Turning the Storm (39 page)

When I finished, Michel was still slumped in his chair, barely able to look at me. Once the ink had dried, I folded the letter and sealed it, then gave it to Michel. Michel
stood up and finally raised his head; his eyes were full of tears. “Thank you, Generale,” Michel said.

“For what?” I asked.

“For everything,” he said. He touched his fist to his chest and held it out, then left the room as quickly as he could.

Giovanni stirred in his chair, and for a moment I thought he'd been awake the whole time—but then he settled back down and started snoring. I still didn't feel at all like sleeping, but I didn't have the heart to wake Giovanni or Lucia for the company, so I curled up in the window seat to wait for morning.

∗    ∗    ∗

∗    ∗    ∗

I woke early in the dawn to find Giovanni sitting at the table across from me. “You look terrible,” I said. “Maybe I should have had you sleep in the bed.”

Giovanni didn't smile. “They've found you guilty, Eliana,” he said gently.

“Oh,” I said, and had a strange impulse to go back to sleep. Maybe if I went to sleep and woke up a second time, it wouldn't be true. I reached for the tea and almost knocked it over. “What are they going to do to me?”

“Clara has sentenced you to death,” he said.

I swallowed hard. “How is she going to do it?”

“Beheading.”

My hand, on the teacup, shook suddenly, and the hot tea splashed onto my hand. I yelped in pain and blew on the scald to cool it. “Well,” I said, and was relieved to hear that my voice was perfectly steady. “At least that's always looked pretty painless. Fast. Not like hanging or burning. That's better than a lot of the ways I thought I'd die, this past year.”

“How about dying in your own bed at the age of eighty, surrounded by your grandchildren?” Giovanni asked. “Did that ever occur to you as a possibility?”

“I never would've had grandchildren, Giovanni,” I said, and gave him a wry grin. He summoned up a weak smile in return and poured me a cup of tea.

“So this is it, then,” I said. “They should be coming for me soon, I suppose.”

“You might be able to convince Clara not to kill you if you begged for mercy,” Giovanni said. “It's the sort of gesture she'd go for.”

I took a swallow of the tea. “If she were planning to burn me alive, I might be able to make myself do it,” I
said. “As it is—” I sighed and closed my eyes. “Michel told me last night that Travan is hoping to use this to shove Placido and Clara out of power—as an excuse to disband the Servi. Do you think it'll work?” Giovanni started to answer, and I looked up to fix him with a glare. “Truthfully. Do you think it'll work?”

Giovanni lowered his eyes. “It will probably work,” he muttered reluctantly.

“It's worth dying if it gets Clara out of power.” I took another swallow of tea; my mouth had gone very dry. “I'm going to come back as a ghost and haunt Travan, though. Do Redentori believe in ghosts?”

Giovanni blinked at me slowly and then shrugged. “I think the question is open to debate.”

“I dreamed about Mario last night,” I said. “It was a nice dream, though. He didn't haunt me.”

“What did you dream about Mario?” Giovanni asked.

“He was there with all the Lupi who'd died, and he said that it was their choice, that I shouldn't blame myself,” I said. “Now that I'm going to join them, I guess they wanted to reassure me.”

Giovanni smiled and reached across the table to squeeze my hand. Then he pushed back his chair and stood up. “Eliana, I need to leave for a while. I promise, it won't be long.”

“What?” I stared at him. “Where are you going?”

“Privy,” he said.

I started to shake my head in disbelief. He turned toward the door, then turned back to me, slipped one hand behind my head, and kissed me on the lips. Then he broke away and strode out.

“What the
hell
,” I shouted after him. “Giovanni! Get back here.” He didn't turn around. “Giovanni!”

I knew within a few minutes that he hadn't gone to
the privy, not unless he got lost or fell in. I woke Lucia and asked her to go look for him, then paced the room, touching my violin as I passed it but not picking it up to play. It was depressing, to be alone like this, and frustrating to lack an audience for the morbid jokes I was coming up with to pass the time and distract myself. Much more than an hour passed before there was a knock at the door. I opened it to see Lucia, and a guard.

“Lucia,” I said, “thank goodness. Did you find him?”

Lucia looked at the guard.

“You're free to go,” the guard said.

I stared at him. “Giovanni said I'd been found guilty.”

“You were,” the guard said. “But your sentence was overturned. New evidence has come to light.”

“What evidence?” I asked.

“Someone else confessed to freeing the mage,” the guard said.

Lady's— “Where's Giovanni?” I said.

Lucia slipped her arm around my waist, supporting my weight as if she thought I might fall suddenly. “Giovanni went to Clara, and said that you delivered Mira as a prisoner to him, but that he was so taken by her beauty that he freed her.”

Oh my God, Giovanni
. “Giovanni, you're an idiot; you're an
idiot
,” I whispered. “Where is he? I need to see him.” Lucia shook her head. “I'm not going to let him do this,” I said.

“He knew that,” Lucia said. “Eliana, Giovanni's dead.”

∗    ∗    ∗

I'd spent the morning bracing myself to walk out of my room stoic and dignified; now that I was free to go,
and safe, all I could do was sit down at my table and sob. This wasn't what I'd been ready for. How could Giovanni possibly be dead? I'd just
seen
him.
Damn you, Giovanni
.

“But they all knew I did it,” I said to Lucia.

“Giovanni started by shouting his confession from the center of the gardens,” Lucia said. “He figured that if enough people knew that he'd confessed, Clara would look pretty foolish executing
you
—and looking foolish is the one thing Clara can't stand. He said that you were protecting him.” Lucia sat down beside me. “He wrote you a letter,” she said, and slipped it under my hands.

Eliana
, the letter read.

Typical.

I looked up. “Placido?”

Lucia sighed. “Dead.”

I folded the letter so that my tears wouldn't make the ink run, and laid my head on my arms.

∗    ∗    ∗

Though Giovanni's death wasn't quite what Travan had planned on, it worked well enough for his purposes. Declaring that the Servi had clearly lost their way if they had turned on Generale Giovanni, hero of the Empire, he removed Clara from her post and appointed, of all people, Lucia. Lucia had never bothered to disguise her contempt for the very idea of the Servi, and that, I concluded, was precisely what the Emperor wanted: a leader who would dismantle the organization. I found a couple of extremely trustworthy former Lupi to serve as Lucia's bodyguards; she'd need them. Giovanni, I thought, would have appreciated the irony.

There was a Council meeting the following week. I took my seat, cautiously. There were a few new faces— one of the old reformers that Giovanni probably would have known, one of the Cantatori, and Lucia, of course. Lucia sat beside me, and we rose together as Travan came into the room.

I had not seen Travan since the last Council meeting,
though Michel had told me that Travan read my letter. I had to fight down my anger when I saw Travan; my hands clenched into fists. Travan's gaze swept coolly over his Council, but he didn't meet my eyes. Nor did he meet my eyes, or acknowledge me in any way, for the rest of the meeting. I found that without Clara and Placido there, I didn't have to say all that much anyway. At least, I thought, Travan didn't bar me from the meeting; I was a little surprised that he had not. It didn't matter, though. Watching his back as he strode out at the end, I knew that it would take a great crisis to inspire me to go to another Council meeting. I might be a hero of the Empire, but I was no friend of the Emperor.

I tried not to think about Giovanni, because it hurt so much. But for the first few weeks after his death, I kept thinking things like,
I need to remember to tell Giovanni about this later or Giovanni will be amused by that
, only to remember a moment later that he was dead. I avoided both Court and company, unwilling to risk weeping in front of others. After the first wound of loss had started to heal, a few months later, I realized that I was desperately lonely.

Lucia's new responsibilities kept her away from me most of the time. Flavia had left Court: the Cantatori were staffing the border outposts, and Flavia was either in Verdia at one of the outposts, or traveling through the Empire recruiting people to join the order, I wasn't sure. Of my friends still at court, many were avoiding me—out of shame, I thought, that they hadn't done more to foil Clara's investigation. Or maybe it was because I had avoided people so assiduously right after Giovanni's death, and they didn't want to intrude. Regardless, I didn't know how to bridge the distance between us now, so I stayed in my room, and brooded.

I have to leave
, I thought one morning when I woke, stiff and cramped, in my window seat.
I'm dying by inches. I can't stay here
. I could go back to Verdia. To teach at the conservatory, or to visit Doratura. Or perhaps I could join the Cantatori and play my violin in the wasteland with Flavia and the others. They would welcome me, surely. It might even be helpful to the order, if it were known that Generale Eliana had joined them.

There was an appeal to the idea, I thought, taking my violin and tuning it. I might not have a whole lot of faith, but I could play while others danced, and pull their energy down into those dark hills, so that someday grass might grow there again. I could lose myself in the music; maybe someday I'd forget what I'd lost.

But if I leave Cuore, Mira won't know where to find me
.

I started to play one of the folk tunes I had learned with Mira, back at the conservatory. Giovanni knew how much I loved Mira; did Mira know? If she knew, and she was alive, why hadn't she come back to me? Maybe when she stopped doing magery this final time, the sickness had killed her. Maybe she was killed trying to escape from Cuore.

Or maybe she was alive, but she didn't feel toward me as I felt toward her.
Impossible
, I thought, remembering the way her hands had gripped mine. But I found myself unwilling to believe that she was dead, either.

Perhaps, I thought, she's alive and she knows that I love her, but she's afraid to come back to Cuore: she might be recognized, a message might be read. She could put both of us in danger. But the Empire was vast, and the world vaster still. I couldn't very well go buy a horse and set out searching, not without
some
idea
of where to look.
It would take a miracle
, I thought,
to find her that way
.

∗    ∗    ∗

A
miracle
. After breakfast, I went to the Great Cathedral. Unlike the cathedral in Manico, the cathedral in Cuore had not been burned. As Lucia had once bitterly predicted, the building was still in use, but for Redentori observances. There was a painting of Gèsu behind the Great Altar, and the pews had been removed so that people would be able to dance. There was no service in progress at the moment, and the cathedral was empty. I eased the door shut behind me and stepped forward into shadow.

I had come to pray, but now that I was inside the cathedral I had to admit that I wasn't quite sure who to pray to. During the war, I'd continued to say my selfish prayers to the Lord. I'd prayed to God when I'd truly feared that Lucia was dead, after Mira had destroyed the Lupi, but most of the time I felt deeply awkward asking for favors from God. In some sense, I equated the Redentore God with the Lady; the Lady was too important to bother with small things. Years ago, during the war with Vesuvia—when I was still a Della Chiesa—I had prayed to the Lady for victory in the war; I had prayed to the Lord to protect my own small family, on their farm near the border.