The Storm of Life

by Amy Rose Capetta

  “And you love kings, don’t you?” I asked, with a bitterly mocking blink. At least that was flush with Cielo’s character.

  “I love sensitivity even more than strength,” Favianne admitted, everything she said molded to sound like a confidence. “My last husband had very little to offer me in that regard. He courted me in a fever but once we were married, all he wanted to do was bed me, over and over and over again. If there hadn’t been a war in the way, I doubt we ever would have left his chambers.” I tried to swallow but failed spectacularly. “Don’t bother looking scandalized. You’ve met your uncle. He was trying to create an heir. It wasn’t the most attentive lovemaking.”

  I worked hard to keep the image of the Capo atop Favianne from forming too crisply in my head.

  “He was a horrible man,” I said. I would not turn him into a hero now that Beniamo had murdered him. I could regret the manner of his death and the way that he’d lived his life, all at once.

  “We didn’t agree on a number of things,” Favianne told me, another whispered truth. “But I can’t imagine that you and Teo always do either.”

  I choked down her words. “Teo is not here to defend herself, so do not take wild stabs at her character, and do not question our love.” Even if it was broken, Favianne had no right to pore over the pieces.

  “That very answer proves that you are sensitive. Not a man who will lead with his weapon,” she said, pinning the spot between my legs with her gaze. “You seem less interested in a knife than in the velvet box it is laid in.” I unfolded the layers of meaning around her words and found myself blushing. I knew what Cielo’s blushes looked like, bright as poppies to match my strega’s lips.

  “Do you really believe you can sleep your way onto the throne twice in one lifetime?” I asked.

  Favianne laughed broadly. “Twice in a year would be a real feat. And no. That’s not why I came to you tonight.”

  “Of course,” I said. “You want magic, and you think I can give that to you.”

  “Two guesses, and neither come close to my true aim,” she said. “I thought you were cleverer than this.”

  “I’m not clever enough to throw you out of my tent at first sight,” I said. The words came out well fortified, but that only proved that Favianne had breached my defenses.

  “Cielo, Cielo,” Favianne said, putting her hand down in the territory between my thigh and groin. “When are you going to tell Teodora about us?”

  “What?” I asked, leaping up, my head brushing the canvas.

  Favianne leaned back and studied me as if I were a flawed painting. “Don’t act like you have no idea what I’m talking about. The Palazza? Our favorite little spot in the courtyard?”

  I picked frantically through my memories of our time in Amalia when Cielo had barely been able to look at Favianne and certainly had done nothing to court her as far as I could see. Of course, what I had read as jealousy might have been something else entirely. It might have been guilt.

  No—that was impossible.

  And yet my breath came faster and faster.

  “Settle, my love,” Favianne said, her voice firm under all of that plush lining. “I promise I won’t tell Teo anything. You must do that yourself.”

  I shook my head, the long black strings of Cielo’s hair whipping. The ability to speak had flown away from me on dark wings.

  Favianne stood up, grabbing the open neck of my linen shirt and running her hand over my skin—Cielo’s skin. “Are your memories of me fading? Do I have to kiss you, to remind you of what you enjoyed so much?”

  I took a step back, running into the wall of the tent. Favianne pushed forward, her lips brushing mine as softly as the night breeze, passing onto my left ear, the one that worked well enough to carry her whisper straight to my heart. “You have never looked more like Teodora di Sangro than you do at this very moment.”

  My eyes flew open.

  I should have denied it to my last breath. Giving in to Favianne’s doubts would be like handing her a pistol she could fire at any moment. But I could not keep up this deception; it was too costly.

  I let myself slip out of Cielo’s form, shrinking back into Teo’s girlish skin. Letting someone else—even Favianne—see one of my true forms bludgeoned me with relief.

  “I knew it,” she said with a snappish glow in her eyes. “If you want to convince people you are truly Cielo, it’s going to take a lot more work, and you can’t break this easily. I was barely trying.” When I didn’t push back against any of what she’d said, her eyes dimmed. “Is Cielo dead? Is that why you’re using magic to take on this likeness?”

  “No!” I shouted. But she had pushed too close to my worst fear, and it was going to leave a bruise.

  Favianne’s jaw worked back and forth. “You haven’t paid him off and sent him far away so you can rule the country in his stead, have you?”

  “That sounds more like you.” I crossed my arms.

  “Two guesses, and I’m nowhere close.” She sat down with a sigh. “I give up. Where is Cielo?”

  “Gone,” I said. The word came out as a single, short scrape. “We fought, and Cielo left. The strega believed all I cared about was forcing a Malfara to be king of Vinalia so we could stop Beniamo.”

  “Is that true?” she asked.

  “No,” I mumbled. “Well, stopping Beniamo is necessary.”

  “Necessary? I might be a horrible paragon of love, but even I can see that’s not a good sign. Maybe you two aren’t as suited as I thought.” She cocked her head. “What do they say? There are many eels in the river, and most of them will eat you alive, so choose carefully. And if you see a glint of teeth, toss it back.”

  “That must be an Oscurra Valley saying.” I sat on the ground, gathering my knees to my chest. “I do not want to lose this eel.”

  Favianne knelt in front of me. “Well, this is not going to do. What will happen when Cielo comes back and finds out that you’ve been using this body, puppeting it all over the central provinces?”

  Guilt rubbed me to a raw state as I remembered my strega’s words. I like it when you are Teo, whatever that means. That definitely did not include impersonating Cielo to keep yet another scheme from falling apart.

  “Cielo’s not planning to return,” I said. Heat coursed through me, melting a reserve of tears. “The Violetta Coast,” I pushed out. “Cielo went to the Violetta Coast to find a shard of magic in the drowned grottoes. It’s all my strega wants in this world.”

  “That’s a bold lie,” Favianne said. She rocked back to her heels so we were sitting in matched positions. “I’ve never seen two people who adore each other more fully and maddeningly. I’ve had dozens of men, and at least one woman, tell me they love me. And perhaps some of them did, but what they wanted most was to prove their worth, to sate themselves, to make their lives more convenient. Nothing about great love appears to be convenient. You and Cielo prove that point, too.” She stared me down, and this time there was no false sweetness in her eyes. “In a life of troubles that were thrust on you, loving this strega is the trouble you chose.”

  The words rang deep and true, like the bells at Mirella’s wedding.

  Favianne rose, dusting off her dress.

  “Where are you going?” I asked. Cielo might have sent her rushing back to her tent, but I needed someone I could be honest with. I was in no danger from Favianne anymore. Her loveliness was as obvious as it had always been, but it no longer opened a door in my heart and let in temptation. Even with Cielo so far from me, my strega was in my every step, my every thought.

  “I’m off to bed.” Favianne patted at the tender skin below her eyes. “I require a certain amount of sleep.”

  “You aren’t going into battle tomorrow,” I said.

  “I am always going to battle, Teo,” Favianne said, with a tired twist of a smile. For a moment, her beauty existe
d for its own good, instead of being put to work flattering and convincing men. It felt like I was truly seeing her for the first time.

  “When did you first know it was me?” I asked. “I mean, how long did you know, before . . . ?”

  “Before I decided to repay you for that near kiss in Amalia? Oh, I could tell from the moment I had you in sight.”

  “How?” I demanded. If there was something I needed to do to convince people I was Cielo, I would have to learn quickly. There was still a battle to get through before I could let this disguise fall away.

  Favianne ran her hands down the rich cloth of her dress. “Let’s say I could feel the difference. I’ve been attracted to a certain di Sangro since the first time we spoke. And when I look at the strega you’ve chosen to love . . . well . . . I could not be further from ecstasy.”

  “It must have been a challenge to pretend you two had a secret history, then,” I said, relieved I had not misread their feelings and impressed at how easily Favianne had tossed together this little scene.

  Favianne ran her fingers down the tent flap as tenderly if she were touching a lover, and sighed. “The things we do for Vinalia.”

  * * *

  We rode the crest of the dawn, approaching Amalia from the west. Its great domes and endless marble greeted me coldly, not that I expected a great flush of nostalgia. It felt as if my entire life had done an about-face since the first time I’d seen the city.

  Back then, I had thought the Capo was my truest and deadliest enemy, and Beniamo would spend the rest of his life as an owl, dangerous only to those who were unlucky enough to cross the Uccelli when he was hunting.

  Now the entire country was in his talons.

  And then there was the matter of my body. At that time, I had barely learned to change form, and now I was a perfect imitation of another person. But that didn’t feel like a triumph. It felt like twisting a great deal of magic, stolen death by death, to do something that never should have been done. Favianne was right—Cielo would have hated it.

  Amalia did nothing to help matters. It heaped memories into my helpless mind. The first time I’d kissed Cielo. When I’d dared to call the strega mine. The moments when I allowed myself to dream of a life shaped by Cielo’s long fingers and mercury whims—as much as my own stubbornness and quick-rising passions. And then there had been our escape: when our magic gripped the city and we grew infamous.

  We had turned into a story, and I was not ready for it to end.

  “Do not worry,” Lorenzo said, clapping a hand to my shoulder. “Teo would never miss a good fight.”

  Cielo would have scoffed, so that was what I did. “Good fight? I believe that’s a contradiction of terms.”

  “That’s why you need a di Sangro at your side,” he said.

  Lorenzo was trying to help, but for someone who rarely spoke, he had chosen a deeply imperfect moment.

  “Perhaps Teo is tired of fighting,” I said, staring out at the army encampments clustered along the Estatta like burrs.

  “Are we talking about the di Sangro women?” Vanni asked, joining us. “Mirella just tried to convince me that she should join us on the battlefield. With the baby.”

  My sister was currently breaking stale bread and handing it out to the Otto men and the church’s army while she and Father muttered about the upcoming battle. I took my place in line, suddenly aware of how hungry I was.

  She broke off a portion of the loaf and handed it to me as if I were any man, not a powerful strega or the future king of Vinalia. She treated everyone in line with the same brisk kindness.

  The scrap of food looked miserable at first glance, but then I remembered when Mirella and I were little, pretending that the rations we had to get us through the winter were our favorite foods. Strawberries doused in dark sweet vinegar, clouds of mascarpone, the creamy flesh of pears.

  “It’s perfect,” I said. When Mirella looked at me, I was certain she would see through my disguise—I almost wanted her to—but her squint did not catch on the truth.

  I tore my bread, the crust as hard as stone. As I broke my teeth against the first piece, Father came over and clapped a hand on my shoulder.

  “Glad to see that you are not in rough shape after dealing with Ambrogio.” He looked Cielo up and down, a dry scrutiny that sent me scurrying to hide my most blatant di Sangro qualities. My mouth even ground to a halt in case I was chewing too much like Teodora. Father finished by nodding approval—the same look he’d given Cielo after the fight.

  I swallowed, pushing the bread down my throat with a scratch. “That was less than a scuffle,” I said in Cielo’s raw honey tones. This voice stung at me, and keeping in this shape for so long pulled at my magic.

  “Well, today we are in for far more,” Mimì said, pointing at the encampments on the Estatta River. “There were either more troops left in the Capo’s army than we thought, or Beniamo has been picking up reinforcements.”

  I looked over at the tents, hundreds of tents, with smoke rising from cookfires outside. The men I saw moving about looked as small as beetles from this distance, but I knew they had homes and families, stories that would be cut short today if we won and unraveled more slowly if Beniamo did.

  “Xiaodan, can you tell us what we’re facing?” I asked.

  She walked slowly, with a deep sway, toward the edge of the camp, as if following a trail of scent. Her hands lifted into the air, then parted it. “Those soldiers are afraid,” Xiaodan said. “They joined Beniamo out of fear.”

  I did not wish to believe the Vinalians we faced today had the raw materials for redemption in their souls. It would make fighting them—killing them—so much harder than if they were simple villains.

  “Most of these soldiers did not join Beniamo’s army,” Lorenzo said, shaking his head. “They were only there when he took the reins.”

  And the others were men from the villages he’d plundered along the road to Amalia. The ones who were given one choice—join him or die. Did he threaten their families if they did not fight for him? Did he burn their homes?

  Did he smile as he hurt them?

  Xiaodan fell to her knees. I ran to her side, to see if she had been felled by some kind of sickness, or perhaps even an attack on her magic. “I know this fear,” she whispered. And then words flowed out of her, as smoothly as the notes that rushed from her lips during a song. “My parents were artists, paper and ink mostly, and I was small and silly enough to look forward to the days when men came from all over the world, asking for Father and Mother’s wares. But one day they did not have enough to satisfy the Vinalian men who came all the way to our country for fine goods. They threatened to take Father and put him to work, but . . . one of them heard me sing while I was dusting the shop. I knew songs from all over the world, even at eight years old. He said that Vinalians would be delighted to see a little Ovetian girl spill out an aria or two.”

  She took a deep, studied breath, controlling her voice, careful with her pitch. “The music was beautiful, and I believe it is the one thing that kept me alive. It took months to travel here, and every time we stopped they chained me so I wouldn’t be able to run. My parents had taught me what to do with my magic. Every time those men thought well of me, I increased the feeling tenfold. But there were moments when they had nothing in their hearts but hate for the world, and a belief that it had not given them enough. I was never very good at taking feelings away, except for my own. So, when they hurt me, I . . . I took away everything, until I was completely blank inside. As blank as fresh snow.”

  She looked up at me with her eyes glowing far brighter than I’d ever seen before. “Please don’t ask me to make their fear stronger.”

  My mind worked to understand, but walls stood between my youth and Xiaodan’s. There were people who had faced more hardship than I could imagine, even with Beniamo for a brother. I’d grown up with Fiorenza and F
ather, my sisters and Luca. I’d spent my days surrounded by those who loved me.

  I’d known moments of wild fear, but Xiaodan had lived knee-deep in it.

  “No,” I said. “No, of course.” The soldiers’ fear might put us at an advantage in the battle, but I wanted nothing to do with the dread Beniamo inspired. I would not use it as a weapon. “All I need you to do is give us strength during the battle. And for that, you will need your own.”

  Xiaodan nodded, her hands bolted to her lap, retreating further into herself.

  “Leave those men to their feelings. Do not hurt yourself more than the world has already hurt you,” I whispered. Then I stood and walked to the rest of the streghe.

  “You cannot be so soft with your soldiers,” Dantae said.

  “Xiaodan is not my soldier,” I said, thinking about trying to change into the wolf Cielo had become so many times, so she could see how I was bristling. “She is my sister in magic.”

  Dantae’s eyes narrowed until they were two splinters in a wooden expression.

  But I would not relent. Azzurra and Delfina had been made into soldiers by the Capo. I was not here to do the same. I hadn’t been able to save the strega sisters who had been pitted against me, but I would never be so ruthless with my people again.

  “You are welcome to join the sixth family,” I told Dantae, flinging the invitation at her soldiers as well. “My name might be Malfara, but that is not my allegiance. All streghe will be taken in without needing to bleed for it.” I turned to my father. “We could use a healer, Signore. And you know what they say. Family is fate.”

  Father blinked hard, as his own words had traveled from the past and finally caught up to him. “If anyone on our side of the battle is injured today, I will do what I can to heal them,” he muttered.

  He offered me his hand, but Dantae slipped into the space between us, slithering like an eel. Or perhaps I was only thinking of eels because of Favianne’s words. “You are a strega, aren’t you, old man? Seal your bargains like one.”