Now that the bone knife was no longer near Father, fury gathered around his eyes. This was not how his daughter’s wedding day was meant to unfold. That di Sangro temper would not give way to sadness—not even if I died. If Father mourned me, he would bury the grief inside of him for years, the same as he did with his magic.
In a single dark moment, I thought of a way we might survive.
“Kill me,” I said to the woman at my side, making sure my whisper had enough life in it to reach the crowd. Dantae was not the only one who could put on a show when it was needed. “If you must, do it now.”
“I don’t remember asking for a final request,” Dantae said, clapping on a smile.
“The Capo wants me dead, and I do not want to fight him anymore. I’m not strong enough.” The words slicked my mouth with bitterness, and the taste brought me back to the day Beniamo had me on my knees—the first time I had to lie to keep myself safe from the greed of men. I willed my voice to flutter, and it did not take much convincing. “Let me die here, with the people who love me.”
Do they? the knife asked as it slid back and forth, anticipating the cut. Do they love you enough to claim you, no matter what? My mind went hot with anger that had nothing to do with dying.
“Fine,” the woman said. “Kill you here, kill you elsewhere, it’s all the same to me.”
And with that, she dug the knife across my throat.
The cut was so clean and quick that at first all I felt was a blessed warmth. My blood, rising. It left me in gouts, and then a shocking cold set in. I shook as hard as I would have standing in the Uccelli in the heart of winter, wearing nothing but my red nightdress.
I hit the floor and watched the sideways world, through a flurry of last breaths and strained heartbeats. My blood was eager to cover the floor, pushing its borders farther and farther, a country made of blood, soiling the hems of anyone who stood too close.
My hands went to my neck as if they could push the life back inside of my body.
“Go,” I spat up at the soldiers of Erras, my words tainted with blood. “Let me die in peace.”
“Fine,” Dantae said, her not-quite-a-smirk looming above me. “Easier if I don’t have to fight you and that black-haired whelp all the way back to the Neviane, to be honest. Your magic will find me either way.”
Did that mean Cielo’s throat had been cut too? I writhed to look, but all I saw was a blockade of bodies. I hadn’t heard Cielo cry out—but I’d been so occupied with the sound of my own screams.
My pain threatened to steal away all sense, but I fought to keep a grip on my thoughts. How could Dantae be so sure our magic would make its way back to her? Did she have some way of channeling the brilliant death? One more thing I would never know unless my impossible plan worked. But that hope seemed far away, like the sound of my own heartbeat fading into the distance.
The soldiers of Erras stepped over my body. I reached for Father, my fingers sticky with my blood. He came to my side.
“Please,” I whispered, the word barely making a dent on the world.
Father shook his head. He knew what I was asking for—and he was refusing. My weakened heart took the blow and almost gave way.
This was my plan. This was the only plan.
“I don’t have enough for this,” he whispered, not naming what he could do. He still wouldn’t say the word magic. Father hadn’t trusted his abilities since the day I was born, when he failed to save Mother.
“You didn’t let her die,” I said. “You tried.” I had grown up never asking Father for anything. I had no right. I did not wish to impose on him when the world asked so much. And yet the word crawled up from my wounded throat, pushed itself to my lips. “Try.”
He touched my neck, coating his hands in my blood, pulling me close as he spoke warm, soothing words. At first, they were a loose scattering of pebbles. I followed the trail of Father’s voice, step after step after step.
He was telling me a story.
A strega story.
Meaning dawned on me, as large as the sky overhead, as bright as the sun rising in sharp rays over the mountains.
“‘The Bird Prince,’” I said, my mouth sweet and sticky with blood. It had always been one of my favorites. The words brought me back from a smooth, dark place where nothing mattered, nothing meant anything. Breath raged into my throat, painful and raw, the kind of pain that proved I was alive.
I staggered to my feet.
Father looked gray and threadbare kneeling in a puddle of my blood. It seemed small now, as if all of the life that had leaked out of me hadn’t amounted to much. Everyone in the five families was staring at us. At Niccolò di Sangro.
They knew what he was now—a strega. A healer with a low, haunted voice that could knit bones and skin back together with a story. My little sister Adela looked on with amazement. Fiorenza watched with the steadiness of a woman who had paid close attention to her family and grown immune to surprise. But most were glaring at Father as if he had been lying to them for years, for decades.
He kept his eyes on me. He had never been able to face the judgment of the five families, and today was no exception.
I crossed the room to Cielo. He was huddled around the book, his blood seeping into the pure white pages. His black hair splayed across the floor, as limp as a half-hearted apology. His eyes had gone elsewhere, leaving me behind.
It did not matter how many people surrounded me. If Cielo died, I would be alone.
I whirled back toward Father with a new demand on my lips. “Save him.”
“Impossible,” Father said, putting his hands to his knees as he rose. I understood his exhaustion, his uncertainty, but there was something else lurking in his tone—a resistance that hadn’t been there when I was lying prone on the floor, leaving the world one breath at a time.
“I need Cielo,” I said, this moment pushing the truth out, even though I knew my father wasn’t ready to hear it.
“This person is leading you astray, Teodora,” he whispered.
“You think Cielo is the problem?” I said with a vicious laugh. “The world is ripe with enemies, and you pick the strega who shares my bed to blame?” Father’s face hardened. I had gone too far—revealed too much. But I was tired of keeping my story down. Hiding it shamefully, as my magic hid now.
Father shook his head, putting two fingers to the knot at his brow. “Today should have been a simple day. No magic. No death.”
Cielo’s breath rattled like a key in a lock that didn’t quite fit.
“He’s in pain,” I cried.
And so was I. Losing my strega only months after finding that such a person existed was unthinkable. I could only imagine how my heart would split—the shards of magic that I would leave behind.
Father’s nod was heavy with consideration. “I will ease it,” he said, spreading his fingers over Cielo’s chest. “Make things . . . peaceful.”
I ripped his fingers away as another truth knitted itself together. Father hadn’t killed that man on the stairs all those years ago just by stabbing him. Niccolò di Sangro was a strega, and on that deep winter night, I had seen him use a reversal. Instead of telling a story that summoned healing, he had offered a deep silence, drawing the marrow out of life.
I would not let him do that to Cielo.
“This person is a strega,” I said, falling back on a language Father understood—threats. “And not any simple strega. Cielo’s magic is the strongest, most potent, most sought after in all of Vinalia. People will keep coming for us. They will always come for us.” My own words hit me, a fresh wave of terror.
“All the more reason to keep you safe,” Father said, his decision still firmly in place.
“Would you take all that power in when Cielo dies?” I asked, prying wildly at his conviction, no longer in control. “Would you chance it going to someone else in
the family? Another one of your children? Your grandchild?” I looked around the room for Mirella and Luciano, but I could not find them in the crowd.
I hated every word of the argument I was making, but to save Cielo, I would say anything. “The last time you let a strega die, I was the one who took on his magic. Do you want that to happen again?”
Father’s eyes went wide, as if he’d been poisoned with understanding. As if turning me into a strega—a person so much like him—was the worst thing he’d ever done.
Cielo cried out as his body flicked to girlish form and then slowly changed back. Agony infused Cielo’s magic.
Father knelt roughly at Cielo’s side. Niccolò di Sangro looked older than he ever had before, and Cielo looked young, a child, as Father spun another strega story for him, a live-giving stream of words. Cielo’s long, shadowy eyelashes fluttered.
He looked up into my father’s face. I thought Cielo would spit out some remark about how long it had taken Father to heal him. “Signore,” he said, voice rusted over. “A thousand thanks.”
Father wiped Cielo’s blood off his hands and stood. Cielo bounded to his feet twice as quickly as Father had. I rushed to him, but Cielo held up a hand, his throat working hard to swallow. “Before we lose another moment, I need to talk to those death mongers who call themselves streghe,” he said, “and soil the good name of every cow who died to make their leather.”
“Really?” I felt my face souring. “You always say I’m so bent on revenge that it will change my shape altogether.”
“You are,” Cielo said. “But this isn’t a matter of revenge. It’s about those knives.”
Carina ran through the crowd, breaking past the line that separated us from everyone else. She tugged at Father’s sleeve. “It’s all right, wildflower,” Father said, patting her head, trying to put her fears back in place. “Teo is going to live, and so is her . . . friend.”
“No, no.” She pulled Father down to her height. I could read my sister’s lips, white as strawberries picked out of season. “Luciano is missing.”
I started running, with death’s shadow still clinging to my heels.
* * *
The town on the far side of the moat must not have known about the trouble in the castle, because festival lights burned a hole in the dark. Cielo and I split the quiet of the castle walk with our bootheels and the harsh breath that came of recently having our throats slit. As we searched for Luciano, I gathered the facts that had been hard to see with the distraction of a knife at my neck.
The soldiers of Erras had tossed in their lots with the Capo—he had probably been wooing them for years. Whatever he had promised had to be worth more than the dirty little bargain he’d made with the streghe he stole from the streets of Amalia. The Capo had also courted Ambrogio and won him over with the promise of power and the di Sangro lands. Now, to keep one of the five families in his well-lined pockets, the Capo had said he would reclaim the child for Ambrogio, ripping it away from Mirella. The soldiers of Erras had been sent on two errands tonight: Dantae had put on her little circus of violence while one of the soldiers of Erras quietly stole the child.
“Both bridges to the village have been drawn,” Cielo said.
“Of course they have,” I said. “It’s supposed to be safer that way.”
“Did they come in by the lake?” Cielo asked. “Villains always have an array of skills, like seafaring. Although I suppose this would be lakefaring.”
I shook my head. “The five families posted guards along the shore.”
Cielo’s eyebrows danced into a scornful position. “Guards who are immune to magic?”
“There are no sounds of a fight,” I said. “But . . . what if there is a secret way for a boat to leave?”
Cielo caught up to my reasoning. “The underground river.”
“It flows into the castle,” I said. “Where does it come out?”
Cielo took my hand and pulled me along. Our feet scraped the stones of the castle walk, all the way back to the abbey.
“You think they took a quick moment to pray?” I ask. “They’re not fond of God, from what I hear.”
“Precisely,” Cielo said. The smile he gave—an enigmatic slide of the lips—might have frustrated me on any other day, but I was glad to see it now. Cielo was still alive, still mine. The embers of my excitement crackled to life at the worst possible moment.
The abbey was emptied, silent, the pews shiny with polish, long and inviting. If it hadn’t been for Luciano’s disappearance, I might have dragged Cielo onto the nearest one and risked damnation.
“We need a way down,” Cielo said.
“What?” I asked, still dizzy with thoughts of pulling Cielo to his knees.
“These old abbeys weren’t plunked in any old spot, or rather they were plunked in the oldest spots of all. Built on the bodies of temples for the worship of the old gods.”
“Yes, yes.” I dusted off my di Sangro lessons. “Every temple to the old gods contained a stream so truth could flow from the lips of worshippers to Veria’s ears.” That underground river must have been the source of the cold, clear water Luciano had been baptized in.
Cielo and I ran through the nave, every sound our bodies made clanging through the empty space. Behind the cold marble stretch of the altar, I found a wrought-iron railing bolted to the ground. A tight spiral of steps led into the damp, breathing earth. My fear closed in as I worked my way down. Cielo stayed a single step behind me.
We emerged into a world of crumbling pillars, many covered in markings I could not read. My knowledge of the old language came from hearing the priest at mass and novena and from the magic that rang through my body. It was all spoken, never set down.
A whisper slid into my ears. At first I thought it was the bone knife, back to do its sharp work. My hand rose to my throat, finding a single line crusted over with dried blood and throbbing an echo of the pain that had almost killed me. But the knife did not return, and the rush of sound did not settle into words. I took another step into the chamber as it grew more forceful.
Water.
Cielo and I ran forward and found two small boats poised on the underground river’s rumbling dark surface. Dantae stood with her heel on the prow of the first boat, the other soldiers of Erras working to untie the knots that held both in place. When Dantae spotted us, her lips went flat. “So that healer had a few breaths in his old lungs. I would have killed him if I’d known he was worth anything.”
I would have rushed to Father’s defense, but Luciano’s cry silenced me. He was nestled in the arms of a soldier on the bank, so deep inside of a bundle of blankets, I hadn’t noticed him at first.
Dantae tracked my interest like a bird of prey. “Oh, this is coming with us,” she said. “His father wants him.”
“Vanni is his father,” I insisted—like Fiorenza was my mother. Blood formed a bond, but it proved weak and watery in the face of love.
Cielo shouldered his way in front of me, locking eyes with Dantae across the cavern made of ruins. “Tell me about the bone knife.”
“Really?” I muttered. “Now?”
“I need to know,” Cielo said, his eyes filled with hard flame.
“You do know what the knife is, little strega. Or you wouldn’t have that look in your eyes.” Dantae sized Cielo up and did not seem to disapprove. I hated it even more than if she had dismissed him outright. “You know, you could have grown up with us,” she said. “The soldiers of Erras would have welcomed your magic with open arms.”
“You mean the kind that reach all the way around so they can stab you in the back?” Cielo asked, but his muscles twitched.
Dantae’s arrow had hit home—or rather, Cielo’s lack of any such thing.
“We are a true brother- and sisterhood,” Dantae said, with none of the performer’s gloss to her words. She had a harsh voice wh
en she wasn’t shining it up for the crowds. “Nations rise and fall, men spark and fade. We are the steady flame, always burning. Magic is our common cause; death, our friend and companion. Did you know that once you find a way to invite death into your life, she can never surprise you? And now we have what we’ve needed for so long. We have the Bones of Erras.”
“The Bones of Erras?” I asked. Those words gnawed out a space inside of me—raw, painful, empty.
Cielo clearly had an idea what they meant, because his entire face changed, fear and awe battling each other. “That’s nothing more than a story.”
The soldiers undid the last of the knots as Dantae’s gaze flicked over my body, then Cielo’s. “So were you, until a few months ago. What is real is always shifting, but what is true never changes.”
“What are we all spitting riddles about?” I asked, even as my heart reached wildly toward Luciano. The man’s arms tightened around him, as if he could feel what I was thinking. This standoff could not last forever.
Dantae sighed. “If you come after us, I’ll have to throw the little one in the river. A tragic accident, but these things happen when a strega’s magic is so wild and untrained.”
Dantae would blame me for Luciano’s death. The idea made my magic rise along with my fury. I feared I would take down the old temple, the abbey, the castle and island it sat on, the whole rotted world.
I fought to get hold of my magic, to spin it into a useful shape, but I knew that if I let it out of me now, Dantae would be right—I could change Luciano without meaning to.
A noise as loud as a cracking heart came from behind me.
I turned to find the snout of a pistol aimed at Dantae. The dragons cresting along the barrel took shape, and I recognized the weapon a second before the young man holding it came into focus. Vanni’s red hair dipped across his sweating forehead as his hands plunged into his pockets for another ball to load. The first shot had gone wide, cracking the wall of the temple.
The Storm of Life Page 6
