The Mirana slid into place under us, and Cielo and I tumbled down, over the fretted roofs and into a series of wondrous gardens, each one like a small jeweled box set with flowers in a hundred different shades. We came back to the world, naked and already twined, grass biting into my bare skin everywhere it was not fortunate enough to be pressed against Cielo’s smoothness.
“We can’t do this here,” I said, the presence of the priests like a set of eyes pinned to my back.
“What will they say?” Cielo asked with a rough smirk. “Two streghe were caught in a headlong embrace in their own gardens?”
“So, we’re safe because they don’t want to admit their failures?” I asked.
Cielo answered by kissing me. His lips offered the same heady freedom I’d felt when I was flying. I could think of no more reasons to hold back, and so I poured with a generous hand, fingers and lips streaming over his skin without pause. I used his shoulder blades to draw him closer.
Stop yourself, my magic said. Before your enemies stop you.
Heat built around our bodies, the white heart of a bonfire. The feeling pushed me forward, eyes consuming every bit of Cielo’s skin, kisses searing. I did not care about the priests, the constant parade of dangers.
I needed Cielo, only Cielo.
“Teo,” he said, tapping on my shoulder so politely, it stopped me in the midst of reaching for him. “Teo, are you by any chance angry at these flowers? Have they done something to bother you?”
I looked around to find that the garden was on fire. Every bloom had ripened, not with life, but with flame. Delicate petals burned with a steady blaze. Fruit trees crawled with yellow and orange, a hunger that threatened to devour them. Flakes of ash latched on to the wind, falling like impure snow. The heat that I’d felt was not only a matter of rubbing skin and the rush of eager blood.
It was magic, burning a small patch of the Mirana.
“Well,” said a voice that made me cringe, a voice that did not belong to this moment. I looked up to find Oreste standing in an open doorway, looking as if he’d just tossed on his robes, the collar left undone. “This is quite a scene.”
“Stop,” I told the magic, but it only flared brighter at Oreste’s sudden appearance. The garden was being swallowed. I did not know how far my magic would go, if it would claim all of the priests, every inch of Prai.
“I can only protect you for so long,” Oreste said. “Someone else is bound to notice this little show. I suggest you do away with the hellfire if you don’t wish for people to start drawing comparisons.”
Oreste’s dry wit was so much like Cielo’s that I couldn’t decide whether to cringe or laugh. The frantic need to stop the flames did nothing to help me control my magic.
“Teo,” Cielo said, his words fractured by smoke. “Perhaps some water, to put this out?”
Cielo was right. Stopping my power wasn’t the point. Giving it direction would work just as well. I took a breath, smoke crowding my lungs.
“Water,” I cried.
The flakes of ash became rain, sizzling the fire into nothingness. The garden went dark.
The silence that came over us was laden with trouble.
Oreste sighed. “You must leave. You never should have come here.”
“What?” I asked, standing up with one arm slung over my chest and the other hand covering the feature that I thought a priest would most object to.
“It is one thing to help my child, even if such a child should never have existed in the first place. That is my sin to bear, not . . . anyone else’s.” Oreste looked briefly at Cielo, then away, as if the sight of his own family burned. “But to help that child sin . . .”
A small, rough laugh escaped me.
Did Oreste truly care about this degree of sin? While some young people pretended to be virtuously untouched, it was true for few in Vinalia, and everyone simply nodded along while they lied. It was like calling the land across the sea the virgin continent. There had been colonists from this side of the ocean on it for nearly two hundred years—and whole civilizations there before they arrived. And yet we kept calling it untouched.
Of course, I couldn’t argue any of these points with Cielo’s father, especially not while trying to fan my hair over my breasts with the hand that wasn’t covering the spot between my legs.
“Do you deny that you two are sinning?” Oreste asked, his voice taking on the shiny heat of coals.
“Yes,” Cielo said.
“Do you deny that you are lovers?” he asked, hotter still.
“Not a bit.”
“What if we were married?” The question flew out of me, doubts flocking darkly behind it.
Should I have said that? Did I wish for Oreste to marry us here, now, as part of a desperate bargain to save Vinalia from my brother’s rule? Would Cielo believe I’d only come up with this plan to soothe his father’s God-fearing heart?
And then, when I saw the strained, questioning look on Cielo’s face, new fears troubled the skies of my thoughts. Did Cielo want to be with me forever? Had I been afraid to ask because my strega—ever the cynic about people’s hearts—might have less trust in lifelong love than most Vinalians had in magic?
“Are you married?” Oreste asked.
“Not presently,” I admitted. “But you are a priest, and therefore the only person who can help with that part.”
“A wedding would be an acceptable solution,” Oreste said.
Cielo flung his hands in the air and turned from his father, letting him see the dimples of his buttocks. When he thought Cielo was no longer watching, I saw Oreste take us in with a gentleness that made me wonder. Was he remembering what it was like to be in love with his own headstrong strega? Did he see that love mirrored in us?
“We’ll get started at once,” Cielo’s father announced.
“You’re going to perform the ceremony in a burnt garden?” I asked. “Doesn’t it have to be in a church?”
“If you’d prefer,” Oreste said dryly. “Though you’re not exactly dressed for church.”
I felt my blush grow, branching out in several directions.
“I prefer the gardens,” Cielo announced, standing up to prove that he didn’t care if Oreste, the entire Order of Prai, or even God saw him strolling around naked. “It’s a better story, altogether. Everyone gets married in a church. How many people can say they have gotten married under the moonlight in the Mirana gardens, after setting the whole thing ablaze?”
“This is about pleasing God, not improving on your legend,” Oreste reminded Cielo.
“Here’s something more important than proper setting or costume,” Cielo added, ignoring his father. “We have no one to prove that we’re married.”
“I can go fetch witnesses,” I said, thinking of Father and Fiorenza in the safe house, just across the city.
“No,” Oreste mumbled. “This will have to be a secret, at least for the moment. I can’t have the church leaders knowing I’ve done this. Or the five families dangling it over my head.” He sighed and headed back into the Mirana.
“I can’t believe he agreed to it,” I mumbled. A priest of the most infamous strega-hating order in the land had just agreed to marry Vinalia’s most powerful streghe in God’s own gardens.
“Is this the good sort of disbelief or the magic-will-start-leaking-out-of-you-at-any-moment sort?” Cielo asked.
“The first one.”
Cielo took my hands, his fingers still warm from the flames as they played over mine. “Did you only offer to keep Oreste on our side? Or . . . is this what you want?” The strega looked up at me with an impenetrable stare.
“Is this what you want?” I asked, spinning the question around to face Cielo.
“Teo.” Cielo’s hands gripped mine, a hard clench. “Please. I need to know why this plan sprang to your lips so easily.”
“I want to be with you in every way that the world can devise,” I admitted, chasing the words with a dry swallow of fear.
Why did it worry me to say that? Cielo and I had taken on a great deal together. We had peeled away layers of safety and certainty along with our clothes. And yet admitting such a deep and constant need for the strega made me feel more vulnerable than being in the church’s stronghold, naked and pouring magic.
Cielo’s lips quirked. I expected a long speech that pinwheeled from subject to subject, ending in my strega’s acceptance of my rather odd proposal. But all he said was, “Then it’s settled.”
“If Oreste is off to find more people, I’m going to need something to wear,” I said.
Of course, the magic answered, as the air around my body tightened and thickened into a simple, elegant dress, as green as the most verdant spots in Cielo’s eyes. I ran my fingers down the fine cloth, shocked into a laugh by the obviousness of the solution.
I asked my magic to give Cielo something to match.
“How have we not thought of this before?” he asked, appreciating his clothes by running his hands over his shoulders and chest.
“Perhaps I’ve never been terribly interested in clothing you,” I admitted.
Oreste reappeared and waved two guards into the garden. They looked around at the dark, crumbled remains of the flowers and fruit trees and said nothing. Their eyes were stuck halfway across the bridge between wonder and fear. One had a fair Celanese complexion, complete with a hail of freckles. The other had the famous Prai nose, a long straight ridge, and looked barely older than Luca should have been.
“MacCartaigh and Cinquepalmi are two of the church’s soldiers,” Oreste said. “If the time comes when you need to prove this took place, they will swear to it.”
“Were you and my mother married?” Cielo asked, tossing out the question as if it hardly mattered. Here was another thing these two had in common—both child and father were not particularly skilled at making their true feelings vanish from sight.
“No,” Oreste said numbly. “That would have been against my vows.”
“I thought you had promised to give those up,” Cielo said. “Or was that a lie to entice her into bed?”
“Cielo . . .” I warned, not wanting his father to snatch back his offer now.
But Cielo’s stare did not let up, even if his questions did.
“I intended to leave this place for Giovanna,” Oreste said, the hard clang in his voice fading. “But life did not honor my plans.”
“You did not honor them,” Cielo corrected.
“Well, you have a chance to put some salve on the wounds of the past,” I said, jostling my way into their argument. “The five families have united with us against Beniamo. With the help of the church, we can keep a man even more tyrannical than your brother from the throne. We have to move fast, though. Can you promise a meeting tomorrow morning?”
Oreste looked stricken, but he gave me the barest nod.
“Look at you, Teo, scheming even in the middle of your own wedding,” Cielo said with a smile that would not be held down.
Oreste cleared his throat and held up a book of prayers. The words of the ceremony, spoken in the old language, drifted over us like the slightly burnt smell of greenery on the night wind. And even though I knew the Order of Prai hated streghe, and the church did not trust them with a power they believed should be God’s alone, that did not stop the prayers Oreste spoke from sneaking into my heart.
I watched Cielo’s eyes on me. I could not read their color; the moonlight forced everything silver. For once, Cielo was not allowed to speak, unless he wished to stop the wedding. At the end of the last, solemnly intoned prayer, Cielo kissed me. Not a polite, ceremonial kiss. Cielo’s lips delved deep, and I swam down into a dark, shining place.
When I came back, I was gasping.
Cielo smiled at his father. “Teo and I did not require a wedding, but I thank you.”
Oreste looked from Cielo, to me, and back again. “Now, even if life does not honor your plans, you have each other.”
* * *
When we reached the safe house again, the bells in every church in the city rang in chorus. Once. Twice. The darkness around the streetlamps seemed to huddle and grow even stronger as night threw its long shadow over the start of the new day. I looked up at the lean house, its windows unlit.
“Go ahead,” Cielo said, nodding me toward the door. If we had not just been married at the Mirana, I would have. But if I opened the door, climbed the squealing stairs, and woke everyone inside, I couldn’t imagine the next time Cielo and I would have this chance to be alone together.
“Let’s not spend our wedding night with di Sangros around us on all sides,” I whispered.
Cielo snuck me in through a door to the cellars. We could find nothing to lie on but a rough old blanket, and yet I couldn’t find a single complaint in the stacks that I usually kept close to hand.
“Do you think we can celebrate without burning or breaking anything?” Cielo asked, running a nervous finger down my stomach. “Our allies are sleeping above us, and if we fry them up, your scheme is going to suffer.”
“The only scheme I care about right now begins like this,” I said, kissing the strega’s long, pale neck.
“Where does it end?” Cielo asked.
“It doesn’t,” I said. “That’s what makes it the best scheme I’ve ever come up with.”
“You are very good at strategy,” Cielo said, “but I have a few notions of my own.” Starting on his knees, he slid over me until he was unraveled at his full length. “Since we’re husband and wife tonight, I thought we might try something . . . traditional.”
“We’re not good at holding fast to the ways of other people,” I said, pushing his dark hair behind his shoulders so I could keep his face in full view. “Even our wedding was as odd as possible.”
“That’s what will make it so interesting,” Cielo said. “I’m sure we’ll come up with our own embellishments.” This arrangement, with Cielo’s boyish body hovering over my girlish one, might have been traditional, but nothing about the way he skimmed his entire body up and down mine felt obvious. This was new, and bright, and so full of hope that it hurt. He pressed closer, coupling our skin, then our lips. Cielo’s body blazed into mine, a streak of sudden brilliance moving through me, a star falling.
I thought Cielo would be eager to repeat the motion, but he stayed where he was, staring down with the same expression I’d found so inscrutable in the garden. “What did you mean when you said we don’t require a wedding?” I asked.
“I don’t need a priest to bind us,” Cielo said. “I have been yours since you asked me to teach you magic, and you taught me how to belong to another person. I have tied the knots and invented the prayers myself.”
And with that, Cielo and I were married.
We celebrated many times that night, and no houses were burned, and the spines of no mountains snapped. When the fear of losing this feeling stormed through me, I was prepared. I let magic have its way, set free when I had kept it close and careful so long. It turned everything it touched into flowers with silver petals, so that a cellar in a nameless house in Prai became a garden of fallen stars.
* * *
When I woke the next morning, it was well before dawn, and the flowers were still glowing softly.
“Cielo,” I said, pushing on his bare shoulder.
He grumbled softly in his sleep.
“Cielo! The meeting with the church! Your father told us to bring everyone to the southernmost hall of the Mirana.”
“I suppose you want to go muster your troops,” he said, turning over and pulling the blanket over his head.
I thought of climbing the stairs and facing everyone like this, with a hurricane of hair and sleepless eyes.
“No,”
I said, shaking Cielo with a little more vigor. “You go up and tell them where we’re meeting. I’ll see you there. I have a few things to attend to before we start this whirlwind of planning.”
Cielo did not respond but burrowed under the blanket until he was little more than a silent, stubborn hill.
“They need to listen to me as they would to any leader,” I said, “and no one will do that now. If the first glimpse everyone has is of me at Oreste’s side, with the power of the strega-hating church at my command, it will force a needed change in perspective.”
Cielo’s voice rose through the weave of the blanket. “I already see you as powerful in the extreme.” His head emerged, and he blinked with the fussiness of a newborn. “Does that mean I get to keep sleeping?”
I cast him a glance that could have turned all the water in his body to ice, and then cracked it.
“All right, all right.”
I left Cielo to his work and crossed the waking city. I barely saw or heard the scenes that Prai staged all around me. I could only think of the morning ahead, the elaborate dance that must be done to keep the Order of Prai from killing the streghe, and the streghe from lashing out against the church.
And then there were the five families, who had no love for the Malfara line.
The southernmost hall of the Mirana was a quiet place, not nearly as ornate or gilded as the rest of the edifice, but I found it suited my purpose. I didn’t wish to draw too much attention to our meeting in case Beniamo already had men loyal to him scattered throughout Vinalia.
When I pushed in the door to the chosen rooms, I found a sideboard laden with wine, bread, cheese, and a few sweating grapes—and only two men waiting. I recognized them as the guards who had witnessed my wedding. If they were surprised to see a young woman enter the meeting alone, they did not show it. Of course, they had seen much stranger things only the night before.
“MacCartaigh. Cinquepalmi.” They dipped their heads. “Where is Oreste?”
The men stared directly in front of them without meeting my eyes. “He told the high council of priests of your plan,” MacCartaigh said, his Vinalian salted with a Celanese accent. “Then he said he needed time to prepare himself.”
The Storm of Life Page 19