He beckoned to a soldier outside the tent and said, “Tell my second that Teodora di Sangro has returned to the fold.” The soldier saluted and spun, but the Capo cuffed his arm before he could start off. “If this strega is here, my nephew—or niece—can’t be far behind. Inform the men to keep a sharp eye for a young person with long black hair and a pampered air.”
“Pampered?” I asked as the soldier set off and the tent closed behind the Capo, sealing us in together. “I thought Cielo’s lot was fairly difficult after you destroyed Giovanna’s life.”
“She made her own choices,” the Capo said mildly.
“So you didn’t drive her to death and your brother back to the arms of a strega-hating religious order?”
“I thought my soldiers killed you in Castel di Volpe,” the Capo said, no longer amused by my presence.
“You must have been too busy losing a war to notice that I was still alive.”
“There is that wit,” the Capo said. “I had forgotten how well matched we are, Teodora. Together, we could have doubled our greatness. Who knows? In time, I might have asked you to be queen of Vinalia.” The thought slithered over me as the Capo took a seat in his canvas chair. “All of that is unimportant now that I’ve found the perfect wife. Strong of body, mind, and will. A good Vinalian woman, Fabiana. The people love her. And they don’t have to worry about whether or not she’ll turn them into thimbles when she gets angry.”
He should be a tapestry that you can pick apart, thread by thread, my magic chanted, but no matter how much of it spilled out of me, nothing happened. My eyes went to the bowl on the desk. The Capo tracked my attention easily.
“Do you like that trick? A ring that protects me from the touch of magic can be used to cast a wider ring, with the same properties.” He picked up the gold band and slipped it on. “The soldiers of Erras gave me the idea. They know all about shards of magic. I do wish they were slightly less obsessed with those bones, though.”
I must have twitched, because the Capo gave a rich, heavy sigh.
“Please don’t tell me you’re interested in the Bones of Erras. You always seemed a more reasonable sort.”
Part of my mind snagged on the idea that the Capo believed he knew me so well—but the rest moved on. “The bones are shards of magic?”
I thought about the way they’d whispered to me, the judgment that dripped along their blades. Of course they were magic. I’d just been so wrapped up in thinking they were godly in nature that I hadn’t seen it.
“You didn’t know?” the Capo asked, leaning forward on a fresh wave of excitement. His enthusiasms were as catching as ever, but I knew they could be a death sentence. And that knowledge gave me a kind of immunity. I leaned back, arms folded as he rambled on. “Those figures that some called gods were powerful streghe.”
If the Capo was right, the old gods were still with us, left behind in pieces, their magic stored and waiting.
My mind scurried back to what Cielo had told me about Veria’s Truth. The tears in that vase carved of moonlight weren’t some brittle old tale. They were strega magic, as real as the iron necklace I’d worn to Amalia.
I worked to throw a cloak over my hopes so the Capo wouldn’t see their naked shine. If he wasn’t already searching for Veria’s Truth, I didn’t want to give him any new ideas to steal from the streghe of Vinalia.
“The old gods brought the first age of magic,” he said, still storming down the path of his own interests. “It’s no wonder they existed at the same moment as the only empire this land has ever known. Magic and power have always been tied together.”
One last piece of the Capo’s plan for Vinalia slid into place, like an intricate puzzle box that I’d finally unlocked, revealing the darkness inside. The Capo had learned of the connection between the old empire and the streghe known as gods. Whether it was the beginning of his hopes for a new empire or only one step along the path hardly mattered. As soon as he could manage it, he had enlisted magic, risking the displeasure of the church to do the one thing that he believed would bring a new age of glory.
The Capo worked off his black leather boots with twin sighs. His feet were bare and pale with winter and confinement. He waved to the canvas chair opposite his. “Since you can’t leave, you might as well sit. You and I keep meeting for a reason, Teodora, and I’m sure we can come to some kind of—”
The tent flap rustled. I held my breath, sure Cielo was about to be pitched headfirst in front of the Capo’s bare, sweating feet. When I looked up, everything inside of me went dangerously still.
The orange torches of the camp set the edges of a young man’s body alight. His eyes were the same dark brown as mine, but they had a searing quality that traveled through skin and muscle.
“Sister,” he said. “I thought I would have to hunt all over Vinalia for you.”
“I’m sorry to deprive you of that pleasure, Beniamo,” I said.
My brother had the same deceptive loveliness that had come to his aid so many times as a child. He had been able to flutter his long black eyelashes at any adult until questions about the bruises on my legs dissolved. As he grew older, he had simply gotten better at placing my injuries where no one would notice them.
Any traces of softness that hid his cruelty had been stripped away by his time as an owl. The intensity of his face never waxed or waned now, but stayed at full, glaring strength. He wore a cloak of pelts and feathers, only a thin pair of trousers beneath. I wondered if he truly didn’t feel the northern cold or if he was trying to train himself to care even less.
My brother moved between me and the Capo without a sound. I remembered what Luca had told me about owls, when Luca was still alive, before Beniamo ripped him from the world and left a ragged hole in my life.
Owls were silent as they flew. Prey didn’t hear the great birds until they were already striking.
“Thank you,” Beniamo said. His voice was low and hollow, and it scraped against my bones.
“Of course I was going to let you know that your sister had been caught running around camp,” the Capo said. He gave me an apologetic shrug. “When you abandoned me, I was in need of new allies. Your brother was all too happy to swear his loyalty.”
“I was thanking my sister,” Beniamo said. He moved in front of me, taking up every inch of space in the tent, every crevice of my mind.
I knew that feeding him a scrap of interest was dangerous, but the question asked itself. “For what?”
“The victory at Zarisi. A di Sangro victory.” I did not like how his voice lingered on our shared name. “I’ve been waiting for this moment.”
“We all have,” the Capo said. “Vinalia—”
“Needs a strong leader,” Beniamo finished smoothly. “A man who will not lose his first war.”
“Which is why it’s such a good thing we’ve won,” the Capo said, but his laugh sounded sickly.
“Yes,” Beniamo said. “We have.”
In that moment I remembered the stories Xiaodan had brought back from her soldier’s tent, stories of a second-in-command who desired more power and might be too dangerous to wield it. I should have seen my brother mirrored in those words.
Without taking his eyes off me, Beniamo lifted his right hand to show that his nails had been replaced with long talons of some silvery metal. I did not know if this was magic, or if he’d grafted them himself.
He pulled his hand back in a swift arc and plunged his talons into the Capo’s gut.
The Capo’s eyes went shiny-wide, then dimmed. With Beniamo’s hand still stuck in him, he fell to the ground. My brother huddled over the Capo’s body, talons ripping fast, tearing him apart, until the Capo was no longer a man, or even a corpse, but a mass of blood and flesh and the soiled white of bone.
Beniamo stood up, his bare chest laced with blood.
“Now we are alone again, sister. H
ow long has it been?” For years, I had been so careful not to be caught near my brother without someone else in the room. But this was not the di Sangro castle, and there were no doors to close, no one left to hide behind.
I shrank from him. Beniamo tracked my movements as if he knew where I would step before I did. He crowded my body with his against the rough canvas of the tent, leaning over me, the salty-hot smell of blood sticking to him.
He uncurled his fist, talons poised over my face.
I waited for white-hot streaks of pain. “Not yet,” Beniamo said. “I don’t want to rush things.”
He flicked his wrist and caught me across the face with the back of his hand, knuckles bold against my cheekbone. “Do you know how long I’ve waited to hurt you without having to hide it?” he asked, backhanding me again.
I could not scream. Beniamo loved it when I screamed.
My temples felt like they would burst. My right ear hummed a metallic whine and then went strangely dull. I tried to stuff my pain back into my body, but it would not fit. I shoved and shoved, handfuls of pain, nowhere to put them.
As the first scream pulsed out of my throat, my brother leaned over me, smiling.
“That’s a good start,” he said.
It took every bit of will to keep from passing out, to stay on my feet when all I wanted to do was collapse. “Start to what?” I asked, trying to sound defiant, even as blood ran down my face like hot tears.
“Vinalia needs a leader who will not lose,” Beniamo said, tracing the words with hungry lips. “And you are my war.”
Three
A Garden of Fallen Stars
I was forced through a trapdoor into my childhood, crouching in the corner of the nursery, waiting for Beniamo’s cruelty to pass like a wind off the mountains. He raised his hand so many times I learned every chapped line between his knuckles. He thrashed me with hateful words as often as he struck me, but I stayed silent.
It was the only way I knew to survive.
Magic did not rush hot through my blood, clamoring to save me. I’d stopped it from hurting Beniamo so many times, barely avoiding the fate of turning on family when he felt no such need. The pain inside of my head hardened, splitting into several sharp hopes. Rescue. Revenge. Escape.
My magic wobbled and struggled to right itself.
Do something, I told it. Before he kills us.
Beniamo turned away and walked with his back to me, the slight hunch of an owl lingering in his posture, his shoulders perched high. “You are not going to use magic against me.”
I winced at fresh pain. Beniamo knew me well enough that I did not even feel safe from him inside my mind. I could not bear for him to see through me, like so much leaded glass, weak and wavering. Easy to break.
Stilling my thoughts, I silenced myself down to the marrow.
He bent over the mound of flesh and blood that had been the Capo and came up holding the ring. Beniamo licked the Capo’s blood clean.
“Do you know how many of my kills I used to eat?” he asked as he shoved the ring onto his finger. I had been careful not to think too much of the time Beniamo had spent as an owl, the ways his humanity had been broken and put back together. It had left marks, though, as if he had never fully transformed back. “Most of those animals went down whole, and I vomited up their bones.” I writhed, which only made him glow with satisfaction. “I ate other owls, too. Did you know about that, Teodora? Is that one of the scientific facts our brother told you?”
Without thinking, I raised my hand and slapped his mouth before Luca’s name could pass through it.
Beniamo smiled as if I was finally playing with him. Then he grabbed my face between two fingers, pushing until my entire skull ached. “I’ve killed so many of your kind. Since magic is passed through death, I had no other choice, but I can’t say I disliked the task.” For all of the pain in my head, it was nothing to match the one that ripped through me now, a tide of mourning for streghe I would never know.
“No matter how many I torture, or slay, or tease the last breath from, I stay this way,” Beniamo said, pressing a hand to his bare stomach. “The way Father and Mother made me. The way you made me.” A darkness passed over Beniamo’s face, like shadows smothering the moon. “Magic won’t have me, Teodora. Tell me why.”
“Your soul is too weak to feed it,” I said, a guess spun from pure spite. Magic made its own choices, and even though I’d been a strega for years, many of its workings were mysterious to me. Still, I felt some grace in the knowledge that magic had passed over my brother.
Beniamo stroked my hair, a sickly playacting of the brotherly love he’d never felt. “You’re the most powerful strega in Vinalia. Maybe I just haven’t been killing the right people.” He stood back and studied me, and the pain in my head grew. When he spoke, the words sounded off-kilter, far away. “It’s fairness I’m after. You probably think of yourself as a good daughter, a good strega—if there is such a thing. But you took me from home and family. You did that. And so it is fair that I will take this land and everyone you love. You changed me with magic. If I can’t have magic, I will tear it from the throat of Vinalia.”
His words left me shaking.
But I would not speak. I would not think.
I would not give him any weapon to use against me.
“I might let you think you’re safe for a while,” he said, throwing himself down in the Capo’s canvas chair. He sat impeccably still, only the burning centers of his eyes shifting with each tiny movement I made. “A few years to build your life, one nervous stone at a time, always looking over your shoulder when you hear an owl’s call.” For the first time I noticed another legacy my brother’s time as an owl had left behind—a ring of orange around the dark di Sangro brown in his eyes. It burned with delight. “And then, oh then, I will swallow you whole.”
It was all I could do to clench the vomit and muscle it back down my throat. Beniamo smiled at my struggle as I choked a few thin strings into the dust. “Of course, that’s after I disembowel that black-haired strega boy. Or is it a girl?”
My head snapped up, my eyes meeting Beniamo’s. He had played his strongest move. Now it was my turn to do what I always did.
Lose.
But I could not hold back this time. If I failed to stop Beniamo again, it would be after spending every bit of strength I had.
“Now,” I said, in the hard, clipped commands of the old language.
Magic roared out of me.
I could not touch Beniamo while he wore the ring, but the circle cast by the bowl of water was no longer in place. Anything else could be changed. My magic met the canvas of the tent in a great crash, and it became a thin pane of glass. In a ripple that covered the entire camp, all of the tents became just as transparent and breakable.
“Is that all you want to do?” Beniamo asked with a laugh that sounded achingly familiar. He’d stolen it from Father. “Or maybe you can’t even control that magic?”
The magic inside of me was the sum of a hundred deaths, too large for any single person to hold from moment to moment, but my rage was a force large enough to match it. I could feel it growing, spreading, pushing certainty into every corner of my soul. I knew what I had to do.
Stop my brother, at any cost.
The shouts of confusion from the soldiers around us were growing. With glass walls, the men in camp could see what Beniamo had done to the Capo and what he was doing to me now. Beniamo had been allowed to hide behind closed doors for much too long.
“Look,” I cried. “Look!” I wished that my voice didn’t sound so high-pitched and fragile, but at least it drew more eyes.
Beniamo pounded to his feet. My magic had set the stage, and now he had a thousand men as his audience—an army of Vinalians at his mercy. I could feel the tide turn against me before a single wave hit the shore.
“The Capo is d
ead,” he said. “By my own sister’s hand. She has been given the power of many streghe, and it has turned her into a danger.” His words sounded flimsy, empty, but men listened to him nonetheless. “She won a great victory for Vinalia today, and I wish I could help her, but she has no way of keeping her magic in check. We will have to stop her if we wish to keep our country.”
I screamed at his lies, a wordless, raw sound.
And my magic screamed with me.
The sound broke the glass of the tents. Men knelt to take cover, shards lodging in their arms and throats. I slipped and fell to one knee, looking down to find that my magic had iced the floors, turning them to cold, clear mirrors. Here was my face bloody and bruised, my mouth misshapen by a scream, my arms raised.
I had kept my silence for too long, and now I could not stop filling the air with my howling, because if Beniamo spoke one more word, I would destroy everyone in the camp and myself in the bargain. And if he was the only one who walked away from this, with the Capo’s ring on his finger, there would be no one to stand against him. He would kill every strega in Vinalia.
Starting with Cielo.
Help, I told the magic. Help me leave this place alive.
I looked down at my reflection trapped in the glass beneath my feet, and felt a reversal work itself even faster than last time. Before, I’d been trying to keep the power of this great magic from unraveling me. Now I urged it on. The screams that had passed out of my lips became the howls of a great storm. My body unlaced itself into gales of wind. I battered the camp as I went, but there was nothing left to break. I could only hope that Vanni and Mimì and Xiaodan—the streghe I had dragged to this place—had run away.
And then there was my strega.
I saw Cielo on the ground, a tiny figure running. He spotted me and vanished. A moment later, smoke rose from the camp, unfurling its long fingers where Cielo had stood. The smoke moved fast, beckoning me across the southern stretches of the Neviane.
Cielo and I left the camp behind as Beniamo howled at the sky, his rage and delight impossible to pick apart.
The Storm of Life Page 13
