The Storm of Life

by Amy Rose Capetta

  “No magic, remember,” I said, laying my hand on Father’s arm.

  A shadow crossed his face, as swift and threatening as when they moved over our mountains. “I don’t need to use magic.”

  * * *

  With our plan to march to Amalia in place, the meeting broke. All anyone could do was ask about Oreste and worry over whether he was losing the backing of the church as we spoke. They agreed to wait for him together, but I had another reunion in mind. I walked over to my sister on soft feet.

  Luciano slept at her breast. His miniature eyelids pinched in a way that made me think his dreams were already filled with enemies. Mirella and I both kept our eyes on him so we would not have to face each other.

  “Thank you for saying what you did,” I told her in a low voice. “It came at the perfect moment to draw everyone together . . .”

  “I’m not here for you, Teodora,” she said, bobbing the baby up and down to keep him from waking. “I came for my son. I won’t let him live in a world where Beniamo is allowed to rule.”

  She held on to Luciano so tightly, I worried she would keep her promise—that she wouldn’t allow this tiny child to go on breathing if our brother was named leader of Vinalia. I wondered what I would do if I had a child to care for, a new life to tend to in the middle of so much death.

  Vanni appeared at Mirella’s elbow. “Let me hold him for a minute,” he said, gentling the baby out of her arms into an awkward, loving grip. Vanni took a great deal of joy in counting Luciano’s toes several times over, as if he might eventually come up with a different sum. Mirella pushed her way past both of them to wedge distance between us.

  “Do you think you can convince your wife to hate me slightly less?” I asked.

  “She’s afraid, Teo,” Vanni said, smiling at the baby as he woke, though his words were grim. “We all are.”

  “Did you have any trouble getting the streghe out of the Neviane?” I asked.

  “Oh, nearly the opposite,” Vanni said. “Mimì kept us warm with her snow magic, and Xiaodan plumped up our best feelings until you could have confused us for a merry band of travelers. For an opera singer, that girl can coat her lungs in brass and belt out so many lewd ditties that a nun would burst into flames.”

  I looked over at Xiaodan, trailing Favianne’s steps as the former Queen of Vinalia praised her bright brown eyes and her straight black hair and gave advice on how to tighten her corset to its full throttling potential. Was Xiaodan trying to curry favor with a powerful noblewoman, or was she that starved for friendship? I realized I knew little about the famous soprano besides her magic.

  “The only bad part was . . . well, at times we thought we were being followed,” Vanni admitted. “We heard broken twigs, crunching footsteps. I assumed it was Beniamo but he never showed himself. Now that I see her in that dress that she clearly hasn’t washed since breaking camp, I think Favianne was tracking us.”

  My eyes skipped away from Xiaodan and landed on Favianne, who took notice of my attentions at once and curled her hand in a wave, each finger crooked like an invitation to come closer.

  “Teo,” she called out. “Aren’t you going to come take up our conversation where we left off?” She turned to Xiaodan and leaned in closer. “Teo and I used to have the most intimate talks in Amalia. I’ve missed them.”

  “Help,” I whispered.

  Vanni offered the baby, but I shook my head. If Mirella saw me holding Luciano, she would undoubtedly come and grab him away from his dangerous godmother. Besides, I felt uneasy near Luciano. He was new to this world, and strangely clear-eyed, as if he was judging me more harshly and fairly than the grown men of the five families ever could. I felt freshly relieved that I’d swallowed that magical milk after leaving Pavella. I could take on a room full of the most influential and magical figures in Vinalia, but the thought of a single infant terrified me.

  Cielo stepped in and accepted Luciano in my stead. He drummed his fingers on the baby’s stomach, making his lips burst into a wide show of gums, his smile edged with spittle. Cielo didn’t appear to share my reservations—and in fact seemed to prefer Luciano’s company to that of anyone else in the overstuffed room. I drifted away from this stolen moment of happiness.

  Toward Father.

  He looked stiff from travel, dusted with the grit of the roads and the heaviness of our talk. He stepped closer and drew me into his arms. Things had been so strained between us since I left the Uccelli that the only reason I could think Father might embrace me so deeply in public was if someone we both loved was dead.

  “Where is Fiorenza?” I asked.

  Father cleared his throat. “Well . . .” he said, beginning a story instead of giving me an answer. My fear folded over on itself, doubling in strength. “When your summons came, I wanted to believe that the matter with Beniamo would take care of itself. But your stepmother took one look at your letter and she . . .”

  I waited as my heart screwed tight.

  “She left us.” Father pressed his hands together. “She went back to the Violetta Coast and took the girls to hide them.”

  “But she loves you,” I cried. In the wake of my own wedding, I could not fathom the idea that Father and Fiorenza’s marriage was crumbling. Their love had always been unquestioned in my mind—even though some practical part of me knew that Fiorenza had done well to get Carina and Adela out of our brother’s path.

  “She’ll come back after we’ve won, won’t she?” I asked.

  Father rubbed the spot on his forehead where his hairline was pulling back, slow and steady as a tide. “I don’t know. She said that I would keep trying to live as if Beniamo wasn’t dangerous because that was what I had always done. Your stepmother believes . . . she believes that going was the only way for me to understand how serious things have become.”

  Father studied my face, and it took me a moment to realize he was tracing the bruises on my cheeks and jaw from Beniamo’s cuffing. “She is always right,” he added. “No matter how much I argue with her.”

  Then he whispered a story, simple and true, and I felt the ache and tightness I’d grown used to over the last few days fade, disappear.

  “Thank you, Father,” I said, touching my relieved cheek.

  My lopsided hearing remained, the conversations in the room muffled in the way I’d come to expect. Apparently, my ear couldn’t be healed in the same way as a cut or a bruise.

  “I should have done more to keep you out of harm.” He pulled his stiletto from his sleeve. There was no grand, sweeping motion. Only a knife in his hands one moment, and mine the next. “This is for you, Teo.”

  The night he’d offered it to me in the ruins of the di Sangro castle came back all at once, as ruthless and clear as the light of a full moon. He had told me that I should keep the family stiletto, along with the boyish form that the men in Amalia respected. “I told you I can’t accept . . .”

  “There are no conditions,” he said.

  I ran my eyes along the edge, which looked as sharp and promising as ever. “If you’re going to face Beniamo yourself, you still need this.”

  Father shook his head with great force, which meant I had stepped over a line from simply wrong to willfully so. “Your stepmother called this stiletto my favorite piece of art. Your mother teased me for being in love with it. My father chose me as his heir and offered me the di Sangro blade when I was a year younger than you are now. Every one of those memories is worked into the metal. It is a weapon, Teo, but not only a weapon. It would be wasted on your brother. Please, take it. I don’t care if you use it to cut apples for the rest of your days.”

  “She prefers pears,” Cielo said, striding over with the contented baby in his arms. “Red ones, if they can be had.”

  “Of course,” Father said, his voice clouding with memory. “I knew that.” His disdain snapped back into place. “I see that your . .
. friend . . . is still with us.”

  “You’re not the only one with family here,” Cielo said, looking at me pointedly.

  I felt certain he was about to bring up our marriage. I trembled, wanting and fearing those words in equal measure.

  Cielo slipped the baby into the crook of one arm and held up his other hand, flicking his fingers and scattering my expectations. “Now that he’s giving up the priesthood to rule Vinalia, I suppose I can reveal the shameful fact that Oreste is my father. Though at this point I can’t remember whether I’m supposed to be ashamed of him or he’s meant to be ashamed of me.”

  “You’re a Malfara?” Father asked. He narrowed his eyes, as if that made it easier to see the truth. “You’re as tall as a Malfara, though you don’t have their vices stamped all over you.”

  Before this could go any further, I looped my arm through Cielo’s free one and steered him back toward Vanni, returning Luciano to his father. “Wait here,” I said, spinning back to mine. “We’ll bring Oreste, and you two can sew up the rest of the plan.”

  “It looks like you have done the hard work yourself,” Father said. “Fiorenza would be proud.” As I nodded, he added in a dusty whisper, “So would your mother.”

  Heat flowered in my chest, unfurling petals of orange flame. Both Luciana and Fiorenza di Sangro would understand this scene far too well. I had brought everyone in this room together, streghe and soldiers, church and five families. There hadn’t been a single splinter of violence to break the discussion.

  I looked around, from the former Queen of Vinalia chatting with a magical opera singer to the head of the soldiers of Erras standing in close quarters with the powerful family whose newborn heir she had tried to float down an underground river. I had brought this moment into the world, a difficult birth that easily could have left more than one of us dead.

  Now Oreste would sweep in and claim everything, as if it was his right.

  “The new leader of Vinalia will be so glad to see that his subjects are getting along,” I said, with an empty smile and a heart to match.

  * * *

  The rooms Oreste kept were on the first story of the Mirana, which meant we had to climb a nautilus of stairs to reach him.

  “How do you think it went?” I asked Cielo. A skin of worry had formed on my thoughts, and I could not seem to pick it away.

  “You’ve worked a miracle,” Cielo announced to the empty stairwell, his voice hitting cold stone and bouncing. “I’d call you Saint Teodora, but you have to die for that, and martyrdom doesn’t suit you any more than it does me.”

  “Dying for what you believe in isn’t a fashion that comes and goes, like high-necked dresses,” I said.

  “Isn’t it?” Cielo asked, sounding more distracted with each step that we took toward his father. “Both look pretty in a certain light and are uncomfortable in the extreme.”

  We reached the door, and I managed a polite knock, when all my magic wanted was to break the wood to splinters so I could stride through without stopping. “Now we just need Oreste to take his place in all this.”

  We waited, but there were no footsteps.

  “You don’t think we’re going to open this door to find a carefully inked letter explaining all of the reasons he can’t possibly be the leader of Vinalia, do you?” Cielo asked with a nervous tremolo of laughter.

  “He is probably having a quiet moment to himself,” I said, though lies did not suit me any better than martyrdom did.

  “You mean he’s hiding under his desk and shaking like a rabbit in a hutch,” Cielo said.

  “If that’s something he needs to do at the moment, it really is better for him to take care of it privately.”

  “He’s a priest of the Order of Prai,” Cielo said, setting his hand to the knob. “I’m sure he knows how to hide his sins.”

  “Shouldn’t he simply . . . not sin?” I asked.

  Cielo sighed. “Sometimes I forget that you spent the first sixteen years of your life hidden away under a pretty pile of rocks.”

  “The di Sangro castle is not—”

  “A pretty pile of rocks? Fine, it’s a menacing pile of rocks.”

  He pushed the door in. The small table at the center was set for tea, its tiled surface covered in half-filled cups that had taken on an oily sheen. I walked over to find the pot of black tea with bergamot gone cold. Cielo looked over Oreste’s desk, but there was no letter pinned to the ink blotter, not even a loose scrap of a note.

  A wind troubled Oreste’s papers. My eyes went to the window, cast open though the once-fine day had retreated, and the dark gray of rain was advancing.

  The weather was the least of our troubles, though. There was a rope, tied to the leg of the desk, snaking over the ledge.

  “My father escaped out the window?” Cielo asked. “That seems childish, even for a man who has run away from every one of his worldly duties so he can pretend he is God’s special son.”

  A pit of dread from some bitter fruit lingered in my stomach. “I don’t think he escaped.”

  I walked to the window, following the line of the rope as it dropped. A nearly naked man, stripped of his robes, swung at the end, bruised where he had bashed against the wall of the Mirana, purple lines scratched into his skin where the rope had left him burned.

  The next leader of Vinalia was dead.

  And so was my plan to save us.

  Four

  The Last Malfara

  Oreste’s body swung lightly, moved by the urgent hands of the wind.

  “What do we do?” Cielo asked as rain started pouring misery all over Prai. I stepped back from the window, and not simply to keep dry. I did not want anyone in the Mirana to notice my place in this tableau and blame me for the death of yet another Malfara.

  There was a tap at the door. I leapt back, and before I could summon magic and escape, we had company.

  It was Cinquepalmi, his strong features pinched with contrition. “Signorina . . . I’m meant to tell you . . . I have a message.”

  “Who is this message from?” I asked. He stepped back slightly as if I’d battered him with the words—now that my ear was dulled, I had a tendency to speak with greater volume and pointed articulation.

  Especially when my emotions were rushing in every direction.

  Had the church killed one of their own, a known lover of streghe, to show that they were never going to be on our side? Was standing against magic so important that they would sacrifice the rest of Vinalia to my brother?

  “These are the words of Father Malfara,” Cinquepalmi said, clasping his hands behind his back. He went into the singsong voice of rote memorization. “I’m meant to tell you that he offers his apologies. He says he wishes for God to be with you on your mission against Beniamo, but there is too much guilt in his soul to make a good ruler, and now that he remembers the . . . manner in which he broke his vows . . . he can no longer remain a priest in the Order of Prai.”

  Cinquepalmi let out his reserves of breath, looking relieved and more than a bit pleased. I doubted that he knew Father Malfara was hanging outside the window, and that he had just delivered the man’s final words.

  I sank into a crouch, setting my head in my hands, seeking out darkness—wishing I didn’t understand.

  This wasn’t the church’s doing. This was Oreste’s choice.

  I looked up at Cielo, and from this angle I could see something inside of him break. It was less of a clean snap, and more like watching a city crumble.

  Cinquepalmi ducked his head. “I’m sorry I didn’t say anything sooner, but Father Malfara asked me to wait until you came up here to find him. He didn’t wish to make a scene.” I thought of everyone waiting downstairs—the impossible peace that I had knitted together. “Shall I go and let everyone know that circumstances have changed?”

  “No,” I said, pushing to my feet.
“Nothing has changed.”

  “Nothing has changed?” Cielo asked in an incredulous voice.

  “Has anyone else heard this message?” I asked. I could hear myself going through the steps of keeping this plan alive. I felt like a doctor must when a patient is beyond saving, working hard while the possibility of life retreats into the distance.

  “Only MacCartaigh,” Cinquepalmi said.

  If Oreste really did wish for us to stop Beniamo, he’d done one good thing. He’d arranged for the church to lend us an army, and we couldn’t ruin that now.

  “Good,” I said. “Go back down and tell everyone that we’ll be there soon enough.”

  My anger drove me around the room in sharp lines. Oreste was meant to be our savior, but he could not face the upcoming battles, or Beniamo, or even the disappointment of his child. Cielo had been afraid that his father would run away, and he had done exactly that, flying to the one place we could not follow.

  My mind turned up the memory of Cielo’s mother, driven to kill herself when the Capo’s troops closed in.

  Cielo had no parents now.

  But he did have family—the one he’d married into.

  Had Oreste thought of that as he married us in the garden?

  Even if life does not honor your plans, you have each other.

  “He was thinking of doing this the whole time,” I mumbled.

  When Cielo finally stopped struggling against the truth, he sank deeper into sadness. He stared over the stone lip of the window as the rain fell on his downturned face, sliding down his forehead and beading on his lips.

  His profile was absurdly noble. His fingers were slick on the stone but poised, ready to act. He looked more like his uncle than his father in that moment. Traces of Giovanna stuck to him, always. It was easy to forget that Cielo had not made himself from long strings of words and great volumes of magic. He might have spent most of his life estranged from his family, but he was a Malfara.