“Only Dantae is here,” I said, trying not to let those words pitch me into despair. Oreste would never be able to rally the church to our cause unless I gave him the backing of the five families. He would disappear into the safety of his robes if the only ally I could offer was a begrudging strega.
Cielo spun as if noticing Dantae for the first time. “Teo, did you put snakes all over our guest?” I tried to come up with a way to explain our little rissa incantata, but Cielo wasn’t waiting for my response. She pointed to the bones on the floor. “I see that Teo has filled our half of the promise. Now, what do you know about Veria’s Truth?”
Dantae gathered the bones, her vest hissing at Cielo. “Why don’t you answer your own question?”
Cielo’s head tilted slightly, her eyes narrowed. “You don’t know where to find it but you have heard of a place that should point us in the right direction. It’s called the Buried City. It’s underneath the very center of ancient Prai.” Cielo shook her head as if trying to rattle a marble out of a wooden maze.
“You can thank Dantae’s magic for that,” I said.
And because I could not stay in that tiny room waiting for my father, I grabbed Cielo’s hand and drew her toward the stairs.
Cielo’s whisper hooked into the softest parts of my body. “I’ve barely returned, and you want to work at your schemes all night?”
“I want to work at your schemes,” I said, pushing Cielo against the railing as soon as we were out of Dantae’s sight. “And there are plenty of hours before dawn.”
* * *
We returned to the Evracco neighborhood, the oil lamps in the windows like a set of low-hanging stars. I heard the rasp of boots on the cobbles behind us, but I knew enough not to turn.
“We’re being followed,” I said, sliding my hand onto Cielo’s arm.
“That’s the point,” Cielo whispered.
She spun, and I followed, to find a girl whose dark eyes were touched with gold from the lamps.
“Are you lost, traveler?” she asked.
“We are all lost,” Cielo said.
“Can I help you find your way?”
This exchange made me think of a scrap of music that had been played an uncountable number of times, a well-worn passage.
Cielo stepped closer, and the girl flinched away, but I saw no fear in her eyes. It felt more like she wasn’t allowed to stand close to us, at least not when someone else could be watching.
“Where is the center of ancient Prai?” Cielo asked.
“Under the fountain of the maidens,” the girl said, in a voice that seemed familiar with the weight of secrets.
Cielo nodded, and the girl went on her way. We continued our walk past the shuttered shops. I resisted the rising urge to look back.
“Is she a strega?” I asked.
“Rivka? Yes, and no. She was born and raised in Vinalia, but the Evracci have their own name for those who hold magic. Chisappe.”
I wanted to ask a hundred questions about Rivka, starting with how—and how well—Cielo knew her. Jealousy rushed through me, as certain as magic and twice as sharp. “Is the magic of Chisappe the same as ours?” I asked.
“Again, it’s a matter of yes and no mixing together to create a different shade of truth. Chisappe can work magic and a reversal at the same time. They don’t see the two as opposites. They believe all things come together, hand in hand, without sorting them first the way other Vinalians do.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, feeling like Cielo and I had taken a step backward in time, to the days when I was first learning what it meant to be a strega. The magic inside of me still longed to know more. It was never done with seeking out knowledge, with answers that split into fresh streams of questions.
Cielo offered me her arm, in the same courtly way she had in her boyish form. “Magic is bound up with a person, and a person is bound up with everything around them. The way they are raised, what they are taught to believe. If you change the way people think, how they live, their magic has to change.”
The night air rushed with a thousand small messages about the people who lived in this city: what they had eaten for dinner, where they spent their daylight hours. I felt the stirring of new possibility. “So, if we change magic with Veria’s Truth, it might change the way people live in turn?”
Cielo’s arm tightened around mine, and for a rare moment, I let Cielo’s hope flow into me. Then we turned a sharp corner, traveled down the dark slit of an alley, and emerged into a piazza.
The fountain of the maidens was nothing like the bombastic creations scattered through Prai. While newer fountains had been carved of marble, this one was dark gray stone, slicked green with age. A single, deep bowl was ringed with young maidens kneeling. Their hair ran down their backs in waves of stone. Tears dribbled down their stone faces.
“Who would build this?” I asked, the words a low scrape in my throat.
“Most fountains are made to flatter and please,” Cielo said. “But this one is clearly made from a different sort of raw material.” Cielo turned to me on the fresh wind of an idea. “Do you think you can use your magic to change all the murderers of the world into fountains? They can spurt water wherever they’ve stabbed people.”
“I don’t know if there should be monuments to people like that,” I said.
“There are only monuments to people like that,” Cielo reminded me.
“This is different, though,” I said, running my fingers down the cold stone skin of one of the girls, from shoulder to elbow, as if I could take her by the arm. Studying her face felt as intimate as staring into a mirror. I knew that expression.
They’re mourning, my magic told me.
“We have to find a way underneath this,” Cielo said. “The water flows down. Shall we flow with it?”
“I think we can make it easier than that,” I said, pointing to the grate beside the fountain. I knelt beside it, and using night as a blanket to cast over my magic, I changed the metal bars into a set of dark twigs and then snapped them.
The hole that opened up beneath us was wide enough to slide down, and I sat down in the middle of the piazza, slipping into the world beneath. Iron staples bolted into the stone formed a ladder that led me below the city.
Cielo followed me down. Moonlight came with her, forming a column as white and solid as any made of marble. As I reached the bottom of the iron ladder, I stepped out of the light, into the darkness beneath Prai.
I picked up a broken bit of stone.
Light, please, I told the magic.
It flared, and the stone in my hand softened to tallow, the end springing to light with a single point of flame.
Cielo skipped the last few rungs of the iron ladder and leapt down, landing on the ground beside me with a skittering of stone. I turned in a full circle, thrusting the candle in every direction, hoping it would show us what we came to see.
Not that I knew precisely what to expect.
“What are we looking for?” I whispered. The ancient silence down here needed to be dealt with delicately. “The Buried City could be enormous.” Ancient Prai was probably smaller than its newest incarnation, but that could still mean miles of tunnels.
Cielo put a steadying hand on my wrist. “Start here,” she said, leading me toward a chamber that opened up at our left.
I was about to launch a thousand ships of argument, but the moment I took a step, I saw what lay behind the crumbled remains of a stone door. It had most likely been sealed once, but now it was a heap on the ground, and behind that, a dozen raised mounds of earth, set with stone tablets, each the length of a body.
“The Buried City isn’t just another layer of Prai,” Cielo said. “It’s a great deal more literal than that.”
I walked first, the candle bringing the crypt to life, one illuminated patch at a time. Now I understood what
the fountain above meant. Those maidens mourned the passing of the old gods and marked their burial chamber.
“Look,” Cielo said, touching one of the stone tablets set on top of a burial mound. “These are their stories, spending eternity with their bodies.”
The first stone set near the entrance of the room featured paintings of Melae, the goddess of death, usually depicted as a woman. But the flaking images reminded me that she was known to transform into a man once a year, when death came for the summer and the harvest was reaped, as well as into a bird who bore her favorite souls directly to heaven on large black wings.
Now that I knew the old gods were streghe, I felt a kinship with Melae. I wondered if Cielo felt it, too. For my part, the connection only grew stronger when I thought of the magic I carried, which was able to send so many to their deaths.
I had feared Melae’s powers as a child. Would others in Vinalia grow to fear me?
“Here is Cecci,” I said, moving on to a safer tablet, running my fingers over faded paint. In a few images, an artist had rendered the story of a strega who adored wine nearly as much as lovemaking. For a tribute to a god, the stone did nothing to hide Cecci’s bawdy nature, with more than a few images of Cecci and his lovers in positions that tugged at the limits of belief.
“I suppose that could be a sort of magic,” I mumbled.
“Looking at this, I’m beginning to feel like it’s the only magic worth having,” Cielo said.
At the bottom of the tablet was a very different image, of a man with righteousness in his eyes and a knife in his hand. The final picture was Cecci’s body letting out rivers of blood, the waves washing red. Under the picture, a single word was set down in the old language.
Prai, the magic told me, translating the markings.
“Does this mark where the stone was made?” I asked. “Or where Cecci died?”
Cielo looked from tablet to tablet. “They all have different places filled in, so probably the latter.”
I moved on, knowing what I would find and yet stuck to the sight of the blood at the bottom of each tablet, washed to a dull pink by the centuries. But time scrubbed away none of the terror. “All of these stories end the same way. Erras kills the gods. His family, his friends, his lovers.”
“Look,” Cielo said, drawing my eyes to the end of the chamber and two burial mounds that didn’t match the rest.
One was empty.
“Erras,” I said. “He’s buried all around the city. Those worshippers were like wolves, scattering him.”
“He deserved it,” Cielo said darkly. She moved to the final burial mound, her fingertips resting on the stone tablet. “It’s her.”
I stood across from Cielo and tipped the candle closer. Veria’s burial mound told the story of a strega whose magic stripped away lies and left the truth shining. Wherever she went, hearts glowed with it, like small suns trapped in people’s chests.
At the bottom of the tablet, Erras appeared again, but this time Veria slipped away from his knife. The final picture showed her huddled in a cave as waves rushed in to claim Erras. She was crying, crying, her tears mingling with the sea. Some of them trickled into a vase that glowed so brightly I thought it must have been magic, but when I touched it, there was only flaking old paint.
There was a single word under the picture. Drowned.
“The vase of moonlight,” I said. “It must still be in that cave.”
“Why wouldn’t they bring it here?” Cielo asked, impatience ripening and bursting all at once.
“They must not have been able to find it.” The water in the cave gleamed a shade of blue that was nearly purple. I knew only one place in the world that looked like that. “It’s somewhere along the Violetta Coast.”
Cielo sighed, setting her weight against the burial mound. “The Violetta Coast covers a hundred miles, more if you take into account every nook and cranny and cave. I was hoping for something a bit more specific.”
Drowned, the magic said.
“I know she drowned,” I growled in the old language.
Drowned, my magic repeated.
I looked again at the word on the burial mound, and my heart didn’t quite glow, but it did flush with heat. On the other burial mounds, the word did not give a description of how the person died.
It named the place where death came for each god.
“Have you ever heard of the drowned grottoes?” I asked.
Cielo looked up with a vague, unformed recognition on her face, like clay that had been palmed but not yet molded.
“Fiorenza, my stepmother, is from the Violetta Coast. She used to tell us a story about a place where pirates would go to hide their treasures, and girls would go if they cared to make love to pirates. Parts of it were flooded by the sea, and the tides ravaged it each day. There were secret ways in and out, known to only a few who lived nearby. Fiorenza called it the best hiding place in all of Vinalia. That’s where Veria’s Truth is.”
Cielo’s defeat did an about-face, and suddenly she was rushing toward me, leaping and shouting. “We can do this, Teo. We can change things. Finally.” Her smile spread out wide and whiter than the moonlight vase on the stone tablet.
I wanted to believe Cielo, but I knew that changing magic would not be enough to stop my brother. He had already been molded and set. If we managed to change the ways of the world, he might simply burn the whole thing down.
Cielo leaned in to kiss me, but my lips wouldn’t rise to the occasion. They felt as cold as stones in winter, and all I could think of were those girls above us, weeping silently, and forever.
Cielo and I climbed back through the grate as the bells in the Mirana chanted the hour, peal after peal until twelve had piled up. Cielo and I walked to the safe house and found it dark, but at least it was familiar. It gave off that wafting sense of home that I hadn’t felt since the day I left the Uccelli. It was as strong as Fiorenza’s favorite orange-and-anise powder, as sudden as a flash of Mirella’s dark hair moving through the leaded windows of the tower.
And then I realized that the feeling wasn’t coming from the house itself, but something inside of it. A magic I knew as well as my own.
He’s here.
I pushed past Father’s magic and found more waiting. Mimì, Xiaodan, Vanni. Dantae was still there. I was getting better at recognizing power at a distance. The rest of the five families, those poor souls without magic to light their way in this dark world, must have been packed tight in the narrow house too.
“They’re all here,” I whispered to Cielo, hope getting a stranglehold on my voice. “They heard the call to stop Beniamo from taking Vinalia by force, and they came.” When I was a child, I had tried to tell my parents that my brother was dangerous. They had done nothing to stop him. Fiorenza hadn’t been able to rein in a di Sangro boy born to another woman. When I dared to tell Father, he had frowned at me like I was causing trouble, instead of being harmed by it. Beniamo had doubled my punishments as soon as he had me alone.
I wasn’t alone anymore.
I had the five families, and now a sixth, as well as the soldiers of Erras behind me. I was no longer a little girl, taking off my slippers so I could move silently down the stone hallways of the di Sangro castle, afraid to be caught.
Tears rimmed my eyes, and the press of Cielo’s hand in mine almost shoved them over the edge. “Go in,” Cielo said. “Your family is waiting for you.”
No matter how strongly I felt, this moment also set the practical clockwork of my scheme in motion. “We go to Oreste,” I said. “This minute. He needs to know that our plan has powerful backing.”
“Otherwise he’ll disappear on the first boat to the virgin continent?” Cielo asked.
“Only if he’s being predictable,” I muttered. “We need your father to renounce the priesthood and ask the church to join us so we can bring our forces together for
a great meeting tomorrow. If we don’t leave Prai by the day after, we’ll never cut off Beniamo as he marches the army into Amalia.”
“Which gives us a single day to unite the squabbling powers of Vinalia,” Cielo said, the slanting of her inky eyebrows just as effective in the dark.
“Think of it this way,” I said. “If you give a man any longer than he needs, he will invent problems he doesn’t have.”
“Is that one of your father’s sayings?” Cielo asked.
“No,” I said. “It’s one of mine.”
Cielo grabbed my other hand, so we were doubly linked, and laughed as she said, “I never thought there would come a day when you’d choose the Malfaras over the di Sangro family, even for an hour.”
I cast a look at the safe house, my heart straining toward the people I loved. My magic had other plans, though.
“Let’s move fast,” I said.
“As long as there are no feathers involved,” Cielo said. She drew out the book and flicked a page, becoming the wind I knew almost as well as the strega’s boyish and girlish forms. I watched Cielo slide into the sky above me.
With a liquid reversal, I rose into the night.
At midnight, Prai was fiery thread stitched on a background of velvet darkness. Cielo and I skimmed over the bristle of tile roofs and parted around the curve of domes. We flowed together, branching and weaving in so many combinations that I could not tell which bit of air belonged to me and which was Cielo’s.
Hope urged us forward with reckless speed. We knew the location of Veria’s Truth. We had our allies gathered. If both of our plans worked, we might be free to live. We might have the chance to love each other fully.
I’d had no idea how much fear was holding me in place until I left it behind, ripped away by the cold wind.
The Storm of Life Page 18