The Storm of Life

by Amy Rose Capetta

  I brushed Cielo’s lips against both of Father’s cheeks, and he had to stand on his tiptoes to do the same.

  Vanni did his valiant best to stifle a laugh.

  I turned to Vanni and Mimì and started making plans for the use of their magic in the upcoming battle. “We will need you to break their ranks so the church’s army can get us to Beniamo.”

  “Beniamo will be out front, leading his troops,” Father said—proving that, once again, I knew his own son better than he did.

  “With all respect, I believe he will want us to spend ourselves, waste our magic, and face him weakened. If he doesn’t hurt us before we die, Beniamo can take no pleasure in it.” I shivered, Cielo’s shoulders caving slightly.

  “And what of the soldiers of Erras?” Dantae asked. “We are Vinalia’s best fighters, and you’ve left us out altogether.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I have a particular task in mind for you, and it involves those knives you love so well. Speaking of the Bones of Erras, do you think you can spare one for the battle?”

  Dantae snapped her fingers, and one of her soldiers brought a leather roll filled with knives. She plucked out the one that had been carved from the long bone I’d found at the temple to the old gods. “I can’t believe I’ve lived to the day when the future king of Vinalia wields a magical knife.” Dantae offered it to me with a flourish, one leg extended in front of her as she dipped down in a bow.

  “Oh, it’s not for me,” I said. “Favianne is going to use this to defend the camp.” Favianne rushed forward as if she had been waiting for just such an opportunity. She plucked the bone knife from Dantae’s hands. The older woman’s weathered scowl did nothing to scare her off.

  “Be careful with that,” I said as Favianne carved the air with the knife. “It will whisper the worst of you, and you will have to hold strong.”

  “I’m more than acquainted with my flaws,” Favianne said. “The first is being far too perceptive.” Her darkly golden eyebrows pushed up an inch. She was clearly proud that she was the only one who had seen through my disguise.

  “Why are we making all of these plans without Teodora?” Mirella asked, snapping my thoughts like twigs underfoot.

  “I thought your sister was out of your favor,” I said, the words tumbling out.

  Mirella bounced Luciano against her hip as he grabbed for her rippling hair, dark as tree branches in winter. “She is. But that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten her strengths. I am thankful for your help with Ambrogio. Luciano and I are in your debt. So here is my advice. If you want to win today, find Teo at once.”

  “Don’t worry,” I muttered. “She is closer than you think.”

  “I, for one, am glad to see that our new leader is versed in strategy,” Father said. He took a step to the center of the gathering, and all eyes made their way to his solemn face. “There is something that needs to be said.”

  I stood with Cielo’s fingers in loose fists, brittle and waiting. Whatever Father said now could shatter our plan.

  He turned to me, facing the strega he believed was Cielo. “I have misjudged you. Since leaving Prai, you have shown that you have the makings of a fine leader.” I flushed with relief and anger, the feelings running deep as magic. It did not escape my notice that Father still needed to see me in a boyish form to believe I was fit to rule.

  But Niccolò di Sangro wasn’t done. He cleared what sounded like a pile of rocks from his throat. “What is more, you are clearly in the favor of my daughter. I offer you my blessing to marry her.”

  Anger pushed its way past relief, and I took a single step toward Father, Cielo’s motions quick and twitching. “Did you just offer her to me? And what, exactly, changed your mind? Was it the moment when you learned my noble last name? Or was it when you saw me using my fists to mangle another man?”

  “Neither,” Father said, defensive to the last. “It was your ability to send Ambrogio off like a chastened dog without further violence. It was the way you have held such a large assortment of Vinalians together, many of them enemies.”

  It was true that my father had never gloried in blood. My anger slackened. “Yes, well . . . I learned a great deal of that from your daughter,” I said. “The truth is . . .” I almost told them who I was, revealed the whole lie in that moment. But I knew this group would never take to the battlefield without a leader.

  I could not break.

  Favianne watched me carefully. “The truth is, Teo and I are fighting.”

  Father and Mirella nodded as if they understood all too well.

  “Oh, that’s bound to happen,” Vanni added.

  I almost pounced on their reactions.

  “When Teo returns, send her to me,” Father said. “We must be the ones to face Beniamo.”

  “Because I am the heir, and she is disposable?” I asked. I had started flinging out truths, and there was no use stopping now. Besides, this was how Cielo lived. Even if the strega changed form with each breath, nothing about Cielo was a lie.

  Mirella stalked up to me, her finger pointed at my chin. “I know you are making a point, but never speak of my sister that way.”

  My smile unscrolled, and I could only imagine how Cielo looked.

  “Why are you delighted by what I just said?” she asked.

  “Because Teo would be.” Favianne sucked in her cheeks, a subtle reminder that I was being unsubtle again.

  “My daughter will want to be there when Beniamo answers for his many crimes,” Father said.

  I clapped him on the shoulder, like he had with me, a bit of mocking built in. “You’re right, Father.” Confusion turned him paler, one shade at a time, until he was nearly white. Favianne sighed as if I’d ruined everything—but there was one truth she hadn’t dug up. “Oh, didn’t I mention that bit? I’m glad you are feeling kindly toward the match because Teodora and I are already married.”

  Vanni embraced me so quickly and fully that the air left my lungs. Xiaodan and Mimì clapped. Favianne looked at me with her eyes wide as oceans. I’d finally surprised her.

  Father shook his head, but he could not undo what Cielo and I had done.

  I walked away, the wind of victory at my back. I had done one of the things Cielo most wanted me to—shared the news of our marriage—and I found myself laughing up at the sky, the sound rising from Cielo’s throat both bitter and satisfying. It felt wondrous to let everyone know and agonizing to let them know when Cielo was already gone from my side.

  Father came over to me and laid a hand on my arm. I glanced up to find his dark eyes mirrored by the brightness of the day. But when I looked past the doubled reflection of Cielo, I found respect waiting. I was learning a lesson that I suspected Cielo had always known. Truth was so powerful, it could turn every other weapon to dust.

  “What happens now?” he asked, nodding at the encampments. At one time, I’d felt a childish delight when my father turned to me for help. Today, I only wished to know the answer for my own sake.

  I looked to the army and found that the smoke from the cookfires was thick, but I could no longer see the men moving through it. Beniamo must have known we were coming and called his men to arms.

  I knew it would not be long before we saw him. Beniamo did not just want the throne of Vinalia—that was not enough. He wanted streghe to fight him. He longed to write the tale of his victory in our blood. Above all, my brother wanted me. He believed that I owed him more pain.

  He was there somewhere, stalking through the camp, his orange-rimmed eyes tracking our moves.

  “Now we stop acting like hunted animals,” I said. “Now we stand in the open and fight back.”

  I would have marched at that moment, but one more piece had to fall into place before we could leave. The church’s army met us as the sun made its timid way toward noon. From a distance, the long, tired trail of men looked like the mark a sna
ke left on dust.

  When MacCartaigh and Cinquepalmi reported to Cielo as their leader, I was ready with my orders.

  “Have your men carry buckets of water from the nearest stream,” I said, “and be ready to light campfires when we stop marching.”

  “Why?” MacCartaigh asked.

  “A strega has her reasons,” Mimì said, cracking her knuckles and warming her fingers for battle.

  Cinquepalmi squinted at the view of the tents in the distance. “Why hasn’t he just marched straight into the city? He’s clearly beaten us here.”

  “Beniamo wants to fight us,” I said. He longed for it, a desire that had a long, dark history. I had lived in its shadow for years.

  “He must have known there would be opposition to his coup,” Lorenzo said. “In the streets, even a handful of streghe would give us an advantage. Those men are trained for the battlefield.”

  Cinquepalmi made a rude noise. “They’re barely trained at all. Told to play soldier for Vinalia. There’s no reason to think you’re going to survive to see one day sprawl into the next. I got so good at praying that when we won the battle for unification, I figured it might as well join the church’s army.”

  MacCartaigh let out a high, shimmering laugh. “He told me he didn’t want to tumble around in the snow with Eterrans.”

  “Oh, good,” Mimì said. “We’ve inherited all the men who weren’t brave enough to fight in Zarisi.”

  I shook my head, cutting off any further complaint, although my heart darkened as I thought of leading such men against Beniamo.

  I arranged our forces into two long lines that would march at the same time. The first line of defense was composed of the soldiers of Erras, the sixth family, and Lorenzo, who insisted on fighting at Mimì’s side. The second was mainly the church’s army, with my father at one end, ready to heal any wounded soldiers, and Pasquale at the other, looking as if he’d been brought here with his hands and feet tied, screaming the whole way.

  We needed all the hands we could get, but I would not drag men against their wishes to pain and death. “You can stay behind in camp,” I offered.

  “With the women and children?” Pasquale asked, sneering enough to let me know that he was the same coglione I’d met in Amalia.

  “I’m sure the women and children would protect you,” I said. “Even if you’ve done little to deserve it.”

  “I can’t just sit there alone with . . . her,” Pasquale said, stepping around Favianne’s name like a great sinkhole.

  “Then you will have to stand with us.”

  Pasquale shifted his weight but stayed put. “You forget,” he said. “I’ve met Beniamo Di Sangro. He wasn’t fit to lead a boar hunt, so he shouldn’t be leading Vinalia.”

  I walked away shaking my head, amazed that for all of his faults, Pasquale was standing on my side of the battle instead of rallying forces against me.

  Once I had checked over our army, I took my place at the center of the front line, and we began to move. For the first time, I had an army to command—but it was nowhere near the force that began to spill around the tents, a dozen men at a time.

  Vanni grabbed my arm, his fingers like needles. I thought this was finally it: the moment when everyone gave up on my plan and scattered to the winds. I would hardly be able to blame them.

  “I owe you a drink if we both live through this day,” Vanni whispered.

  “And if we don’t?” I asked, with Cielo’s airy concern.

  “Then I owe you a drink in heaven.” He kissed his fingers and raised them to the skies. Behind us, I noticed MacCartaigh and Cinquepalmi repeating the motion.

  I looked to Xiaodan, who stood on the other side of Mimì. “Is their fear too strong?” I asked.

  “I’m keeping my hands very still,” Xiaodan said. “I . . . I only hope that the friend I made in the Capo’s camp deserted after the Capo was killed. I would hate for him to die at the end of a bone knife. I’m afraid he wouldn’t go home, even if he had the chance to slip away.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “He joined the army because no one in his village understood that he is truly a boy, and he doesn’t have the sort of magic that you do, Cielo, that allows a person to shift outer form easily. All he could think to do was change his clothes and bind his chest and run away.”

  I thought of Cielo—off on the Violetta Coast, searching for Veria’s Truth. What would the strega’s life have been without magic?

  What would it be now, without me?

  Xiaodan turned to me as if we weren’t in the middle of the battlefield. I knew that feeling, the one that blurred everything but the memory of the person I loved. Xiaodan’s brown eyes glowed, and not from fear this time. “Massimo—that’s his name—Massimo said he would try to come see me in Il sole e la luna. It’s a story of two lovers who are torn apart each day and brought back together each night. I promised I would sing the words for him until I saw him again.” Xiaodan’s hands tightened their hold on each other until they were a choked white.

  I wanted all of us to live long enough to make our ways back to those we loved. But the closer we marched to Beniamo’s troops, the less likely that grew. “These soldiers are not to blame for Beniamo’s sins,” I said. “They should not have to die.”

  “And yet they will.” I heard Father’s voice behind me. For once, it was not trapped in my head. But we weren’t reunited, either, not in the way I’d dreamed of. I was standing before him in disguise. Our family was scattered, fighting, less whole with each passing minute. “No one wins a war, Cielo Malfara.”

  “There is only a side that loses less,” I finished.

  His forehead took on the trio of lines that meant he was puzzled, or displeased, or both. “Did my daughter tell you that?”

  “How else would I have plundered the treasure trove of di Sangro sayings?” I asked faintly.

  I looked out at Beniamo’s army. I knew, from the camp in the Neviane, that some were loyal to him. Perhaps a few were like him, believing that destruction and cruelty would even the scales for slights against them, both real and imagined. But most of Vinalia’s soldiers had joined the army to save us from invading Eterrans. They had gotten picked up by a storm and set down here. They deserved a world without Beniamo on the throne as much as we did, but how could I separate them from the soldiers who backed him?

  I thought of my failure in Zarisi, a great drift of snowflakes returning to the sky because I had not been able to save anyone.

  I thought of the streghe who had volunteered their lives to make a better Vinalia, the ones who had been sacrificed.

  I was tired of watching people die, tired of the way powerful men broke our lives as thoughtlessly as a child breaks toys.

  I motioned to Dantae, who stalked over from her place in line. Her vest of snakes was back in place now that we no longer needed to be stealthy. The darkly scaled creatures looked calm today; it seemed marching into battle soothed them. They slid and overlapped and made the sound of troubled paper as I whispered a new plan.

  “Are you sure?” Dantae asked, sticking the bone knife against my chest. A single push and it would be deep in the workings of my heart.

  Vanni and Mimì turned to disarm her, but I gave my head a minuscule shake. “Don’t hurt anyone,” I said. “Dantae is testing me, which is her right.”

  The bone knife’s whispers made their way into me, an icy stream. This is a foolish plan. You are a foolish strega. You have come so far and you will risk everything. There is a clear path to victory.

  But I knew that the path was only clear because someone else had walked it before me. Killing everyone in Beniamo’s army until they surrendered was the old way. If we wanted a new path, we would have to break off in a new direction. We would have to pound the dirt down and lay the markers and draw the maps ourselves.

  “I’m sure,” I said
, without a tremble this time.

  Dantae pulled back the knife, tossed it in the air, and caught it in her teeth as she took two more out of her pockets.

  She was ready for the show.

  I cleared Cielo’s long, beautiful throat and threw the strega’s voice as far as I could. “Raise your arms.” Swords and pistols, bone knives and the hands of streghe took to the air in a single motion.

  The other side mirrored it. I waited for the crack of a pistol shot or the cry of a soldier charging. There was only the smallest rustle of feet as Beniamo appeared, splitting the sea of bodies.

  I hadn’t expected to see him until later, when he could claim some kind of victory over a field of men cut down as blithely as poppies. When he could grin at death and gloat at my loss and force me to my knees again.

  But I’d been thinking as Teo—not as Cielo.

  Beniamo wanted a chance to intimidate the strega I loved. Perhaps even to kill Cielo before the battle could properly begin.

  Beniamo seemed to glide forward. His eyes took me in as if he were already swallowing me.

  “So we finally meet,” he said, his voice pitched only for my ears. I was in more danger in Cielo’s form than I had been in my own, but alongside that truth came a sense of relief. By taking this shape, I had kept the real Cielo safe, with a bit of help from the old gods. I imagined him clattering down a cliff on the Violetta Coast, diving naked through beautiful grottoes.

  “Thank you, Veria,” I muttered in the old language.

  Part of me expected Beniamo to fly straight at me, the way he’d dived for Luca on the mountains. My fist ached as I watched his hand, remembering those talons plunging straight through the Capo.

  I would not wait for Beniamo to enjoy my anticipation, my fear. And I would certainly not wait until he claimed me or the people I cared for.

  “Now,” I said.

  With two fistfuls of Vanni’s light thrown down, the battle began. Everyone on our side had been warned to cover their eyes when the brilliant bombs struck, and we marched forward with our arms cast over our faces, eyes closed.