

  “Mmm?” she asked, more than a little distracted.

  “From the strega in Pavella. The vials.”

  She shot up between my legs. “Oh . . . I’m not sure I would need . . . I mean, it’s hard to know what to expect if I were to . . . I’m not certain I can become . . .” I expected a long discourse on the subject, but Cielo nodded and said, “Best not to spit in the eye of fate.” She scampered half-naked across the room, rummaged through her cloak, and downed a small vial of milk.

  Then she threw off the rest of her clothes as if they were enemies, the only things standing between us and victory.

  I pulled more clothes from the trunk to soften the blunt floors, and we knelt together. I did not reach for her at first, and she did not rush past this moment either. We were stilled by a vast feeling, as if we had both rounded a bend in the road and found an ocean that had not existed the moment before. Cielo gathered me in her hands and pulled me closer, lifting herself up, until I moved out of the world and entirely into her.

  I did not know what to do at first, and panic threatened to put a stop to everything, but my body stepped in with its own understanding. I saw myself, two small versions of my striving caught in her clouded-over eyes. My fingers coupled nicely with Cielo’s ribs, her breasts brushing the tops of my fingertips. I felt a storm gathering through my body, a lightning strike that wished to pass through my hips. I tried to hold it off, but lightning was not easy to tame.

  Cielo tipped back and lay down, giving me a startling, complete view of her body as I resettled on my sore knees. I was frozen by the sight of her, afraid to move. Afraid that some disaster of my life or magic would shatter this long-awaited moment. She grabbed my hand and settled my thumb on the softest part of her breast, where pale skin shaded into milky brown.

  She had always been an impatient tutor.

  “I’m afraid,” I admitted.

  “Of my breast?” she asked.

  “No . . . I . . . no. I have a more general fear.”

  “I don’t,” she said, her eyes settled on my face. Cielo had always looked at me that way, as if staring directly at my face was as good as rummaging through the cupboards of my soul. “I’m not afraid, Teo. We are the only ones in this room, and there is no piece of you that frightens me.” I thought she meant the forms I could take, or the fact that I might spontaneously destroy the safe house with magic, but she was not done. “Your anger, your power. Your sadness.” That last one slowed me. “In fact, I will only be upset if you hold anything back.”

  My hand traveled down between us with a startling confidence. Having touched myself there many times, I knew it would add brightness and depth to Cielo’s feelings. Her breath became as rich as oil, and her body arched into a deep crescent. She turned her face to the ceiling and swore in every dialect of Vinalian.

  I got so tangled in the glory of watching that it came as a surprise when my own body doubled its strength and speed, flying into a whirlwind as Cielo clutched at my waist and closed her eyes.

  “You are safe here,” she muttered. “You are safe.”

  I did not know if she was speaking of the house for traveling streghe, or something much larger than that. But those words, in her throaty alto, broke me. I slid my hands to get a firm hold underneath her, and I held nothing back. One more great strike of our bodies, and we rocked together in the wake of my finish.

  With a pitted groan, I withdrew. Cielo stood up suddenly, as if important business had come to her attention. I watched her retreating backside, raw happiness already spinning into the fine threads of memory. But when she bent over, she flipped to a well-worn page in her book, took on a boyish form, and crawled back to me.

  My wanting picked up, an eager wind. As Cielo’s
body clashed with mine, another truth came clear.

  Only the sky can hold a storm.

  I woke to a stream of noise bubbling through one ear. People shouted in Vinalian, laced through with several other languages and the gritty cries of babies. Prai was fully awake.

  So was Cielo. He sat near my ankles in boyish form, his face cast in a honeycomb of light by the tattered curtains. He was spreading out a heap of food, arranging and rearranging with long, careful fingers. “You must be hungry after . . . well . . . I believe it would save a great deal of breath to call it everything.”

  That felt like a challenge, and my mind slipped new ideas between the cracks of my memories.

  “How long did I sleep?” I asked as I stretched muscles whose limits had never been quite as thoroughly tested as they had been last night.

  Cielo rolled his wrist several times as he said, “Exactly as long as it takes to recover from a march into the snowy mountains, a battle against an entire army, and a surprise visit from your brother.” My chest pulled at the mention of Beniamo. Still, I was glad to find the strega back to his traditional habit of honesty, not combing through his thoughts and picking out the offending ones before he spoke.

  I sat up slowly, finding myself back in girlish form, having changed so many times I lost track. There were leftover wisps of feeling all through my body. I set my fingers to working out the worst of the snarls in my impressively destroyed hair.

  “What are those?” I asked, nodding at Cielo’s bounty: small fried globes that were giving off a lovely smell.

  “A small miracle in edible form, one that I miss each day that I am away from Prai. They’re called supplì. First, rice is rolled together with beef ragù and mozzarella, the whole of which is coated in . . .”

  Whatever else Cielo had to say melted away as I bit into one, the thin fried coating giving way to savory, salted warmth. I groaned in a way that made Cielo’s face take on a distinctly helpless look.