My hand was steady as I sliced at the speckled stems of the poison hemlock.
The few candles I’d bothered to light flung the shadows of my movement against the high walls of the empty kitchen. I’d never seen it this still before, this empty of activity, with the only sounds my careful chopping and the gurgling of the stew in the hearth. The memory of the day my children had come racing through the room, my hand in Ugo’s, tried to rise, but I shoved it back. No good would come of remembering that.
I scraped the white, lacy flowers off their stalks and made a small pile of them. I would add all of the plant to the stew, including the roots, for potency equaled speed and that was crucial. I’d not let them suffer more than was absolutely unavoidable. In all of this horror, that was at least the one thing I was certain of: Ugo had not suffered. His death had been instantaneous.
The sound of his cracking neck whipped through the kitchen. It was a fist to the stomach.
I had to bend over, the knife clattering onto the cutting board, as I forced myself to breathe. I’d lost count of how many times that sound had doubled me over already just this evening, always painful and always a surprise.
“Only a little while longer,” I whispered. “And then it’ll be over.”
I yanked myself back from the maw of grief.
I couldn’t allow myself to disappear into it now, as I had for that entire first day and night. The neighbor of madness, it had been a blinding and greedy creature, consuming everything in its path, the rest of my children’s names, all sounds except for Spuma’s shrieks, the feel of anything but Ugo’s soft hair when the men who had lifted him back up the mountain had handed him to me.
Shame roiled in my stomach as I thought of the way I’d left everything for Florindo to handle as I’d sunk into that grief like a stone in a river. I’d not allowed him his own mourning as he dealt all alone with the doctor and Giacomo’s leg, with our other children, with the knowledge that we were entirely ruined.
Our future, lost.
We’d not be able to pay back any of the loans, of course, not a one. Not with a mill shattered by the explosion. The trees might as well not have existed and even the dam had started cracking again, though whether it was from sabotage or faulty construction, I didn’t know. Or care. As things stood, we’d be destitute in a week or two. The massaro would not delay galloping to our villa, then, to escort us off the land that would no longer belong to us. And yet, what did any of that matter when weighed against the small body resting now in one of the sale, candlelight and cyclamens keeping vigil until he could be buried?
I made myself straighten and take up the knife again.
The solution to it all had come to me yesterday, with the dawn, just when I’d thought my mind would shred apart like my grandmother’s tablecloth. I could feel now the same calming warmth falling over me that I’d felt then as I’d watched the reddening sky and gripped on to the thought that all this suffering did not have to last long. I had the tools to make everything all right. I could protect us from the pain of the loss and from the future racing toward us.
And that was exactly what I would do.
The only regret I had was Giusto, for he loved the children and would mourn them. But that couldn’t be helped.
The low, dark voice of the hemlock pulled at me again, issuing another of the many warnings it had given me since I’d snipped it from the forest and placed it on the cutting board.
“Yes, I know,” I said. “Thank you. But I do need you now.”
“Who are you talking to, Mamma?”
I turned to Marcellina, who stood at the doorway, and made myself smile. “Just the herbs, amore.”
She walked toward me. She looked thinner than she had been just two days ago and her eyes were swollen from crying. “Where are Martino and the other servants?”
“I gave them a night to themselves,” I said. “They deserve a bit of a rest after all of this. Besides, I wanted to have a meal together, just the seve—” I exhaled. “The six of us. It won’t be anything fancy, mind, only a stew. But what do you think about using the unicorn plates?”
Her eyes widened. “Really?”
My smile ached. What a silly, cruel thing, to have always been so careful with that majolica set when I could have granted Marcellina the pleasure of seeing it more often. Would a chipped plate have made a difference to anyone, to anything?
“Would you fetch me a few sprigs of rosemary from that pot?” I said and motioned across the room.
Marcellina did as I asked, picking them with care and pressing them to her nose as she walked back to me. As she handed them over, her gaze landed on the stalks splattered with purple, on the pile of white flowers. She looked up at me, frowning.
I held my breath and her eyes.
Something crossed her face, and as well as I knew my daughter, I didn’t know what I was seeing. She watched me with the same intensity with which she’d stared at my herbarium back in Genova, but no expression crossed her face. Her thoughts remained hers.
I opened my mouth without a real idea of what I was going to say, but she looked away, down at her hands.
“Do you need more help?” she said. “Or can I go find the twins?”
I swallowed. “You go on. I just have to add this to the pot and let it cook for a while.”
She nodded and started to turn.
“Wait.” I pulled her back, into my arms, and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “You know I love you so much it burns, right?”
Her head moved against my chest.
“Good.” I released her and smiled despite the tears I felt rising. “All right, go, find your brothers.”
I watched her leave, wishing I could have at least seen a shadow of who she would have been if we’d never come here, if things hadn’t happened exactly as they had.
I shook my head to tear the hope right out of it—for that would, could, never happen—and finished slicing the hemlock along with the rest of the herbs. I kept my mind poised over a great, bright nothingness, allowing the mechanism of movement but nothing else.
When everything was ready, I pushed the herbs off the cutting board and into the stew pot. It had an hour or two left to simmer.
Bene. Because I still had one more thing I needed to do.
I walked out of the kitchen and headed down the courtyard, out to the colonnade one final time. My heart beat just a bit faster as I started down the stairs, descending slowly, stepping right into the mud that was starting to congeal with the chill.
I looked at the land all around me, at the dark mill, the pine tree forest, the mountain, and its oaks beyond it. Everything that had caused us so much harm.
“Well, I have some harm of my own to bestow,” I murmured. “Let us see if I am the strega everyone seems to think I am. If I have the power to deal some of the justice we were denied.”
Clenching my hands, I dipped into myself, diving down and down through the years, past the barricades of decorum and normalcy I’d built for myself, into all of that which my mother had urged me to keep silent about. I clutched onto that pure, smothering need to cry that I’d first felt when I’d seen death embracing my cousin, and made no attempt to hold it back. Any of it. Not this time.
From all around me rose voices. Those of seeds waiting for spring, of frozen roots and trampled leaves, of weeds that held on, green, through the chill, and I pulled on it all, on every voice, on every bit of hope and suffering and strength I had at my reach. I took it all.
Gorged as a leech, I looked at the mill.
“This is what is yours, then: endless destruction. Your wood will rot and crack and you will never escape the explosion that took my child.”
A rope fraying, a man lunging for its end as a wooden part hung suspended in the dusty air for a moment before crashing to the floor. Shattering.
A coil of swirling blackness appeared before me and I exhaled as I felt it pull at my strength. I offered no resistance. I fed it.
I brought up the image of the torrent as it had been on the night of the flood. Feral.
“For you, I grant you waters filled with death and no dam that will ever last, for you will never again be anything but mad.”
Water and rocks crashing through wooden planks, sweeping a man under their force. Bloated deer carcasses squelching out of a black mouth.
The blackness grew. Deepening.
The mountain came next.
“Your oaks will sicken and die. Hemlock will rise like a scourge from their rotting roots, multiplying, covering the land until it is dry as a husk.”
A field of stumps drowned in white flowers, a tree on its side trapped in ivy and moss, its bark black with years.
And then the family. The trespassers who had so arrogantly walked in and out of our home.
I called Antonio’s face to my mind and held it there, pinned in place like an insect.
“Oh, and you.” I breathed, feeling my skin tingle with anger or power or both. “Those with a single drop of your family’s blood in their veins will summon their death if they step foot on this land. This place will be their end just as it was ours. I swear that.”
A man falling in the forest, head striking stone. A bloodied blue cap. A girl clutching at a child as her chest blossomed with red.
The dark form before me churned and continued to grow, finding its shape, becoming large enough to block my view of the mill.
The claws at its side curled and my hands echoed them, fingernails digging into my palms under the oncoming wave of tears. I ground my teeth together, forcing the words to come.
“Yes. This land will remember it all. It will carry the memory of what has happened like a stain that will never wash off. It will pulse through it like a plucked lute string. You will never forget me or mine or what you have stolen from us.”
A young woman’s face, all tussled curls and bright eyes, filled my mind. I felt myself hesitate, the words on my lips weakening as I saw her cradling her stomach.
My son’s golden hair flared bright enough to blind me. I squeezed my hands tighter. I would have my destruction.
“No one who lives here will ever be safe again,” I hissed. “I swear it.”
My palms were wet, my fingers slick, and I looked down. Perfect half-moons oozed red.
Smiling through my rage and lifting my gaze once more to the lurching darkness I’d created, I held my hands out, drops of blood dripping, falling to the mud below. Seeming to sizzle as they met the silent, horrified land.