The Storm of Life

by Amy Rose Capetta

  I’d barely looked at the stiletto since the day I’d fought with Cielo.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, catching my arm before I could toss it in the sea below.

  “No more knives passed down from fathers to sons,” I said. “No more magic passed death to death. Promise me you’ll find another way to change the inheritance.”

  Cielo looked at me with a sadness that I could not possibly bear, along with every other weight.

  “Promise,” I said.

  The strega dipped forward, her lips hitting mine with a warmth that crackled and glowed as sure as sitting by the hearth on a winter’s morning. The sun above us shone cold and measly compared to this.

  The world seemed to tilt, and I believed it was sliding me toward whatever sort of heaven or hell awaited. Then something deep inside of me flicked, and a strange and magnificent feeling came, like turning to a blank page in a story I’d thought was fully written.

  When Cielo pulled back, he was in boyish form.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, pushing forth a smile for my strega, even though I couldn’t feel it. “I’ll miss you in every possible way.”

  “Teo,” he said, standing back with the huddled features of a stranger. “Let me try something.”

  I laughed, which was a mistake. My guts seared with pain. “Do you really think we have time for that?”

  Cielo’s fingers touched the line of my shoulder, brushing my skin, the motion as smooth and tight as turning a page.

  Another flick.

  Cielo was in girlish form again, looking down at herself with something like wonder.

  “What did you just do?” I asked. This could not be the brilliant death—not yet. I was still alive. But it seemed that when Cielo touched me, Cielo changed.

  I thought about my strega’s book, that collection of leather and blank pages infused with magic, how I had locked it away, even though I claimed to love Cielo. The memory of the fight left me aching, wanting to cry out. It felt like pressing on a barely healed wound.

  Our hearts had broken that day, leaving splintered pieces everywhere.

  I carefully uncurled my palm from the stiletto, the handle leaving a harsh indentation as if I’d been gripping it for years instead of a few pitiless minutes. I looked at the dark twist of the handle, spiraling and then sliding down to the point. “You put this in my hand the day we fought,” I said. “The day you left me.”

  “I started with the apology, if you’ll remember, but we can circle back to that if you need to hear it again . . .”

  I put my hand to Cielo’s lips, quieting her for one single, necessary moment.

  “This is a shard of magic,” I said. “Our magic.”

  Cielo’s eyes blasted wide with understanding.

  “Your magic changes the forms of things outside of you, and mine changes the form of the caster,” she said, speaking at a rate I’d never heard before, even from Cielo, words pounding faster than a fearful heartbeat. “Magic is something inherited from the outside world, twined up inside of each strega . . .”

  “And this shard of magic holds both of our powers.”

  “And we’re stronger than any streghe in ages.”

  Neither of us was bold enough to speak the hope that together, our magic was enough to change the death inheritance. That perhaps we had taken the deaths of so many streghe in Vinalia and spun them into something better.

  Something new.

  Cielo looked at her fingers, which were trembling slightly. “I think I could change when I touched you, because . . . I changed you. Into the book.” She cocked her head. “Well, more like a human form of the book.”

  “You’re saying that we traded some of our magic.”

  “But if not through death . . . how?” Cielo asked.

  As soon as I heard the question, I knew. If magic could be passed only by a change as potent as death, the answer was clear. Besides, I had felt it. I knew the truth in my body, my rushing blood. “It happened when we kissed.”

  “Can you take on a different form now?” Cielo asked, hope riding high in her voice.

  I was afraid to try—afraid to be wrong. But the only other choice waiting for me was death.

  I tugged on all of the strings of my magic, and it came together smoothly. This did not feel like a reversal. It was as simple as breathing.

  I tried to think of the fastest way we could return to Amalia, to Father and his healing magic. I didn’t need to be the sky this time. I only needed to be fast. As my dying mind wandered the halls of the past, I remembered that long ago, my brother Luca had told me the fastest way to travel.

  “Come with me,” I told Cielo.

  After so much cold, I became a burst of light.

  Traveling as light was nearly instant, a searing that cut my breath to pieces. At first, I thought I had died and was imagining one last journey back to Amalia. But I woke naked, damp with blood, lying on a battlefield.

  If this was life after death, it was a cruel joke.

  Cielo leaned over me, cheeks drawn tight, apologetic and pleading. “Your father is coming. I don’t suppose you can whip up some clothes?”

  My neck rusted over with pain, and I could not even shake it. “Try it yourself.”

  “Can I do that?” Cielo asked, worry seasoned with delight. Our trade of magic was a discovery worthy of feasts and celebrations, parades and dancing, but all I could manage was a wincing smile as Cielo pointed at a trampled patch of grass, and then tossed a green-brown cloak over me.

  He helped me up to sitting, the pain in my stomach shading quickly into numbness as it became too much for my body to fight.

  I faced the same view as I had the day before. Mimì’s rivers were unmistakable, and so was the green stripe of the Estatta separating us from the city. Amalians were crossing the bridges to see what had become of the armies, to make a hasty peace with their new fate.

  And Father was approaching.

  “Teo,” he said, his breath spent in running. I hadn’t seen him run in years. “I thought I saw you. . . .”

  “I’m here,” I said, forcing the words out past the overwhelming urge to faint. Talking to Father made me feel like everything might be fine, that my life could still return to its former state.

  But when Father looked to the wounds in my stomach, his face fell into grim, helpless lines. Still, he threw himself down at my side, telling me stories, pouring the words into my nearly deaf ear.

  I strained to listen, but there was little comfort here. These were not the calm, measured stories Father told other people who were sick or wounded. They were strega stories, yes, but the sentences were choppy, the plots half-remembered.

  His magic was faded.

  I had come all the way back from the Violetta Coast, and Father couldn’t save me. He must have used up too much power after the battle, saving all the wounded soldiers like I’d asked him to.

  “It’s fine,” I whispered. “You don’t have to keep trying.”

  I didn’t want the last thing I heard to be his frantic misery. I looked up at the sky, the brightness burning behind the clouds.

  Father kept throwing useless words at me. Tales that should have felt true, but all rang empty. My hands went to my stomach and slid around in my blood. Words. More words. They didn’t mean anything.

  All I could think about was how the streghe in those stories were dead and gone.

  While I was dying, the past was like a half-opened door, and I found another truth beyond it. Father had feared a moment like this since the day I was born. This was the way he must have looked when he could not save Mother, when no amount of magic could put back the life she bled away after pushing me into the world.

  “Death is not your greatest enemy,” I said, giving Father the words though each one cost me another clawing second of pain. Father had left so
much of life untouched out of a potent mixture of fear and tradition.

  “Do not be sad for me,” I said, one last di Sangro demand.

  I had used my magic. I had loved my strega.

  My eyes closed. There was an abyss waiting, a ravine as dark as the Storyteller’s Grave on the mountain at home.

  I was no longer afraid to fall into it.

  Cielo’s voice leapt with urgency, a silver fish traveling against the tide. “Signore, you must kiss your daughter.”

  “I would prefer not to take orders at this moment,” Father said with a gruffness I could not help loving—and a stubbornness that I knew all too well.

  But even after those words, I felt the dry brush of Father’s lips.

  My magic lifted and rose through my body like dawn, banishing the darkness. Everywhere I hurt, it spread brilliance. Everywhere I bled, it dried up the rivers. And where I was broken, it mended my skin.

  I opened my eyes to the rarest sight of all—Father’s amazement. Instead of us looking like him, Niccolò di Sangro looked like one of his children: Luca bent over his specimens; Mirella caught in a rare unguarded moment of translating a mountain scene with her thick, oily paints; me when I had my first magic lessons from Cielo.

  “How?” Father asked.

  “I had plenty of magic, but no way of healing,” I said, the pain stepping away from me like a dance partner as the music stopped. “You gave me what I needed to do it myself.”

  The trade of kisses that Cielo and I had done on the cliffs of the Violetta Coast was not a onetime matter.

  This was the new inheritance.

  This was a new age of magic that would not be a bloody echo of the others.

  I wondered if that meant Father had just taken in a little of my magic too—some of the strength that he needed to use his powers openly and freely. I rose to my feet, as wobbly as a kid goat. Cielo steadied me, setting my face between his hands. His eyes were solemn, the missing colors calling to my memories, but I did not wish to spend the rest of my days mourning tiny losses.

  Not when there was so much beauty here.

  “Your eyes are clear as water in a mountain stream,” I said, finding a new way to admire them.

  Cielo’s focus was so intent, I wondered if the strega had even heard the compliment. “Because you survived, I am going to do something foolish.”

  I cocked an eyebrow.

  “I have a scheme,” Cielo said. “But I’m not a di Sangro, so it is stuck together in the most careless fashion, and a great deal of it rests on your newly mended shoulders.”

  “Good,” Father said, with a laugh that still had a last bit of fear clinging to it. “If you don’t give Teo a challenge, she will slap one together in the next four minutes.”

  * * *

  We gathered the rest of our party at camp, and in the midst of bittersweet greetings, I gave Cielo several looks that should have pried the truth from his lips. But my strega would not speak a word of this new scheme.

  While Mimì and Xiaodan embraced Cielo, I rushed over to Luciano. My godchild was wailing in Dantae’s arms. He was the one person who felt the lack of his mother more keenly than I did. I patted his head, and he stopped crying for a moment, though he gave me the same suspicious glare he had earlier.

  Then he cried harder, his entire face blotching di Sangro red.

  “He’ll need milk soon,” Dantae said. “It’s the one thing I can’t give him. There’s a woman back at our camps who’s just had a baby of her own, and she could be here in less than a day.”

  “We’re close to talking Dantae and her soldiers into joining the sixth family,” Mimì said.

  “Her feelings are resonating closely with ours. I told her there won’t be any sticking of knives to anyone’s throats, though,” Xiaodan said. “That made her frown a bit.” She hooked one arm through mine, and Mimì claimed my other elbow.

  As they told me everything I’d missed while I was on the Violetta Coast—mostly the fact that the Amalians had heard of our victory and were waiting to see what happened to Vinalia next—I noticed Favianne across the camp, standing near a twitchy Pasquale and looking thoroughly left out.

  The church’s army had started the long march back to Prai, but I was surprised to find MacCartaigh and Cinquepalmi sitting around the campfire. They both leapt up to greet Cielo.

  “Good,” MacCartaigh said, pounding on Cielo’s back and offering him a tin cup that could have held anything. “You’re back.”

  “Father Malfara would not have liked us to leave without seeing his child safely returned,” Cinquepalmi added.

  “My father didn’t care what became of me,” Cielo said, sipping at the drink. I could smell it from where I stood, and judging by the piercing odor, it was as purely distilled as a vase made of moonlight.

  Cinquepalmi shook his head, his great nose cutting the air. “You were all he spoke about in the last few months. He came back changed after Amalia. He couldn’t talk to the priests about his past with a strega, but he took us into his confidence. Why do you think we were at your wedding?”

  “They were at your wedding?” Father asked, looking more than a little slighted.

  “We can have a di Sangro celebration,” I said, but the words lingered on the air like smoke. I did not know who would come to such a feast. The di Sangro family had dwindled, one loss at a time. I could hope to change Fiorenza’s mind, and bring her back, but if she chose to stay on the Violetta Coast with my sisters, I would honor her decision.

  When I looked around the fire, I could see another family, stitching itself together. It eased the grief in my chest, though it could not banish it completely.

  I took a quick drink of Cinquepalmi’s liquore. After facing Beniamo in the drowned grottoes, this moment still required all of my courage.

  I took Father’s hands between mine, as if I were teaching him to pray. “There is a place for you in the sixth family if you’re willing to accept it.”

  Father’s brow folded. He didn’t answer yet. I found I didn’t need him to.

  The offer stood.

  I walked over to Cielo, who swiped the cup from me and tipped it so gravity gifted him the few last droplets. “Come,” he said. “We shouldn’t keep all of Vinalia waiting.”

  After I had used magic to add a few more items of clothing to our outfits, Cielo led the sixth family and the remains of the other five into Amalia. I walked at the strega’s side, the cloaks he had made for us flapping around our legs like the wings of birds. He had already taken to the pageantry of clothing magic—perhaps a little too well. We looked regal, and yet not in the way of Vinalian nobles. A people of our own.

  As we walked, the Amalians stared and traded bits of stories.

  They spoke of the streghe who had saved Vinalia from a madman.

  They spoke of the di Sangro who had saved Vinalia from her own brother.

  “These people are following us like stray cats,” I said as the crowds grew, inviting curiosity and yet more people.

  “Let them stare,” Cielo said, flicking a hand to draw them all closer. “I find that I don’t mind being a sensation. After so many years of hiding, the whole thing is refreshing by comparison.”

  We stopped in the square in front of the Palazza. The statues of the Capo had been charred by Cielo’s magical fires, or pitched over, a few chunks of marble left as the only tribute to the greatness of Cristoforo Malfara. But some of the statues of the old gods stood, proud and lasting. Melae, with a robe that hid the sight of a person’s death in its folds. Veria, with her solemn gaze. Erras, with his knife.

  As we came to a stop in front of the Palazza, the crowd perched on every bit of open space. A nearby conversation turned to the battle and the already infamous speech Cielo had made on the battlefield.

  “What are they talking about?” Cielo asked with a clear-eyed squint
and a heavy frown. “I didn’t make any speeches. I would have a memory of that.”

  I coughed, pretending it was caused by the dust. “Yes, well, I might have borrowed your body for a brief time,” I said. “But your scheme?”

  Cielo squinted. “Ah, yes.”

  He stepped in front of the crowd of gathered Amalians, and they went silent. I savored this moment—the last before another war inevitably broke out to decide who would rule when Cielo stepped aside.

  “You require someone to lead you,” Cielo said. “And it would seem that I have the right blood in my veins, as well as the traditional anatomy between my legs.” There were confused stares but no laughter. Cielo looked disappointed, but pushed on. “I accept the honor, and honestly, the tremendous burden, of being the next king of Vinalia.”

  My hand raised to grab Cielo’s arm. I did not want the strega to turn his life into a string of grim, unwanted responsibilities. Cielo had given up so much to Vinalia, and I would not ask my strega for more sacrifice.

  But just as my hand met his sleeve, he spoke again. “I will not be running this country, however. I have other plans, starting with giving a great deal of magic back to Vinalia, magic stolen by the previous Capo. No, I will not be able to cut your deals and scheme your schemes. That is the calling of Teodora di Sangro, who I have married, which I believe makes her your queen.”

  The crowd looked more than confused now. They shifted, unsettled, as if we had faced a calm sea and then a storm had broken the sky.

  “I imagine that some of you are already writhing like squids in a net,” Cielo shouted. “However, I would like to point out that other countries have put queens on their thrones. In Eterra, there is one ruling right now. And there have always been those who helped shape countries quietly, standing at the elbow of a man on the throne. Also, I would remind you, quite forcefully, that you have already followed Teodora’s rule before today. She has proven herself in battle, if you care about that kind of thing. She was the general of the strega forces who held the pass at Zarisi, and she kept all of you from cutting each other open just yesterday.” The people looked to each other, sure of themselves when they shouted that no such thing had happened.