Behind me, life and noise and chaos reigned. The countryside, in comparison, was stunningly empty. There was only silence and a slight wind running a finger along the folds of the hills.
I cast my magic away from me. If the Bones of Erras were below the city, I should be able to feel them from here. The power of a godlike strega had to be strong enough to travel through layers of earth, to survive the long, slow burial of time.
“Find them,” I said, letting myself speak to my magic out loud, hoping the old language would help orient me toward the bones.
My magic worked its way into the earth like a stain, moving down and outward at the same time, covering a great amount of ground, finding nothing but earth and brick and dull, dead shards of the past.
“Try harder,” I said, my heart railing against the effort, as if I were running miles instead of standing in a single, unimpressive spot.
My magic filtered its way down through layers of Prai, each one shed like a skin the city had outgrown. I could feel the shape of what lay underneath me: walls and buildings and waterways. There were no glints of magic in this heap, nothing that whispered or shouted in the old language, nothing that begged or commanded to be pulled from the earth.
If Oreste was right, the Bones of Erras should have surrounded the city, and finding one shouldn’t have been difficult if my magic had any sense at all. There were so many bones in a human body. So many tiny, fragile pieces that somehow added up to a person. So many different ways to break.
My magic rushed down until it hit hard rock, then recoiled.
Nothing.
Frustration stabbed at me. Oreste could have lied. What if he sent us on a foolish journey simply to get Cielo away from him? Why would he give up the church’s secrets to streghe? Why would he finally choose to be helpful after so many years of denying his family, picking up the hem of his robes and running from his fears and failures?
I walked the rim of the city: one mile, then two. The sun made a slow, dramatic exit from its place of honor in the sky. Stars appeared, fighting to be the brightest in the sky, to outstrip each other with their silver offerings.
I grew tired and hungry, and the only thing that kept me moving was knowing how much this meant to Cielo. I did not have to believe it was as important as stopping Beniamo. I only had to remind myself that Cielo was in the sky right now, soaring toward my family and our band of streghe.
If Cielo could have faith in my schemes, I could have faith too.
The fields that had been uninterrupted for so long finally gave way to the sight of ruins just outside the city, the hobbled temple to the old gods and the glorious ancient marketplace stripped of everything but a few splintered walls.
There, my magic said, pointing me in a new direction—not down, but forward.
After all of my dark mutterings, the truth came like the dawn, bright and obvious. The edges of the ancient city were in a different place.
I ran, breaking the invisible line between city and countryside. My magic guided me. I had never been talented at finding other streghe, but these shards of magic were so powerful that even I could sense them, a dull aching throb. It felt like the aftermath of being cut, like the legacy of a wound.
Where are they? I asked my magic. Where are the bones?
I ran to the stairs of the temple, looking up through the smooth columns that ended in ruinous points like the ribs of a wrecked ship. My magic pulled me through the temple, which stood open to the air. Worship in ancient times had moved freely as breath. My steps carried me to the far side, where I cast myself to my knees.
What was it like, to be worshipped as a god, when you were simply a person with great magic? Was it a tide of constant adoration? Or was it the wash of loneliness I felt now, without Cielo nearby? Perhaps it was both, like magic and its reversal: two things that looked different but were actually the same.
My magic pressed down through layers of tight-packed earth. What they found made me shiver in restless bursts.
They are here. They are here. They are here.
I dug with my hands and my magic, both at once, working in a kind of jagged harmony. First I stripped away a section of earth with magic, changing hard-packed clay to air. Then I sifted with my fingers. Raw earth came up in my hands, and soon I was removing the rubble of another world, forgotten pieces of pottery and brick. Prai used to be here, but it had migrated, like some great bird that flew as slowly as the mountains rose and the oceans bit away at Vinalia’s shores.
Why did you come here?
The whisper in the old language slithered up through the earth. My hands scraped with a new frenzy, and as the moon rose over the hills in the distance, it caught on the scarred white of old bone.
You don’t believe magic can be changed. You know the ways of the world. The cruelties of men are never-ending. A circle you cannot break.
I picked the bone from the dirt, shook the dark crumbs free. It could have been any part of the god known as Erras. I was not familiar with anatomy like my brother Luca had been. I could not name what I held; I could only feel its magic rushing through the halls of my mind, throwing open doors that I kept locked.
You are here for nothing. You are nothing. Magic has not given you the power you seek. You will spend the rest of your short life chasing it, then fall into a grave, forgotten.
You have no god to claim you.
No friends who will come for you.
No family who will mourn you.
No love strong enough to save you.
The night grew darker, clouds making a slow journey over the moon and dulling its glow. I didn’t stop digging until I found three bones. Where the first was slender and curved, the second looked small enough to be part of a finger, or a toe. The last sat heavy in my hand, scratched dark at both ends.
After listening to the bones whisper their insults for hours, I would have happily turned the large one on myself simply to gain a minute of silence.
But I had to be back at the safe house when Cielo arrived, so I tucked the bones in my pockets and carried them back into the living city. When I’d studied the neighborhoods of Prai I had dug the trenches of memory deep, and my body found the vine-covered house without much help from my thoughts.
When I reached the little room on the first story I dropped onto a pile of clothes and fell into a chasm of sleep. I woke expecting to find Cielo at my side.
All I had were the bones in my pockets, whispering.
Your strega is gone. You have already lost.
I waited for an entire day, only leaving the house long enough to barter for another heap of hot, oily street food. It did not taste nearly as delightful as it had the first time, with Cielo’s hand sometime brushing mine when I reached for a bit of baccalà.
As night crept near again, I spent every minute thinking of the ways Beniamo might have tracked Cielo, hurt Cielo and left my strega without help, killed Cielo and waited for me to discover it.
I imagined Beniamo’s smile, slick with moonlight.
I imagined his talons, raised and glinting, then crushing through Cielo’s slim body with a sickening sound.
I felt the heat of Cielo’s blood rising as steam. I smelled death on the wind.
I lived the moment when Cielo passed out of the world, and then started over and lived it again.
My mind lost its ability to tell the difference between a real death and one that it drew with its own crude hand. I railed against the wooden floor, cried out, crushed my body into painful shapes. This must have been one of the tortures Beniamo had devised for me. It was as keen as any blow he’d ever landed.
A knock sounded at the door downstairs, bold enough that even with my near-deafened ear I heard it right away. I flew down the narrow staircase and flung it open to see a woman, clad in leather and a deeply notched frown.
“Dantae,” I said. “What
do you want?”
“You dead on the doorstep, but I’ll settle for the Bones of Erras,” she said. “Your strega told me you were working on some kind of elaborately stitched plan, and I would find what I needed here.”
Elaborately stitched plan sounded exactly like a phrase Cielo would conjure, and for a moment my heart sparked with hope. Cielo had made it all the way to wherever the soldiers of Erras had gone after breaking camp. Cielo had delivered my letters. My hope did not catch, though, and light the fires of true comfort.
“Cielo should have returned by now,” I mumbled.
“You love that feral strega, don’t you?” Dantae asked.
“Who told you that?” I asked, defending my deepest feelings from yet another person who might try to turn them against me.
Dantae nodded at where I was clutching myself across the middle. “It’s all over your body. You might as well be screaming it.”
The whisper of the bones drifted down the staircase, cold and certain, finding me even from a distance. You have lost the one person who knew you. The only one who truly cared. You have sent Cielo to greet death.
I brought Dantae upstairs and gathered the Bones of Erras, unsure of whether I was doing the right thing but glad to be rid of them. “Why do you worship filthy pieces of a strega you never knew?” I asked, thrusting them away from me.
“We don’t,” Dantae said simply. She took one bone at a time, studying them with the eye of a scholar. “The old gods aren’t a religion to us. They’re . . . more like our elders. The Bones of Erras make it easier to defend streghe against the many people who seek to destroy us. The Bones of Erras keep us alive. And they don’t work against my own men and women, which is part of the appeal.”
“I’m sure your people are pure as November snow,” I said, sarcasm crusting over my tone.
“Not a bit,” Dantae said, sitting down with her knees pointed at the ceiling, the bones in a heap between her legs. She took a knife as long as my shin from a sheath at her side and started to whittle the long, slender bone, leaving chips of an ancient strega on the floor. “Others are free to judge, but the soldiers of Erras don’t give their judgments power over us.”
I tried to picture what that would be like, but it felt impossible, like trying to spot the sun at night.
And my mind was somewhat busy, taking in the sight of the knife that Dantae was creating in front of me, one long stroke at a time. “Now that you have the bones you wanted, are you going to kill me?”
“Why don’t you answer that yourself?” she asked without looking up.
I felt the question I’d asked open up slowly, like watching a flower unfold into bloom. “You want to,” I said. “It’s not because you hate me, though. It’s . . . my magic. Something about my magic. You want it back. You think it belongs to the soldiers of Erras. To you.” I took a step backward, as if that would stop me from running into more truth. “How did I know that?”
Dantae chuckled. “My magic spins a question into an answer.”
“So, you agreed to kill me and Cielo because you want to reclaim the magic of dead streghe,” I said.
Dantae bent over the bone, working hard as she flayed the point, her lips set. “There is only one dead strega whose magic I care to steal back.”
The rest of the story came without help from Dantae’s magic. Memory carried it to me on a silver tray. “The man who came to the Uccelli years ago, the one that Father killed. The one my magic came from—you knew him?”
I was about to ask if he was her brother, her cousin, her friend—but the look on Dantae’s face hit me in a tender spot. I thought of Cielo, and how I would look if I knew someone else carried my strega’s magic inside of them.
“He was your lover, wasn’t he?” I asked.
Dantae’s face betrayed nothing, but her fingers tightened on the handle of her knife, as if she could throttle the truth. “Niccolò di Sangro was his end? Hardly seems fitting. I figured you did away with Mirco yourself.”
“When I was nine?” I asked.
“Children are less afraid of death. Less afraid of their own power, too. We start training ours young. There’s no point in pretending they’re helpless little creatures. If you tell them that story, they start to believe it.”
I thought of how many times I’d been told I was powerless, that what I most wanted was farthest out of my reach. That story had become as deeply twisted with my soul as magic.
“Why did Mirco’s magic . . . why did it choose me?” I asked.
Dantae shook her head. “You’re asking the wrong question. The answer won’t come.”
In a fit of desperation, I grabbed the long bone and held it out. It wasn’t sharpened yet, but it could still raise a decent bruise. “Why don’t you rephrase it for me, then?”
Dantae looked up, her interest whetted. “I have a better game. We fight. Whoever wins gets what they want.”
Cielo never would have let me agree to such a vicious bargain, but Cielo wasn’t here, and I needed the soldiers of Erras on my side. I couldn’t use magic against Beniamo, which made having an army to face his even more necessary.
“You want Mirco’s magic,” I said, laying out the terms clearly, as Father would have done. “I want your undying loyalty.”
“You think I’ll answer to you after I’m dead?” Dantae said with a rough smirk. “I’m afraid that’ll cost extra.”
“I’ll have to settle for the rest of your life, then.”
Dantae rose to her knees and leaned forward, brushing her lips against my cheek. Her lips were strangely hot, and she still smelled of death, but I found that I was growing used to the deeply salty odor. I kissed her cheeks, so tanned by a life spent in the woods that her skin was covered in a web of tiny lines. The aging of wind and weather made her look at least five years older than she was.
She must have been a young woman when she lost Mirco—perhaps the age that I was now. If I lost Cielo, how far would I go to find a piece of my strega? To keep part of Cielo with me, at any cost?
“Begin,” she said, without the showy smile she’d flashed in Castel di Volpe. Her eyes were hard and unblinking.
“Give her a reason to fear me,” I told the magic, the old language leaving me on a thunderous breath.
I wanted her to hear those words coming from my lips. I wanted her to understand how well I knew my own magic.
It changed the leather clothing on her body to a hissing wreath of snakes that moved over her skin, keeping her tightly wound in scales. Dantae glanced down and laughed. “I like that,” she said. “It will make for good stories.”
“What if they’re poisonous?” I asked.
Dantae shrugged. “Then you’ll be down one partner in battle with no one to blame but yourself.”
“Show her we are strong,” I said, but the magic felt stuck. “Hurt her, if you have to.”
She is already hurt, it promised me. There is nothing we can do to her that will leave a deeper mark.
As I battled my own magic, Dantae gripped my arms below the shoulders. “What would happen if you died today?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but Dantae’s magic was already at work, digging out answers. “Your brother will become the leader of Vinalia,” she said. “I don’t care about that, little one. Kings and rulers don’t care for us any more than we care for them.” Her fingers gripped harder, and my body remembered all at once that her closeness could mean death. “Here’s something worse. Your brother wants to kill every strega he can find. He’ll start with the weak ones to send a message to the strong. Then he will let our fears prey on us until we are half-dead. That man will hunt streghe like wounded animals.”
“He wants magic,” I said. And then, since she could probably get her hands on the truth anyway, I added, “He wants whatever is mine.”
Dantae’s first concern was keeping the soldi
ers of Erras safe. That was what she wanted the bone knives for. I should have known that it was the one thing that would win her over to my cause. But I’d gotten caught up in wanting to fight her—in craving a small portion of revenge for what she’d done at Mirella’s wedding.
“I’ve seen your brother in the Capo’s army,” Dantae said. “He’ll never inherit magic, but that will only push him harder, like a stallion with spurs driven into its sides.” She stepped back. “You don’t have my eternal vow, or whatever you noble types swear to each other. But you have me on your side in this fight, and that should be enough.”
“What about Mirco’s magic?” I asked.
“I can always kill you later,” she said with a shrug. The snakes that used to be her vest shivered up and down her skin.
* * *
When Cielo arrived at the safe house, hours later, she was weaving lightly on her toes, as if she were dancing the lead role in a difficult ballet after swallowing a great deal of liquore genziana.
“What happened?” I asked as Cielo stumbled into my arms.
“Flying in three directions at once was . . . Dantae, you made it! . . . harder than I supposed . . . Teo, did you . . . not my favorite way to travel . . . must talk to my father about his role in all this . . . get the bones?”
Her words kept weaving as her feet tried to carry her all over the room. Apparently, she had pushed too far with this latest magic. “I got the letters where they needed to be, but I couldn’t stand the separation for another minute. I had to be whole again, or I would never have made it back to you.” Cielo’s speech finally glued itself together, and her feet carried her in a straight line to me.
Dantae looked pointedly away as Cielo pressed herself against me.
“Is anyone else here?” Cielo asked. “I hate to think I went through all of that pain for nothing. It was like a headache that had the power to split my mind into three pieces.” I rubbed Cielo’s temples at the place where the roots of her dark hair tugged at her skin. She sighed into my touch, closed her eyes, and kept talking. “The streghe were behind me, so they might need another day, but the five families received my message first and had the least distance to cover. They should have been able to make it to Prai in less than a day’s ride if they were moving with adequate haste.”
The Storm of Life Page 17