“Mirella,” I said on a half-formed breath. “Vanni.”
On the far side of the tent, I saw smears of blood in Luciano’s crib. The sheets were blank, the baby missing.
“Luciano?” I asked, as if the tiny child would answer. Maybe I was waiting for Beniamo to emerge from some hidden fold of the tent with the child in his arms. For my brother, no nightmare was out of reach.
But I was alone. Completely alone.
Vanni, my magic said. It kept insisting that my brother-in-law’s magic was here, that he was still alive.
“You’re wrong,” I said, the blunt words my only comfort.
I walked over to the crib, trying to imagine what had happened without losing the last fragile slivers of my mind. Beniamo must have taken the boy—to raise him? To swallow him whole? Both were equally terrifying. My heart took flight and threatened never to land. I fell to my knees, desperate for breath, but all I found was blood, Vanni’s and Mirella’s.
I grabbed at the leg of the crib.
The edges of the ornate decorations bit into my palm. They brought me back to the world, and I found myself staring at foxes. Wooden foxes stacked on top of each other, a tiny dark space between each carving.
The crib had holes in it.
I thought of what Signora Moschella had said, about her talent for keeping her children alive. I pulled myself to standing and tore up the blankets, exposing the long, flat board underneath. I pried until crimson rose in the beds of my fingernails and pain came back to me like an old friend. The board pulled up, splintering at one edge.
The sound woke Luciano, who was sleeping safely inside a small compartment lined with blankets. He looked up at me with a deep frown, distrustful from the start.
I could not blame him.
Vanni, my magic said.
It had not been wrong—Vanni’s magic was here, as strong as ever. The brilliant death had gifted it to his son. I picked up Luciano in his little white gown and pressed him to my chest so he would not see what had been done to the people who loved him. As I rushed past the ravaged bodies on the ground, I clutched Luciano and whispered his parents’ names.
* * *
When company came, I was sitting at the edge of the fire, holding Luciano as tightly as Mirella ever had. At the rustling sound in the trees, I flinched and pulled out Father’s stiletto.
“It’s us, Teo,” Mimì said as she and Lorenzo rushed over to me.
“He’s coming back,” I said, a rattle snaring my breath. “He’s coming for me. He promised he would take everyone and then come back for me.” But that wasn’t quite right—he had told me he would make me wait until the moment I felt safe before striking again. So I would do the only reasonable thing.
I would never feel safe.
“Your sister . . .” Father said, putting a hand to my curls. His sadness was so thick, I could have carved into it with his knife and served it up to everyone for dinner.
Pasquale and Lorenzo carried the bodies of the messengers to the edge of the camp and began digging. Mimì said prayers over their bodies in Salvian, a dialect that sounded like another shade of Vinalian, the vowels pressing deep into her throat. I hadn’t been able to move any of the bodies, not with Luciano in my arms. He was a quiet baby, but his heartbeat troubled me. It seemed to flit at an impossible speed and nothing I did could slow it.
“What happened, Teo?” Xiaodan asked.
“He did not care,” I whispered.
“About what?”
There were too many answers. Beniamo did not care about the men he let die. Or our family. Or anything in this world, except causing me pain. “The throne,” I said. “It was a distraction. I should have known better. I should have seen—”
“If you had stayed here, he would have marched on us and killed everyone,” Father said.
“Do you think that kind of reasoning helps?” I cried. He was trying to make the losses acceptable, but I could never accept them. His own daughter was dead, and yet he was trying to force his way back to calm. Soon all of his children would be dead or gone, all but one. “Beniamo is coming back for me,” I said, and my fingers felt slippery, and Luciano nearly fell. I shook my head at my failure as I patted the soft, silken hair on his head. “He will always come for me.”
His words returned on a vicious wind.
You are my war.
Father looked helplessly at my state. My heart turned so numb that my hands would no longer obey even the simplest order. Dantae appeared at my elbow. It would have taken a true twist of fate for Mirella to let Dantae hold her child, and yet I found myself sliding him into her waiting arms.
“Wait,” I said, “your vest . . .”
But Luciano was already holding his hand up to the snakes. Their constant motion and slight hissing seemed to delight him. It proved exactly how little I knew about babies.
I thought of Cielo, who would have taken the child from my arms in an instant and discovered some new way to make him smile. My strega had inherited magic when Giovanna died, when Cielo was as small and soft and unformed as Luciano was now. It had been an overwhelming inheritance, as much of a curse as a gift.
Luciano needed Cielo as much as I did.
“Why did Vanni’s magic fly to Luciano?” I asked. “He was hidden away, and Beniamo was . . . well, he was right there.” I tried not to picture my brother, hovering over Vanni as he pushed those long, silver nails into his body.
“You tried to ask this once before, but the question wasn’t worded right,” Dantae said, pursing her lips. “You asked me why magic wouldn’t choose him. Magic might feel like a person of its own, but it’s not. It’s part of you.” Those words echoed what Luca had used his scientific mind to guess, long ago. He had been right about magic, and I had the bright flash of a desire to run and tell him. But my brother and my sister were both gone.
“There is no magic without a strega, Teodora,” Dantae explained. “It doesn’t make its own choices.”
“Why won’t magic take root in Beniamo, then?” I asked.
She nodded as if I’d gotten a better hold on the question. “Besides the fact that he wears the Capo’s ring?”
“He would have taken that off,” I insisted. “Beniamo wants magic of his own. He wants everything I have.”
It was Mimì who answered, wandering over after she finished her prayers. “Your brother caused those deaths, but he doesn’t carry them.”
She pointed to the small scar on her face. “I was chosen to inherit the magic of the foremother, the most powerful woman on Salvi. Every generation, she picks a girl to teach, and train, someone to pass on the old ways. Even though I knew her death meant that I would finally take on magic, I wanted her to live to a hundred and twelve. But she flew to heaven when I was only twelve. I remember sitting there, watching her tired fingers stir a bowl of water, the last of her flames rising. When they stopped, I started to cry, and my first tear for her turned to fire.”
“My aunt died suddenly,” Xiaodan said, putting her hands out to the fire, turning her palms bright. “Her heart gave way while she was climbing a ladder in my parents’ shop. I was there when she fell. She told me not to run for anyone, that I was all she needed. She was always able to feel when people were coming, even from a great distance. It made her like a living map. Of course, there were people who feared her, and no man in the village would marry her. She never had children of her own, though she wished to. When she died . . . I felt the change. Not just in our lives, but here.” She ran her hands down her sleeves, all the way to her wrists.
Mimì held up her hands, as proof of where her magic lived. Dantae touched her temple and then swept back her hair.
My magic was in my blood, always moving through me.
It had been there since I saw a strega die in the di Sangro castle when I was nine, but now I carried more than one death. I had the
memories of Azzurra and Delfina with me always. I cared about every strega who had died in the Capo’s dungeons, killed for his dreams. I wished I could tell Cielo, who thought I did not care for anyone but my own blood.
Pieces of all of those streghe lived in me, a collection of magics that glinted silver like knives, silver like a restless sea.
“Beniamo does not feel it when he kills anyone,” Dantae said. “No piece of them becomes a piece of him.” In one clean motion, she sat and started to jolt the baby up and down on her knee, an abrupt motion that somehow seemed to soothe him.
“You are good with him,” I said.
“He is easy, this little di Sangro,” she said. “Mine were not so mild.”
“How many . . . ?”
“Three,” she said. “The first was with Mirco, and the other two . . . well, I was still young when he died.”
That meant that when Father killed Dantae’s lover, there had been a child whose father never returned. I found myself looking at that night from a new angle, not my own view in the di Sangro kitchen, but another home, another set of eyes wide and waiting.
A different sort of fear, and change.
“So that is why I have Mirco’s magic,” I said. “Father doesn’t carry that death with him . . . but I do.” At that point, Father had already welcomed violence into his life, even if it was an unwanted visitor. He had told himself that there was no other way. But when he was younger, and his heart still had open doors, one of the first people he’d ever killed for the five families must have been a strega.
If I had killed a strega today, would the magic have flowed to me? How many deaths would it take before I could no longer feel what I did?
There was a sound from the trees, and the entire camp turned to face whatever approached us in the dark. I was not alone anymore, and yet it would take more than an army to make me feel safe from Beniamo.
Favianne staggered into the camp, her skin yellowed by the firelight, her eyes dull and the rest of her face shining with sweat. Through the cloth of her fine dress, her chest had been raked in long, bloody furrows.
I should have been angry that she’d taken the bone knife and left Mirella and Vanni to die, but the only feeling that pushed up through my shock was relief that someone had survived Beniamo’s attack. “You’re alive,” I said. “I thought—”
“Your brother came quietly,” Favianne said. Her words were crisp and unbroken, but she could not stop blinking, as if trying to shatter whatever she was seeing in her head. “He’d killed three of the men before I even noticed. And then . . . he had me in his hands and . . .” She turned to me, brave and blunt and beautiful, which proved to me that she was still Favianne, no matter how terrified. “I lied, Teodora. I told him I hated you. I said that you had ruined my life, and I was only trailing along waiting for a chance to take revenge. He . . . he liked that answer. It made him laugh.” She wiped her lips, smudging the last of the makeup she wore. “His mouth was slicked with blood.”
Beniamo had started eating his kills.
“I’m glad you kept yourself alive,” I said. Favianne had used her cleverness to survive. She knew that Beniamo wanted to kill people who loved me. And, despite all of her bravado and demands, I knew that Favianne did care. She’d been able to hide it, though—to push it down some trapdoor in her soul. “But then . . . why did he hurt you?”
Favianne looked down at her bodice. The cuts did not look deep, but they must have been painful. My fingers rose to the sticky red edges of the wounds, as if I had the power to take this pain away. I was no healer, though. Death and pain followed everywhere I stepped.
“Beniamo said—” Her voice gave way. She took a long moment and then spoke in a whisper, rough as granite. “He said he remembered how I’d treated him in the Capo’s camp. He told me I thought too highly of my beauty, and he would be happy to fix that.” She ran her finger down a line, dark red and crusted. “And then . . . Teo, he promised he would kill your sister and Vanni in front of me if I didn’t give him what he wanted.”
A thousand possibilities lit in my head, torches along a hall that led to a terrible place. But after a moment, there was only one left, a terrible burning truth.
“He wanted to know where Cielo was, didn’t he.”
“But he’d just seen Cielo on the battlefield,” Pasquale said as he joined us. He clapped his hands together, dusting the feeling of dead men off his fingers.
Favianne finally looked up. “He knew it was you.” All eyes in the camp came to rest on me, but there was no time to explain. Favianne’s face cramped with disgust. “He said . . . he said he’d know your scent anywhere.”
“Did you lie to him about where Cielo is?” I asked, frantic with hope.
Favianne’s breath came in hectic bursts. “I wanted to save Vanni and Mirella. But once I told him, all Beniamo did was walk off to their tent, laughing at how clever he’d been. He didn’t kill anyone in front of me. He let me get away.” Her shame was a palpable force. I took Favianne’s hands in mine, trying to settle it.
“That was not your fault,” I said. “He . . . he wanted me to know what happened here. He left a survivor on purpose.”
I had been so distracted by Beniamo’s move toward Amalia and the threat of my brother in power that I hadn’t paid attention to the words he’d given me in plain Vinalian. My brother had told me that he would not let me die until Cielo was dead. And there was no pleasure in killing my strega in the drowned grottoes unless I lived through the pain of it.
I needed to get to Cielo. Nothing else mattered.
The strega needs us, I told my magic.
No animal I knew was fast enough to track Beniamo if he’d left nearly a day earlier. A wind would take me to the Violetta Coast quickly, but it could not tell me where the drowned grottoes were. Their hidden nature worked against me.
I need to see, I told the magic. I need to see everything.
And the power of a hundred streghe answered, soaring through me, working together to save us all.
* * *
When I became the sky, it did not happen one piece at a time. I blinked, and I was spread out against the heavens, the whole of Vinalia stretched beneath me. We were locked this way, a marriage of solid earth and woven air.
I felt the rapid, pushing fingers of rivers underneath me, and the crawl of mountains, moving and growing and chipping away so slowly, a person would never notice. The towns were knots of life, and the cities were great, grasping fists.
Oceans pushed their waves onto shore, and shores accepted them with grace, changing with each kiss of water to land.
Winds and birds moved through me freely, and they were mine to hold in a loose, loving grasp. The sun moved through my skin. The clouds were my breath. The storms were my rage and beauty.
Yes, my magic said.
If I was going to carry this much magic inside of me, I could not think of a better way to use it. A smothering burden lifted, and I rose and rose, with nothing to stop me. I would have been happy to stay as the sky forever, but Cielo was down there, and I could not let my strega die thinking that I did not care. From this distance, life and death and love shouldn’t have mattered.
Magic was all.
All was magic.
But no matter how much I had taken on, I was not only magic. The part of me that was Teo, the sorely human part, strained to find the black-haired stranger I had met on a mountain, the one I knew as well as I now knew the country beneath me.
I searched everywhere at once. I felt every inch of Vinalia, and it brought on a flood of truth. This land needed new paths: the old ones had led us to dark places. Still, no matter how difficult this moment, no matter how dangerous the choices ahead, this place was so beautiful that even the sky held its breath.
Somewhere along the Violetta Coast, I felt the pinprick of magic that meant Cielo.
And I poured myself back down to the earth.
I arrived back in my girlish form at the edge of a ribboned cliff on the Violetta Coast. But I could not seem to fit back inside of myself. It felt like trying to force an ocean into the shallow curve of a spoon.
I looked around in a daze.
I had been to this part of Vinalia only once, when I was ten, and Father carted all of us on one of his long trips after Mirella and I begged until we lost our voices. We feasted on pasta dotted with tiny clams every night and swam in the sea every morning when we woke.
Fiorenza had told me so many stories of this coast, its seaside villages a clash of turquoise and coral and sunbeam yellow bright enough to rival the greenery that draped itself over homes and cliffs alike. Some of the beaches were filled with volcanic sea glass instead of sand, but even those could not approach the beauty of the water. Instead of a single constant shade, it was alive with a swapping and melding of blues and greens and the sea’s namesake, a deep inky purple.
The salted air moved through me as freely as the wind had when I was sky, teasing my hair into knots. But this breeze did not bear Cielo’s magic.
My own magic pulled me down toward the beaches, which made me hope that Cielo had found the grottoes—and perhaps even Veria’s Truth. Maybe I would discover the strega emerging lazily from the water, glistening from a swim, the vase of moonlight lodged in the sand.
I ran down the cliffside path at a foolish pace, my steps almost sending me pitching into the open air and then the sea. Below me, waves broke against rocks, rabid with foam. As I rounded a sharp downward turn I slid on one heel. My imagination spilled over the edge and sent me to my death, but I clung to the earth, gripping the roots of the lavish green vines that spilled over the cliffs. I thanked God—all the gods—for a childhood spent on the steepest mountain slopes.
The Storm of Life Page 27