Cielo sighed. “Teodora felt the need to borrow my likeness, otherwise no one would have listened to a single word she said. I would appreciate if that wasn’t necessary. It would make kissing her entirely awkward. And while Teo does have a delightful boyish side, I will not stand for anyone making demands on how we must appear.”
Cielo grabbed my wrist and changed into girlish form with a great flick that stilled the crowds. “You can continue to lie to yourselves if you need to believe that I am only a man, and only a man can rule. But here is the truth, and refusing to see it will not change things.”
Cielo touched my cheek. “I believe it is your turn,” she whispered.
Father put a hand on my shoulder and urged me forward.
I faced the uncertain crowds of Amalia. They did not know what to expect, and to be honest, neither did I. We had gone off the edge of all known maps. No one knew where to step. But I thought of a small girl with brambles for curls who had dreamed this day, and I imagined all of the girls who must have done the same. For their sake, I cleared my throat. Even if I did not know what to say, the di Sangro daughter sitting on Father’s walnut chair making decrees did. I set my hand over my heart, where she lived. “This moment seems to have come out of nowhere, and yet it has taken us ages to arrive.” With nothing to stop it, my voice ranged far. The marble of the buildings sent back my words, doubling their strength. “The Capo led you with false hope. My brother would have led you with fear. I will treat you as family.
“Your fate will be mine.”
* * *
“Well, they looked ripe for mutiny,” Favianne said as the crowds parted. She was resplendent in a summer-green dress with golden vines a shade darker than her braided and coiled hair. I had assumed she would cover her chest, but she wore her battle scars with the same pointed pride that she did everything else.
“I think Teodora did well enough,” Pasquale said grudgingly. All eyes snapped to him. “For a woman.”
I wondered how he could have made it this far and yet learned so little.
“Tread with care,” Lorenzo said. “Teodora can still turn you into a boot and wear you to her coronation.”
“Teo, you already know that you were splendid,” Favianne said, tacking the words on to her earlier statement. “But Vinalians don’t change quickly.” The stare she aimed at Pasquale could have shriveled off several of his favorite body parts. “Some don’t change at all.”
I did not know if men like Pasquale would ever see me as their ruler. I did not know how they would respond when I looked past them, to the Vinalians whose lives often unfolded in their shadows. I didn’t know what I would do on the days when I was a storm rather than a queen.
The greatness of the task before me unrolled like endless, shining fields to be sown. “I will need time, and help.”
Favianne looked me over. “I will give a tour of Vinalia, extoling your virtues.” Her voice took on the velvet of her coquettish ways. “Of course, it would be best to have you with me, but . . .”
Cielo’s stare could have sent Favianne’s most intense one scurrying.
“But you will be kept busy here, I’m sure,” she added.
Cielo folded her arms around me, as if she needed to keep Favianne at bay, and yet the way she pressed me gently made it clear that she was only looking for an excuse to touch me in company. I surrendered all of the tension in my body and slid into a state of pure contentment—which lasted only a moment.
There was something missing. I broke through Cielo’s hold and crossed to Dantae at the edge of the square, lifting Luciano gently from her arms.
I brought my nephew back to Cielo, doing my best not to cry at the many reminders of Mirella that dwelled in his face. “You’ve made me Queen of Vinalia, my love, so here is the impossible thing you wanted in return,” I said softly. “We have a baby.”
Cielo’s head turned a fraction, as if she was doing impossible sums. “That was . . . instantaneous.”
I passed Luciano off to her, and Cielo took the offering with surprised grace. My strega looked down at the tiny boy in her arms. The light around the baby’s hands seemed to take on a different quality than everything else around it, dark as amber and nearly as solid. I wondered if Luciano would grow up to carve things from light.
I thought of the vase that Veria had kept her tears in, hidden for so long.
I was still figuring out the truth of what had happened in the grottoes. Judgment was a sharp blade, with a single cutting edge. Truth had many faces, and each one shone. Truth was a gem: a beautiful thing, one that came at a price.
Today, the price was that I finally understood why Beniamo had chosen me as his favorite partner for his vicious games. If I was being honest, it had started well before I had used magic to turn him into an owl.
When he’d looked at me, Beniamo had seen ambition and anger, his own strongest qualities. He’d prodded me further and further, believing that ambition must lead to greed, and anger had no choice but to harden into violence. But I did not have to turn my qualities in the same direction as Beniamo had.
I did not have to use them against people, as he chose to.
“The first thing I’d like to do is move the capital back to Prai,” I said to the small gathering of people around me—my first advisers. “Its history runs the deepest in Vinalia, and there will be fewer complaints from the church if they believe they have a close eye on our pack of wild streghe. Of course, we should also keep one eye on them.”
Cielo held up a resolute finger. “And there will be gelato in the summers. Prai has the world’s best gelato.”
“The things I have to teach you,” Mimì muttered. “Gelato was invented by a fisherman from Salvi.”
“Well, we can’t move the capital to Destinu,” I said. “If Salvi chooses independence, you will need a capital of your own.”
“Prai will have to do, then,” Mimì said as Lorenzo put an arm around her waist. I found myself trying to imagine what would happen the next time they kissed.
“My opera house is in Prai,” Xiaodan said. “You will come every opening night! And closing night. And whenever you feel like it. I will save you a box seat.”
“What about your soldier?” I asked. “Shouldn’t he be given pride of place?”
“Oh,” Xiaodan said, with a telling blush. “Massimo will be waiting for me backstage.”
I could not help turning to Cielo and found that my strega had beat me to it. Cielo’s eyes were hard and fast on my body.
I knew that the best thing I could do was start strengthening my rule so Vinalia would have time to heal. Part of me wanted nothing more than to call a meeting of allies to the newly claimed throne. But there would be time, and I would not be kept from what mattered most.
“I will make a decree in the morning,” I said. “Tonight is for more pressing business.”
* * *
Cielo and I spun away from the square, headed through the great arch of the Palazza and into the main courtyard. Everything was chipped and torn by the last time we’d left Amalia in a hurry. The Capo hadn’t been able to fix things before leaving for the Eterran front, and it was odd to find our last visit preserved. It felt like only a moment ago Cielo and I had been running through these rooms, tripping over our vast feelings for each other.
By the time we reached the stairway that led up toward the Palazza’s bedrooms, my hands were on Cielo’s waist. When we reached the first landing, my body was so bursting with possibilities, I could no longer stop myself. I pushed my strega against the wall, halting us before we could reach our destination.
Perhaps this was our destination.
Cielo kept looking at me strangely, her eyes pale to match the rest of her, hands falling on my neck like long bars of moonlight.
“You tried to be gentle with me once after I was hurt,” I said, pushing into Cielo with the fo
rce of my curves, ending with my hips. “I thought we agreed on not repeating our mistakes.”
“Does that mean we won’t be away from each other again?” Cielo asked, wincing at the tender question. It looked as though I should be gentle with my strega—at least for the moment.
“It does,” I said, kissing Cielo until there could be no more doubt. “We are together in a way that cannot be undone.”
Cielo’s hands ventured under my grass-green cloak, through the gaps between my shirt buttons. I wanted to blink and move straight to the part where we were unclothed. At the same time, I wanted to savor the moment when each button slipped its mooring.
It was my turn to pull away, though. “Do you think we can stop saving each other’s lives and just . . . live?” I asked.
“All I wanted was a life where we could have this without the constant threat of it being stolen away,” Cielo said. “The concept felt so simple and yet it turned out to be the most difficult thing in creation.”
I looked around at the utter lack of people stopping us.
“Let’s not call it official,” I said, “but I think the world is already a slightly different place.”
I had seen from the sky above Vinalia how slow certain things were to change. The land and the seas moved in a way that they seemed to be eternal from our everyday vantage. But I had felt that they did change—that everything, even the slowest mountain, was in motion and could not be stopped.
And then there were the things that transformed with the flick of a page or a well-placed kiss.
“Will we keep trading magic every time we do this?” I asked, my lips pressed against Cielo’s even as I spoke.
“I feel the same as I did on the Violetta Coast, when it first happened,” Cielo said, taking on the tutor’s knowing air that I had found so infuriating and attractive when we first met. “I think that perhaps the kiss of inheritance is a very particular one.”
“So, the rest are for our purposes alone?” I asked, liking that idea very much. I packed the force of my delight into another kiss, melding Cielo to the stones of the Palazza, one hand against her shoulder and the other moving toward the waist of her pants, seeking out other parts of my strega that I had missed.
“I have an idea,” Cielo said, breathless as my hand perched lightly over the front of her pants, closing her eyes as I bore down.
“Only one?” I asked.
Cielo concentrated as if she was summoning either magic or a great force of will. And then she took my hand and pulled me away from the landing. For once I felt sure that no great disasters would interrupt, and my hopes would be satisfied, but they still caused a finely tuned ache.
Cielo led me down a vaguely familiar set of stairs, a path that my body had traced at one point but could not remember in its entirety. We came out into a secret courtyard that I’d first seen from within the cage of memory: a courtyard where many streghe had died. Where Cielo’s mother, Giovanna, had been pushed into killing streghe to gain their powers, and her father, Oreste, had spoken words that split a family into pieces.
Now it was a silent place, the trellises overflowing. I knew that the blooms on the flowers were too young to remember what had happened here, but I wondered if they drank the sadness from the air.
“What are we doing here?” I asked.
“This is the place I come to, often, when I’m dreaming,” Cielo said, touching the walls and the flower petals as I walked alongside. She put a hand to mine, and I felt the deep movement, the flick that turned the strega to a slightly different form. His eyes were still clear as quartz, and his dark lashes framed a bright, fractured gleaming. “When I come back, there are no streghe being killed. There is no man waiting to pit us against each other.”
Cielo reached for my face. The backs of my strega’s fingers stroked the blunted point of my cheekbone. The touch bore his intentions, like the sweet, unfolding scent of almond blossoms on the wind. “I thought perhaps we could add a new layer of meaning to this place.”
When Cielo touched me, the shifting came on faster—my strega kissing me with each change from boyish to girlish, plunging me deeper into my own feelings until I no longer noticed the blur of changes and only rode them like a wave breaking on the Violetta Coast. One of my hands skimmed over my strega’s heart, as the other turned more fervent in its stroking.
My strega’s face tipped up to the sky, and rich sounds left Cielo’s throat.
We fell to the grass, and I set myself stubbornly beneath Cielo’s legs, pushing apart the strega’s thighs and holding them in place as I bent to give back several of the best feelings Cielo had given me.
And then Cielo was reaching for me, pulling me ever closer, finding all the ways that we matched each other. I changed once—back into the boy that I’d first shown to the court of Amalia. That di Sangro boy, Teo of the broad shoulders, had always been part of me. And so had the storm that grew inside of me.
It raged beautifully, setting us both to shaking.
Cielo rested against my chest, looking up at the great dark wound of the night sky, salted with stars.
“You meant what you said, about giving back our magic,” I whispered.
My body pulled me in different directions: my magic urged rebellion, while my muscles craved the relief of carrying less, setting down the burden that came with Azzurra’s and Delfina’s deaths.
“Not to the point that we’d stop being streghe, of course. That would be foolish and tragic. You and I could never be plain Vinalians.” Cielo shuddered at the thought. I’d spent so much of my life dealing with the difficulties magic brought that I’d never counted the blessings of being a strega—so many that the stars seemed paltry.
I could see the faint shimmering of another truth that had been hidden by brighter worries until this moment. I’d struggled with the great magic inside of me, not because it was broken, but because I had felt broken. Leaving my family and being a part of the streghe sisters’ deaths had fractured my heart, shaken my confidence loose.
My magic echoed me, always.
Now I was coming together in a new shape. I was going to serve Vinalia in ways that had once been stories I told myself, but were quickly becoming real. I felt stronger, surer, ready to put the magic inside of me to good purpose. “It took so much to learn how to wield this,” I said. “Giving it up now won’t be easy.”
“Still, the magic we carry should be spread out a bit. One strega was never meant to hold so much,” Cielo said, bracing for the onrush of argument.
“I know,” I said firmly enough that my magic would not immediately stage a coup. The best sort of good would be giving some of this power away. My past as the hidden strega of the di Sangro family—and the days I’d spent without Cielo in the wake of our fight—had taught me that being powerful and alone was not an existence I wished to return to.
Cielo squinted as if I’d stolen Teo and come back with another strega altogether.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m sure that we’ll continue to disagree on a stunning number of topics.”
“That’s part of the enjoyment,” Cielo said, touching the smile that had bloomed on his lips like a flower out of season. My strega touched my lips, gifting that smile to me.
I drew the strega’s finger into my mouth, and Cielo gasped.
“Before we give most of our magic away, I do have an idea,” I said.
“Only one?” Cielo asked, cocking a perfect eyebrow. That, at least, would never change.
“I’ve never liked the Palazza,” I said, pulling myself atop Cielo, my body flush with the strega’s, our chests together, our hips grappling. I sat up, rising high in my seat so that Cielo could take in the sight of me, exactly where I wished to be. I let the wind swirl its way over my bare skin, the glorious Amalian night touching me at the same time my strega did. Cielo’s hands rose to my breasts, hips lifting in a manne
r that released a sharp-winged cry from my throat.
“Well?” I asked. “Should we take this place down? For the good of Vinalia?”
“It helps that we’ve crumbled a mountain. As practice,” Cielo said.
We started up again, and this time I invited my magic to twine through each moment. It would not be easy to let go of so much power, I thought, as the walls started to split in branching lines, and stone became powder all around us.
But as I leaned down to kiss Cielo I felt as far from powerless as I’d ever been.
Through the night, Cielo’s hands and mouth and skin left their marks on me, and so did our magic. It felt like there was no end to what we could be, and who we could be together. Cielo and I turned and turned and turned, finding each other’s empty pages, writing on them until nothing was left blank. This was a story always worth the telling, every kiss a brilliant truth.
The End
When I was the Queen of Vinalia, I spent a great deal of time traveling, seeing in fine-tipped detail what I had noticed in broad strokes as the sky. Vinalia was a glorious place, but it had been rattled by decades of war, and centuries of intolerance had seeped into its bones. People were tired, fearful. After each round of visits, I hurried back to Prai, hunched over a desk sheeted in endless papers, signing treaties and making decrees.
Cielo was nearly always at my side, carrying Luciano for as long as it was still possible, and then longer, until the boy tumbled out of Cielo’s arms and started scurrying across the rare, red-veined marble.
“His magic is coming along nicely,” Cielo said as Luciano ran from the hall, chased by Mimì, who was staying with us on one of her long visits from Salvi. She sent sprays of water after my nephew, making his small voice split with laughter. That sound had been late to arrive, but now we heard it more and more often.
The Storm of Life Page 30
