The Storm of Life Read online

  ALSO BY AMY ROSE CAPETTA

  The Brilliant Death

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  First published in the United States of America by Viking,

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2020

  Copyright © 2020 by Amy Rose Capetta

  Map copyright © 2018 by Shreya Gupta

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  Ebook ISBN 9780451478481

  Version_1

  For everyone

  who is more than the words they were given

  more than the fates that were foretold

  more than the bodies they were born in

  for the ones who are storms

  bringing change

  and especially, for the one who is my sky

  Contents

  Also by Amy Rose Capetta

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  The End

  One: Defiance Doesn’t Come for FreeChapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Two: In the Mouth of the WolfChapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Three: A Garden of Fallen StarsChapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Four: The Last MalfaraChapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Five: All Is MagicChapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  The End

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  The End

  When I was a little girl, my father’s tours of Vinalia carried him far from home. While he conducted di Sangro business in the darkest corners of the finest palazzos, I sat on his black walnut chair, a crown of violets in the bramble of my curls, and made decrees.

  I told my brother Luca that he was the bravest young man in my kingdom, which was true—my kingdom was no wider than Father’s study, though it ran as deep as my stepmother’s old stories.

  I told my little sister Carina, barely born, that she must be a great strega. With her pickled face, solemn eyes, and perfectly timed wails, she seemed both young and old, wise and wicked.

  I told my older sister, Mirella, that she’d been declared the queen of a neighboring kingdom, and I would trade with her if she had my favorite almond paste sweets.

  I did not tell my brother Beniamo anything.

  One day at the turn of winter, as the cold made its first advances into the castle, I sat alone at Father’s desk, working on a scrap of Mirella’s drawing paper with a stick of charcoal from the kitchen fire. I wrote out rules for my subjects, my hands smudged black, my mind burning with the bright frenzy of creating a kingdom. The magic inside me liked this business as much as I did.

  It had been with me for nearly a year, since the night I went downstairs for a glass of milk and saw a man murdered on the stairs. The magic I’d inherited from this stranger ached to be used, but I couldn’t transform objects openly. My family might be frightened or jealous; they might scoff at me or stubbornly choose not to believe. So instead of showing them the whole of who I was, I snuck to the fields on the mountainside, changing ice to white linen sheets. As summer breathed hot down our necks, I turned white poppies to snow that melted in my hands and trickled it down the back of my stuffy red di Sangro dresses.

  The scrape of a foot against stone pulled my attention up from the papers on Father’s desk. I’d been so deep inside of my schemes that I hadn’t heard the door as it opened. Beniamo stood on the threshold, watching me. Honeyed light from the hallway clung to his dark curls, and if I did not know him a bit, I would have thought he looked like a saint.

  “What are you playing, Teodora?” he asked.

  I wasn’t playing a game. I was perfectly serious.

  “Nothing.”

  He’ll hurt us, the magic whispered. Stop him.

  I’d never changed a person before, and my magic was suddenly hungry to try it. But if I changed Beniamo, Father would disown me: strip me of my di Sangro name, send me away from the home and family that I loved.

  “Not now,” I whispered hotly to the magic.

  “Are you talking in church words?” Beniamo asked. I hadn’t known I was doing that until he pointed it out. “You wish to be a priest and a king? Isn’t one stupid dream enough to fill your day?”

  I shoved the magic down. Shame and anger rose to fill its place, a natural spring pushing up to my cheeks. I vowed that I would never speak aloud to my magic.

  “You know you can’t rule anything, don’t you?” Beniamo asked, his voice burning low and steady. He waited for me to give an answer that he could transform into the proper punishment. I wondered what a queen would do.

  “This is my kingdom,” I said in an ironclad whisper.

  “Yours? What if it’s invaded?” Beniamo crossed the room swiftly. Things were moving now, and I could not slow them, could not stop them. I locked my legs around the posts of the chair, edges biting through my stockings and into my skin.

  Beniamo pushed me, toppling the black walnut throne.

  I rolled free, and Beniamo kicked me in the chest. Once, twice. I curled around the broken feeling, gathering the pieces. It wasn’t safe to cry out. Beniamo would enjoy it too much. He would kick me harder, to hear me shout again.

  I watched from my place on the floor as his boots strode toward the crown of violets that had fallen from my hair. Beniamo smashed the deeply blue flowers beneath his heel. I had spent hours on the mountainside picking the ones with perfect cups of black in the center.

  “You have been unseated, sister,” Beniamo said, laughing as he dropped the ruined crown back on my head. He stepped back and studied me with a flat expression. “I’m only preparing you for the rest of your life. You should kneel and thank me.”

  I must not have acted quickly enough, because he kicked me once more, a sharp toe to the shins.

  I whimpered, stuffing a louder cry back down my throat.

  “Go on,” he said.

  I pushed the heels of my hands against the floor. My knees scraped the stone as I shifted, and because I could not look at his face without giving away the force of my hatred, I stared at my brother’s stomach, thinking about how soft and unprotected it looked. “Thank you,” I spat, the words as bitter as blood in my mouth.

  And I started counting the days until I would never have to kneel again.

  One

  Defiance Doesn’t Come for Free

  Cielo and I left at dawn, before the black crepe sky shed its mourning colors. We’d barely stayed long enough for me to learn the name of th
e town we now fled. Pavetta, or maybe Paletta. By day, each new place Cielo and I passed through offered memorable features—a jewel-colored piazza, a fortress that stubbornly carried the weight of a dead empire, a church whose stone walls wept grime that the villagers called God’s Tears.

  This was no grand tour of Vinalia, though.

  We were warning every strega we could find of the Capo’s plan to use their magic in the war he’d stirred up. Wherever we went, a growing number of doorways bore the green-and-black flag of the Capo’s unified nation. I spotted one over the door of a palazzo and resisted the urge to turn my magic on that flag, frying it crisp as a sage leaf.

  Now that I’d taken on more than my share of magic, things were different. I had to be careful in a new way, tiptoeing around my own power. It worked on a much grander and more unruly scale, and it didn’t always wait for my command.

  The town ended abruptly, and we left Pavetta and its half dozen streghe behind. Cielo had helped me pick them out on market day, her eyes sharp as hooks, fishing through the crowd for others with magic. She’d mostly stayed in girlish form since leaving Chieza, which meant we were easier prey for bandits on the road, but also that strangers were more likely to speak with us, delighted and defenseless, when Cielo offered them even the smallest fraction of a smile.

  All smiles died a swift death when we told them of the Capo’s plan to use their magic as a sacrifice, feeding the might of a small number of streghe. His streghe.

  That was the magic I carried now: the death inheritance of two sisters who had given themselves over to the Capo’s schemes and taken the lives of our own kind. One had her throat slit by the Capo himself. One fell into the earth after I tore it open beneath her. As Cielo and I chased rumors of streghe, and I hunted down the worst of the criminals I had let escape from the di Sangro castle, I kept thinking of Azzurra’s wild attacks on my home, her unshakable love for her sister, the guilt I felt at killing a fellow strega instead of finding some way to save her.

  My magic had always craved greater strength, but now that I bore the death-passed magic of dozens of streghe, it didn’t feel like I held a single, seamless power inside of me. It was a collection of splintered pieces.

  “Do you think the streghe we met in the market yesterday will heed our warning?” I asked.

  Cielo pulled her cloak, one of our few possessions, tighter against the newborn cold. We’d left summer behind in Amalia. “Who knows with the northern streghe? They are ferociously independent.”

  If Cielo thought that, I felt little hope.

  We kept moving—north as far as I could tell. Cielo tested the winds by becoming one, flicking the pages of the book she used to control her changes. Not that the strega’s magic was obeying the rules now, either. Only an act of unchecked power had been able to break me away from servitude to the Capo. I was the reason Cielo had lost control of the magic she’d worked for years to bring to heel.

  We had lost so much to gain each other.

  The wind that was Cielo swirled around me, raking through my hair, toying with the hem of my dress, sliding under my collar and working its warm, sure way down the valley between my breasts.

  A blush started in my cheeks and then went on a rampage. “Not now,” I said roughly.

  I ran my hands down my dress, pretending to smooth it from the ruffling of the wind but really savoring memories of Cielo’s hands, Cielo’s mouth, Cielo’s skin.

  The wind breathed over the book, flipping it to a well-worn page that turned Cielo back into the boyish version I had first met on the mountain those months ago. He stood up, naked and grinning, and I tossed a pack directly at his stomach.

  “We need to lay a course,” I said as he removed a shirt from the pack and shook out the wrinkles.

  He hopped into his pants and then removed the green-and-purple traveling cloak that had snared my attention the first time we met. As it turned out, the web of stitching on the back was not just a rich design—it formed a map of Vinalia, including the locations of all streghe known to Cielo.

  “We’re here,” Cielo said, jabbing a finger at the silk.

  Pavetta—or Paletta—sat in the western foothills, as far as we could walk before the Uccelli dwindled to nothing, soon to be replaced by the sharp angles and snowy creases of the Neviane. My mind filled with those peaks and the war the Capo waged there.

  “Let’s see if we can make it to the hazelnut fields of Alieto by midday,” Cielo said. “From there, it’s only a short hike to—”

  “No,” I said, stabbing through the heart of Cielo’s plans. “We should be doing more than skulking from village to village, warning a few streghe at a time, always afraid we’re about to be caught. Unless we find some way to unite the people, our people, the Capo will be able to pick them off.”

  My hands slid into knots, and Cielo eased them back open. “Don’t think of him.”

  “He’s your uncle,” I muttered.

  “I take no responsibility for that,” Cielo said. “I didn’t choose my uncle any more than you picked Beniamo from a batch of possible brothers.” Even the mention of Beniamo felt like an attack, and I cringed away from it. When I blinked, light alternated with fractured bits of memory—turning my brother into an owl, watching him come back more vicious than before. The last time I’d seen him, he’d vowed to make my life an endless parade of pain and loss.

  “You’re shaking,” Cielo said, taking me by the shoulders.

  “I’m not.” I forced myself to stillness and then realized I hadn’t been the only thing shuddering. The ground shivered subtly beneath our feet.

  I hoped this was one of the earthquakes that seized the Uccelli on a monthly basis, gave the mountains a quick shake, and then died. But the feeling grew steadily, and so did the dread in my chest. Cielo dropped to one knee and spread the cloak over the ground. It jolted and danced.

  “Someone’s coming.” Without so much as touching the book, Cielo split into a flock of birds. Dark wings rose into a sky as pale as a fevered brow.

  I called on my own magic and found it restless. It hissed, angry that I had been holding back for so long. When I pulled, there was no smooth and ready response. Instead, I grasped for sharp edges. There were so many of them, so many different ways to hurt.

  I turned to the mountain and focused on its smooth hide. I need a place where I won’t be seen.

  A dozen spots on the mountain burst as if they’d been hit by cannon fire. Above me, the flock of Cielo-birds crowed.

  Not very inconspicuous, I told the magic.

  It buzzed a rude, angry response. It had become a chorus of discontent, always pressing me to do more. I rushed to a pockmark in the mountain’s newly pitted face and settled behind a great stone that gave me a perch to spy from. Just as I rounded the corner, the road came alive with dust.

  Men marched across the foothills of the Uccelli, wearing green and black. They were moving north from the Capo’s beloved capital of Amalia to the brutish cold of the Neviane, their necks slung with scarves, their sweat evident under winter coats, even from here. The Eterrans had chosen to swarm over the northern mountains: the least forgiving approach, but their navy was tied up in constant skirmishes with the Sfidese. Keeping their army alive meant trusting the known passes through the Neviane, and only one was large enough to allow a great number of troops through its harsh, rocky embrace. It sat just north of the town of Zarisi. These Vinalians were marching toward the pass, pouring over the fields, a river of bodies. There had to be at least two thousand trampling crops and fallow fields alike. They kept their eyes ahead on the glory of coming battles.

  I thought about changing them now, to spare them the pain and death of this ridiculous war. The Capo shouldn’t have so many lives at his disposal. I could save them all in one great sweep.

  Turn them into a field of toy soldiers, the magic said.

  Would that be merc
y? What would I do when the Capo, bereft of soldiers, lost the war? When the Eterrans broke into the country and took whatever they pleased? It was no secret that the northern invaders had their eyes on our rich fields. They wished to claim our glories in science, art—possibly even magic. Eterrans were empire builders. For a few centuries they had been focused on spreading over the seas to the virgin continent, but they’d lost most of their colonies there to war. Now they had their eyes on Vinalia, and they were well practiced in taking what was not theirs.

  I remembered that moment of being forced into the Capo’s army—my body, my magic, belonging to him.

  Would Eterra try to claim the streghe? Would our magic be the first thing they stole?

  The Capo had exposed us to the world and then brought on a war in the name of his own glory. My rage took flight, but I kept still. These troops might not have been sent to scout for the two streghe who had set magical fire to Amalia, but if they caught us along the way, it would certainly earn them the Capo’s gratitude.

  One of Cielo’s flock landed at my feet.

  “He’s sending more troops,” I whispered. “You know what that means.”

  The bird tapped its beak on the rock, with the impatience that Cielo possessed in all forms. Above, several of the Cielo-birds flew ahead to note the path the soldiers took toward the Neviane.

  Pavetta had been dripping with whispers of the war. The Capo was losing battle after battle, even though our men fought bravely. Everyone knew the Eterrans came from a cold, drizzly land where they spent all their time indoors plotting conquests. Soon they would take the pass at Zarisi.

  Vinalia was on the verge of losing its first war.

  * * *

  Hours later, when the soldiers were only a smudge in the distance, Cielo’s flock came together, wings blurring and molding into a tall, black-haired, distinctly human silhouette. Cielo’s skin had finally taken on a hint of color by the end of summer, but my strega was still startlingly pale. I wondered what Cielo would look like in winter—if we ever lived to see one together.