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 the 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.