When I reached the bottom, I realized that I was still naked.
“Clothes,” I demanded in the old language.
The nearest patch of wildflowers, cloudy blue and tangerine and hardy red, became a tunic with those colors all mixed together, the fabric softly scented. I pulled it on, already missing the play of wind across my skin. But I did not have time to mourn each tiny loss, when such a large one loomed overhead.
I ran up and down the beach, coating my feet in dampness and grit, but Cielo was not in any of the coves, and I did not see the strega’s pale figure among the scrolled edges of the waves.
I turned away from the sea and faced the cliffs behind me, a series of great dark holes, as if some giant thing had burrowed inside the rock and made itself at home. In a way, it had. The sea was a creature that breathed tides and hollowed out grottoes.
When I picked up my feet and ran toward the nearest of the great openings, the magic balked. It scratched and hissed like an underfed cat. Here, it said, directing me toward a dark keyhole in the rock. I didn’t hesitate to push myself through.
In that moment, it became clear that I trusted my magic the same way I used to trust Father’s voice.
I pushed myself into the earth, scraping on teeth of stone, and emerged ankle-deep in water. A grotto opened around me, but beyond a few sun-pierced inches, it was dark. I could see no bridge leading onward, no puzzle path of stones to follow. There was only water.
Farther, my magic said. Do not hesitate.
I trudged in up to my shins, my knees. Eddies washed around my thighs, the tide sucking me closer as it took me by the hips. It was cold here, away from the blessings of the sun. I shivered, slowing as my tunic pooled and tugged. The sea was striking into the cave with far more confidence than I was. Soon the water was so deep, I could not skim the bottom with my toes.
I had to swim.
A lifetime spent in mountains meant that I could push across a fast-moving stream, but I had barely one month of ocean swimming to guide me. The only thing that helped was the tide at my back, pushing me farther in.
It pushed so fast, I grew less and less certain I would be able to fight my way back out. I kept my arms outcast, searching for rocks. There was no certainty that I would come to a new resting place, only the faith that my magic would not lead me here without reason. Only the hope that soon I would find the strega perched on a dry spit of rock, eating a lunch of bread and olives from the nearest fishing town, Veria’s Truth cradled in one hand.
Far off, I heard the thick shushing of wings. My reason, and everything I knew about grottoes, told me that those were the sounds of bats.
Look up, my magic said.
Overhead, a stray beam of light showed me birds rather than bats. The black of their wings, banded with di Sangro red, was a color as beautiful as any shade of the sea. My heart lifted painfully.
Cielo.
I almost turned back, wanting to follow in the wake of Cielo’s flock. But my magic kept me pointed in the same direction. Maybe Veria’s Truth was still here in the depths of the grotto. Maybe Cielo hadn’t been able to find it.
I could fix that. I could mend every broken thing between us.
Rock bashed into my foot as I reached a new series of shallow pools, leading me one by one toward a grotto, where I stood on a thin ledge in front of a deep, rocky bowl filled with water. The walls were pitted with tiny holes that sucked in light from the outside world. The surface of the water grabbed for that radiance and cast it on the walls, creating veins of light and color.
I was so taken with the strange, secret majesty that at first, I didn’t notice Beniamo standing at the far end of the grotto, holding one black bird in each of his fists. He had seen me, though. The cold of the water that I’d been keeping back with eager movement sliced into me like a thousand tiny knives. I wondered how long my brother had been standing there, savoring the last of my hope.
It would be a small and pointless victory, but I did not want him to speak first. Beniamo always claimed the room with his voice before he followed with other means. “You must have killed your horse to get here so quickly,” I shouted. The words hit the stone walls, harsh.
“She was a determined creature,” Beniamo said, sniffing at one of the birds. “You would have adored her. Now she is rotting on the cliffs.”
“Your forces have been defeated,” I said, but the words rang hollow.
“Did you like your moment of playing queen?” Beniamo asked. “That daydream has always been your weakness. I thought it should be stripped from you before you died.” Beniamo had fought his battle against me on as many fronts as he could. Everything my brother had done had been arranged to hit me in the tenderest places. Beniamo wanted more than one death from me.
My wonder, my will, my body.
“It was never enough for you,” I cried out. “Being the chosen di Sangro son. If you couldn’t have everything, neither could we.”
Beniamo’s patience was one of the most maddening things about him. It remained smooth and glassy, unbroken by my rage. “I’m glad you caught up to me, Teodora,” he said. “Once your lover is dead, we can move on to the final stage of things.” His hands curled tighter around the birds, and they rustled and writhed in his grasp. “I will take the magic that should have been mine.”
No, my magic said.
I could not use it, though. I could not risk my brother taking pieces of Cielo in return.
I was nearly felled by my own fear. But I stayed on my feet, and I summoned my voice. I had spent so long throttling it when Beniamo was near that it was hard to set it free. “You will never have my magic. You don’t carry the death you cause.”
As the words met the rocks and resounded, I questioned whether they were true. Beniamo hadn’t cared about the other people he had killed, and yet in a twisted, foul way, he cared about me. Would he carry my death with him like a trophy? Would that be enough to transfer my magic to him?
“I’m sorry,” I choked out.
Beniamo’s laugh pulled up a shiver from my depths. “Do you really think apologies will have any effect—”
“I’m not talking to you,” I said. My voice shook hard enough that the ripples sounded less like a wildflower giving way in a strong wind, and more like the beginnings of an avalanche. I finished what I needed to say to Cielo—the words I could not die without saying, the ones that were bound so tightly in my breast that I could barely release them. “The thing we needed to do most was right there, and all I could see was what stood in the way.”
We needed to change magic so men like Beniamo would never be able to claim it again. I looked around the grotto for Veria’s Truth, a vase of pure moonlight that held the tears of a god—or a strega.
If I could get it, I would drink the water inside of that ancient shard of magic, the tears infused with Veria’s power. They would show me the truth: how to use my stolen magic to do the best thing for all streghe.
I would know how to change the death inheritance.
I searched the water and found nothing. Beniamo was laughing at my struggle, enjoying the sight of me growing cold and desperate. I closed my eyes, true black spotting against the weaker darkness of the cave.
Keep looking, my magic insisted.
“It’s over,” I muttered.
But I felt the slightest wind of hope, and when I opened my eyes, they went to the water swirling around my calves. The ever-changing colors reminded me of the endless hues caught in Cielo’s eyes. I knew this magic. It was just like the feat the strega had pulled off in the Neviane.
Cielo had become the colors of the Violetta.
Or at least, the parts of Cielo that weren’t clutched in Beniamo’s hands. I almost scolded the water beneath me for being so reckless, for stretching Cielo’s magic so far. For coming back when this was my fight and always had been.
“Di Sangro business,” I muttered. “Remember?”
But the water was already changing, leading my eyes as a lively braid of deepest blues drifted and sank to the bottom of the cave. Here were more colors: the rich green of pines and the violet of plums. If I hadn’t been looking straight at them, they would have blended with the shimmering water.
But I knew the ripple of that luscious silk. I knew what those green and purple hues looked like as they flew in a mountain wind or hung around my strega’s ankles. Cielo’s cloak was weighted down to the bottom of the pool.
It fluttered, revealing the brightest shard of white pottery that I’d ever seen, and then it settled back into place.
A new scheme leapt to my hands, my fingers desperate to hold Veria’s Truth. I slid my eyes over the cloak, taking care not to tear my attention away too quickly. If I drew Beniamo to that point, he would find what Cielo had worked so hard to dislodge from the layers of time.
I would not disappoint Cielo again.
If I died today, the last thing I would do was change magic.
“Well, sister,” Beniamo said in a teasing tone. We were back in the nursery, and he wanted to play a game. “What are the chances I’m holding a piece of your lover that he can’t live without?” His predatory instincts snapped into place, his eyes moving over the shining feathers of each bird. “His liver? His heart?”
There were so many pieces that Cielo could not spare—and Beniamo knew that making me guess was half of the pain.
“Which should I eat first?” He held them out, keeping his thumbs hard on their necks as they churned in his hands. “Your choice.”
But that was no choice at all, and I would not speak if it only fed into his brutal games. I pulled Father’s stiletto from my sleeve. I rushed at Beniamo, my blood pushing me forward, forcing open the pathways of my heart until it ached.
Beniamo nodded sagely, as if he’d seen this coming.
Good, the magic said.
Let my brother think that all I cared about was killing him.
With the tide at my back, I thought I would reach him in two flying steps, but the water spun into a thick pool and slowed me.
“Poor choice,” Beniamo said. I was caught watching as the bird in his right hand disappeared into his mouth with a crunch of bone.
I pushed forward with everything I had left in my exhausted body, screaming and plunging the stiletto into Beniamo’s left shoulder just as he turned to the second bird. It flew up to the heights of the grotto, smacking itself against the stone ceiling in its haste.
“Go,” I shouted to Cielo.
Beniamo pulled me close, his talons biting into my back. He didn’t spear them straight through, but dragged them down, deeper with every inch. “I wondered how long it would take before you fought me with your own strength and lost with honor.” Even though I was gritting my way through intense pain, the notion that Beniamo was the bastion of honor made my mind truly riot.
“Father’s knife will not help you now,” he warned. “Neither will his little sayings. The weak die, and the strong live.” Beniamo laid the words out slowly and thoroughly. “You proved that to me when I became an owl. It is the way of nature.”
On the other side of the grotto, at a safe distance, Cielo came back together, the color magic flushing her like a chameleon for a moment before she returned to her usual complexion. “Magic is entirely natural,” Cielo said, flicking water from her skin, droplet by droplet.
“You will have to start fighting it now,” I whispered.
With Beniamo distracted by Cielo’s sudden appearance, I stabbed him. I did not go for his heart or his guts or the arteries in his neck. I ignored every one of the killing blows Father had taught us. I aimed down, at Beniamo’s leg, letting him believe I was choosing to injure him so he could not follow me as I escaped.
When his hand came down to swipe Father’s blade, I grabbed him by the wrist. His other hand answered far too quickly, talons stabbing into my stomach. I did not change course. I kept my grip on his wrist and aimed for the top of his palm, carving away several fingers in a single motion.
Pain rushed to Beniamo’s face, but I took no delight in it, only exhausted relief as I staggered back, curving around my wound. Beniamo fell to searching for the Capo’s ring. He could not sink to his knees, though, because the water had risen too high. The tide was bold now, scattering froth up to my chest.
I started backing away, but I could not move very fast.
I tried to call on magic, but it was draining along with my blood.
“Please,” I said. “Change him into something small, something helpless.” But I could not find enough strength in that moment.
Cielo dove into the water, and I feared that she would try to stop Beniamo. She came up, naked and glistening, holding the vase that had been at the bottom of the pool. Understanding what Cielo meant to do, I scraped out a cry.
Veria’s Truth could not be spent on Beniamo. He was just one horrible man, and the world was full of them. If the only shard of magic powerful enough to show us how to change the death inheritance was gone, we might never get another chance.
Cielo was already unscrewing the lid, releasing the musty breath of ages and a trickle of water. “No!” I shouted, but there was no force behind my words. Cielo flung the contents of the vase at my brother and the drops spattered his face, dribbling down his chest, anointing him.
“Let him see the truth of what he’s done,” Cielo muttered, tossing the vase away and coming for me.
Beniamo’s eyes slid from us and did not return. He looked off into some unknown distance, his brow taking on the three deeply carved lines of di Sangro confusion, while his hand drizzled the dark rock with blood.
The water below me had taken on another color—red. It did not join the rest but kept to itself, like a vein in marble. I could not stop staring at what my life looked like as it left me.
I had the same cold feeling as I’d had when Cielo left me in the Mirana.
Beniamo started screaming in pain. When I looked back, he appeared to be standing in the water, unmoving. It was up to his chest now. The tide had crept up on us, but now it was turning with a vengeance.
“What’s happening?” I asked Cielo, shaking from the cold of the water and the weakness in my limbs. It was moving inward, toward my heart.
Cielo grabbed me by the arms, pushed a hand through my wet hair, and looked off toward my brother. “Veria’s Truth is giving him a guided tour of his own life. It’s showing Beniamo the truth of everything he’s done. He has no choice but to live through every torture, every moment of pain. He can’t turn away.”
My body slipped into a state of shock as I watched my brother’s face lose its vile certainty.
I watched as he grimaced and ground his teeth together, as he pushed against invisible ties that held him in place.
“We have to go,” I said. “While he’s still caught.”
“I think your brother might be here for some time,” Cielo said. Then he took one look at the onrushing tide, and another at my bloodied stomach, and added, “Let’s move quickly, though.”
Cielo turned into a wind, cracking a hole in the side of the grotto where the pinholes let in light. The entire wall crumbled and let in a rush of sea air. I pushed, one faint step at a time, onto a shelf halfway up a cliff.
Cielo sat down next to me, girlish again. Behind us, Beniamo’s screams and the water rose, each one fighting to fill the grotto. The water must have won, because soon it washed over his voice, and my brother was finally silent.
Cielo and I stood on a ledge, overlooking the sea, but its glories could not wrestle my eyes away from Cielo. The strega looked stunning in a determined sort of way. “My apologies are late in arriving, but . . . your brother did have to be stopped. I could not see it on that day in Prai.”
“We were both right,�
�� I said. “Magic still needs to be changed.”
“Don’t forget the part where we were both horrendously wrong,” Cielo said. “I should not have left you.”
If we’d never parted, the story would have been different. But there was no use wishing it into a new shape now.
“What did Beniamo take from you?” I asked, sweeping my eyes over every inch of my strega’s body, expecting a stain of blood, something missing.
“I can’t feel anything wrong,” she said. “Though I did feel it when he treated one of my birds as an antipasto.”
The strega’s light, tripping humor stumbled. She flinched, and I grabbed her by the shoulders, running my fingers down her sides, unable to keep myself at even this distance after so long away.
I pressed onto my toes to kiss her, my calves like two hard stones, but with an inch left, I stopped. In my rush, I had been looking for lost limbs, showy bloodstains. At such a close distance, I could see what Beniamo had taken.
The many shades of the strega’s eyes, that constant swirl, was gone. Cielo’s irises were a pale, nothing color. I brushed a thumb along the soft skin of her cheek. “You will live.”
Cielo was looking at me as if she wasn’t so certain she could offer the same words in return. “We have to get you back to your father,” she said. But I was still bleeding, and even the idea of making it to Amalia was so exhausting, I nearly fell. Cielo pulled me against her, the top of my head buried in her lovely neck.
I was too tired to think of a life that went on like this, from one stepping stone of near death to the next. “I want to stay here,” I said. I meant in the crook of Cielo’s neck. The sandy ground beneath me also looked tempting. Even the sea below would be a beautiful place to die.
“You have to change now,” Cielo said, shaking me. “Use a reversal.”
My magic was faint and far away. A reversal would take more than I could possibly summon. I had only a small measure of life in my body, and I knew what I wanted to do with it. I pulled Father’s knife out of my sleeve, Beniamo’s blood still crowning the blade.
The Storm of Life Page 28