by May Peterson
Also available from May Peterson
and Carina Press
The Sacred Dark
Lord of the Last Heartbeat
The Immortal City
Content Warning
This story deals with topics such as: discussions of sexual abuse trauma, violence, death, depictions of suicidal ideation and discussion of suicide, and depictions of transphobia and transmisogyny
The Calyx Charm
May Peterson
For every flower that finally bloomed.
Author Note
The language and cultural understanding of trans people depicted in this book do not necessarily map perfectly to the way we may be used to talking about transness in contemporary society. My goal has been to represent trans characters in context of a fictional setting while still being relatable to readers.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Excerpt from Lord of the Last Heartbeat by May Peterson
Prologue
Violetta
I dreamed, as I sometimes did, of killing my father.
My hair was long and prehensile, fiery tendrils that snared him like chains. He always struggled in the dream, just as I had struggled in waking life.
But in the dream I always won. I overpowered him, instead of the other way around. My hair was long and gleaming and flawless, and it drowned him in vengeance. I stood over him and wove a spider’s web of angry tresses, of scented mollygirl’s hair, the luminous female power he had always tried to kill in me.
I broke his arms and legs, cracked his ribs, choked the air from him. In the silk grip of my rage, he was finally dead.
His dead body couldn’t have escaped, even if a spirit resurrected him. Because I held him in the cocoon, grinding his bones into powder. Let him try to come back to life. I would still win. In the dream, he could never hurt me again.
Chapter One
Violetta
On the day I ran away from home, Tibario was there.
My escape was important enough that I permitted myself a glimpse into the future. Divining the future was a dangerous business. A lifetime of being a seer, able to peer ahead since birth, had still not taught me how to stare the future down without getting lost. Going too far could make the prophecy self-fulfilling. But this seemed a good time to risk recruiting the future for my cause.
A few measured steps, intuition whispering when I could move unseen, and my ascent from the pit went unhindered. I was across the city in an afternoon—in the pink and white flower district, a place full of entertainers and mollyqueens and fortune-tellers. Someplace a wealthy son of an aristocrat may dally, burn up his youth, but not hide.
Certainly not looking as I did.
The promise of rain had sung to me since I’d decided to run, a mist-gray mattinata in my ear. My coat was thick and I’d already designated the precise spot I’d wait. Wait, so the storm clouds in me could pass as those above reigned, so when I cried out my decades of grief, few passersby would see.
God, at least Mother was safe.
Then he was there. A shadow as dear as midsummer fog. I looked up without thinking.
Tibario stood with an umbrella in one hand, almost supernaturally dry in the gloom. He looked impossibly dashing—and dashing really was the word for it; handsome or graceful wouldn’t do. He carried a quality of movement, like fire about to spark.
He was dressed like he’d slipped out of a soiree, in black and white and velveteen, vest emphasizing his chest and shoulders. Only the oversized military jacket—his father’s—spoiled the image. Fur-lined and billowing with the sleeves not even covering his arms, the jacket made him look simultaneously rough and carefree, like a gentleman thief, yet shockingly youthful and vulnerable.
“Nice to see you again.” His voice had the texture of wool, soft but vaguely scratching. “When I heard your mother left, I wondered...when we’d meet next.”
I swallowed. None of my usual armor was on. My hair fell full and free on my back and shoulders. My clothes, while mostly shapeless, were a far cry from masculine. And sobbing in a teahouse washroom had warranted a little patching up—I’d finessed my eyes with color to make them look a bit better. I usually didn’t like Tibario to see me after crying, anyway.
But he was here now, and there was no one I wanted to see more than him.
If only I could let him see me—Violetta, the girl who had run from her skin, shedding it like a dragon’s husk. But my scales were thick, like the future’s, and Tibario would see them still. See Mercurio, the boy I was supposed to be.
“I...” I swallowed, tried to flatten my voice, keep the instinctive lilt out of it. People always noticed the voice first. Years of pretending to be male had also not taught me to do it well. “I imagine you have an array of mafioso tricks to credit for finding me.”
His brow wrinkled. “Yeah, this trick is called anxiety. Mamma has been blowing smoke out her nostrils for two days about his lordship, so I was worried. I thought you might need...a friend.”
The words were like a caress, soothing then leaving pain as it reminded me how tender my skin was. Tibario was a master of dispensing the ambiguous medicine of concern. It would numb my hurts enough to remember what safety felt like. But I could overdose easily, and it would leave me drunk with illusions of what I wanted his concern to mean.
I could always look. See if the future had any room for something deeper between me and Tibario. Could he ever feel for me what I do for him? But a no from the future would be crushing. It was better to hold on to what he offered here and now—a friendship.
Tibario cocked a brow and extended his umbrella so it allowed for another person. “Care to walk with me for a while?”
I took the hand given, stepped up into the implicit intimacy of a shared umbrella. We walked along the street for minutes, the rain a respectful accompaniment to our footsteps. At least we weren’t disturbed; the strangers passing by might take us for a couple of men huddled close, or read a mollygirl into my silhouette and think he was my patron or my boyfriend. Dualistic people always seemed to see what they wanted to see. I could only imagine how hard the what-sex-do-you-think-I-am dance was for every other mollyqueen and tomking, with no prescience to help them.
Tibario said nothing. A thoughtful, weightless nothing, waiting for me to turn it into something first. So that I didn’t have to if I didn’t want to, didn’t have to explain.
I turned slowly. Tears flecked my voice like raindrops. “I... I don’t know what to do.”
He breathed sharply. We were standing so close I could smell the fabric of his clothes, what they’d been washed in, the featherlight touch of scent he wore. If every track of our past had gone in a different direction, we might have been standing like this as the precursor to a kiss.
His hand touched my shoulder, squeezed. “I’d offer to take you home, but...”
I sucked air, changed a
sob into a laugh on the way up my throat. “Your mother would spit nails.”
He winced apologetically. A part of me couldn’t blame Serafina. Years ago, I had delivered her a rather grisly prophecy. Hard to blame her for not wanting to invite me round for tea.
It seemed like Tibario would touch a moment longer, then withdraw, and we’d continue. But he guided me back to a step, and kept his arm around me. It was solid and warm against me, fingers resting on the top of my bicep. Heat rushed to my face, and I thanked the rain and dimness for making it less plain.
This felt like when we were children, in school together. That had been the last time he’d done this. Before the future and its shadowed edifices had all come thundering down on me.
“Hey,” he whispered in my ear. “Let’s go someplace warm for now. Have something garlicky, and as much coffee as we can stand. I can call Leo. The three of us can come up with something.”
A nod was all my body let me supply in response. My throat was too busy holding back the tears I dared not shed where he could see.
* * *
A week later, when I had a little door to call my own, Tibario was still there.
He rapped at the door, and I was more prepared. Consulting the future still seemed risky, but intuition had been buzzing under my skin like a displaced voice, heavy with the subtle sounds of him. I opened, dressed in worker’s clothes that would at least look boyish, hair tucked into a cap, face bare. And in my exhaustion after moving in the things Leo and Rosalina had given me, I had to admit I wanted to see Tibario now exactly as much as I had the last time. More than anything.
He was messy, dear, rumpled, wearing what looked like pilfered livery of all things, and carrying a sack in his arms. “Sorry to drop in unannounced, but it’s what I do. And I know my manners.” The bag clinked as he fumbled inside, producing a slender bottle bright with a cheery brown liquor. “Never come to a witch’s house without an offering. Will spiced rum do the trick?”
I chuckled. “I think it will do a lot of tricks. What on earth are you wearing?”
He took that as invitation, depositing his bounty on my faded second-hand table, and didn’t seem to notice how quickly I shut the door. He greeted the room with a sniff. “It’s research. Do I look like I could be serving drinks at the Duomodoro? And...did you paint in here? It looks good. Very good. Is it only one room?”
It might have been a rankling question from anyone but him. This was a cozy little flat, and did indeed have more than one room, but not by much. I didn’t want bigger. Leo and Rosalina had secured it, and the only trouble had been finally allowing myself to be talked down from ardent refusal at Rosalina comping the rent.
It had all been Leo’s doing. The mutual friend of Tibario’s and mine, and de facto big brother to his gang of tomking fellows, he’d let me stay in his rooms when we’d gone to see him. He had also provided sympathy by way of alcohol, and the promise that our panoply of friends on the streets would put me up. And they had all been exactly who I did not want placed in the line of my father’s wrath.
But Leo’s wry gangster face had struck a dour note, nose wrinkling. “My girl. My dear. I will be roasted in Rosalina’s oven with parsnips if she finds out that I didn’t tell her the minute I knew you were in trouble. I know you’re afraid, but please. Let me tell her.”
There’d been no arguing with the threat of parsnips. He and Rosalina had acquiesced to my desire for someplace small, out of the way, someplace the supposed son of a prince elector wouldn’t likely slum around. They’d offered up spare clothes—both masculine and feminine, thank heaven, so I had disguise flexibility—odd bits of furniture, even the beginnings of a kitchen’s worth of food. That and the first few nights of startling peace had taught me this was a place I might be able to trust.
Seeing Tibario standing in it, grinning broad and sunny, soft brown face catching the evening light...it was almost enough to undo me. Almost.
I took the bottle, poured into unmatched cups, and saluted. “Is there a purpose to me asking how you tracked me down?”
His mouth opened, as if to defend himself, hand on his chest. Then, after a pause, “Fuck, sorry. My stalker mystique is probably not the most reassuring thing. I pressed Leo. He said you were...gathering your strength, and to leave you alone. But it was impossible to stop worrying.”
It was always like this, a hair’s breadth away from Tibario admitting the unspoken current between us. As if he knew my fragile state would leave me both hungering for his companionship and afraid of it at once. But unspoken it remained.
I sighed. “Thank you.” Then, glass raised—“Bottoms up.”
We downed our drinks at the same time, and the velvet crawl of dark-sugar burn came close to quieting the butterflies in my belly. We drank sweet amber fire that chilled as it burned, on my creaky borrowed sofa that sat against the wall that got the most sun. My windows peered out on the dusty Vermagna streets, a rose-limned skyline looking down on us. I was happy to have a flat on a high story; from here, the city looked quiet, grandiose, like an oil painting. The outline of the Duomodoro, the great cathedral, lent the sunset an air of omen.
As we paced toward drunkenness, it occurred to me that lying on my bed would be more comfortable, but I wasn’t about to crack that door. Tibario sat unselfconsciously close to me, loosening his collar and removing his vest, so the shirt lay wrinkled and partly open on his chest. I caught glimpses of collarbone, decolleté, shoulder, and looked away. Even his arm sprawled on the sofa back behind me—though not touching me, I could imagine it the same as he’d done that day in the rain.
Then, Tibario coughed, having emptied his cup again. We’d moved past the last of the rum, and he revealed gin—I rather hated gin—whiskey, and a coffee liqueur. Maybe he’d robbed his mother of booze as a form of protest. He leaned in, knocking his chest with a fist, and growled, “Mercurio. Hey. You never answered my question.”
Maybe it was the booze, but my chest and lungs suddenly felt like a furnace. “Wh-what question?”
His liquor-heavy eyes were gravely serious for a moment. “Do I look like I could be serving drinks at the Duomodoro?”
I relaxed with a chuckle. “No. Not now, but you did earlier. I think. I’m not a big festival-goer.” The new moon festivals always meant the cathedral being open for celebration, and libation was an expected part of the process. Why Tibario would want to serve it was beyond me, but he changed skin almost as often as I did.
“Good.” Then his head lolled back on the sofa, eyes closing. “You have money? I mean, I’m not judging you, but I figured if you’re running away from a mansion, there’s probably jewels to sell...”
“I do.” Another swig; this had to stop soon, because I was getting sleepy, and with his head almost touching my shoulder, the implications were approaching dangerous. “Mostly Mother’s jewelry she left behind, formal pieces, some personal cash I had. That, and I can make blessing charms to sell.” Rosalina was letting me sell them from her teahouse, but Tibario didn’t need to know that. If his sober mind remembered that I was frequenting a mollyqueen teahouse and bar, he’d put too many of the pieces together about his old friend Mercurio.
“Good,” he repeated, with less vigor this time, but clearer eyes. “Will you tell me if you need anything? I understand it’s probably best not having me floating around too much, our families being rivals...but can I help?”
The sound I made was cousin to a whimper. Definitely not just the alcohol. “You are helping. Thank you.”
His fully focused gaze glinted with wakefulness, probably sobered by his nap. “What about your mother?”
“She isn’t here to be helped, Tibario.”
“I mean...do you want her to be able to find you?”
I paused, counting five breaths. “Yes. No. I don’t know. I want her to be safe.”
Which may mean always staying away from me.
“I need to tell you something.”
My nod was automatic, stiff. The moments slipping by had the weight of stones.
“Do you remember my little brother, Mio?”
Mio? That wasn’t what I’d expected, and calmed me somewhat. “Of course I do.” Lithe, delicate Mio was years younger than Tibario, and he took androgyny to an angelic height. He wasn’t like other people—often mistaken by onlookers as either a girl or a boy, Mio didn’t seem to care. It was as if gender had no power to touch him. I wondered what that must be like, if it was liberating, or if I simply missed the deeper hardship beneath it. Heaven knew my experience with ambiguity had not been freeing.
I also remembered the power he held.
Tibario appeared hesitant, as if rethinking his confession, before going on. “He’s going to perform for the Imparviglio next week, when your father will be a guest of honor. The hope is Mio will be able to see into Lord Benedetti’s mind, and that at last...”
Ah yes. Tibario didn’t need to finish. A picture of the Gianbellicci family sprawled across my thoughts: Mio and his gift to read hearts through song, Gino the warmaster on the streets, Tibario the house spymaster, and Serafina...endowed with the sparkling red occhiorosso, she was able to pierce the mind as long as she knew something painful or shameful about her subject—a telepathic backdoor. And unlike Mio, once she had touched a mind, she could control it like a puppet.
“So she’s grooming Mio to join the family business of sorcery after all.” The sourness in my voice wasn’t intentional, but I doubted Tibario would fault me it. He’d been assumed to take on the mantle of don mafioso much younger, magical power or no. Sorcery—magic that manipulated the mind—was officially forbidden in Portia, but since when had it paid to truly stamp out crime?
