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7

Mari

Monday, April 16, 1821

T he pirates turned east, sparing Positano yet again.

Instead, they landed in San Marco, where—according to the newspapers—they pillaged a cluster of villas built along the coastline, before setting fire to the piazza at the center of town. They destroyed an ancient monument and made off with a few dozen casks of olive oil, but to everyone’s relief, they left the women and children unharmed.

Soon after the news made its way to Positano, the village men gathered by their boats, praising providence and relishing, yet again, their good fortune. The streghe acted as surprised and delighted as everyone else, but privately they whispered words of commendation to the three women who’d successfully cursed the currents.

In this interim, Corso had left town, too, returning to Rome. He gave no indication when he would return, and though Mari might have breathed easier without a return date, instead she found herself uneasy about the uncertainty of it all. The next time he returned, he would very likely have a ring.

Thus, a few days after Corso’s departure and the good news about the pirates, Mari woke again in a restless, uneasy mood. Today, she had promised to take Lia and another young strega out onto the water for a morning of instruction, but as she dressed, she found her agitation growing. She considered finding some excuse to call off the outing, but now more than ever, it was important to relay her knowledge to as many as she could.

Mari first stopped by the house of friend and fellow strega , Viviana—Vivi for short—to retrieve seventeen-year-old Pippa, then they made their way to Ami’s house to get little Lia. As the three walked down one of the many crude staircases built into the cliffside, Lia paused, bent over, and began to whine about a pebble stuck between her toes.

On any other day, Mari would have sat with Lia and carefully pried the stone out with her fingers. But today, Mari ignored Lia’s grumbling. She wanted to get this morning over with as quickly as possible.

At the shoreline, tied to a boulder and bobbing gently in the waves, was the small gozzo they would take out. As they approached it, Mari lifted her nose to the wind as she always did, her senses attuned to any threat: the musty scent of incoming rain, or the reek of rot, suggesting something gone wrong with the water.

But Mari smelled nothing. Just salt and good sea.

Next, she scanned her eyes over the waves. The tide was going out. A dry scirocco breeze blew from the south, and enormous bands of kelp drifted with the breeze. On the horizon, she could make out a few other gozzi —tiny fishing boats, the same ones that left her village every morning and returned a few hours later—but nothing larger. No merchant brigs. Nothing with sails.

It was, by all accounts, a very dull morning.

As Mari approached the water’s edge, she bent down and placed her hands in the ocean, cupping them into a bowl. Although her hands were steady, the water held inside of them began to tremble of its own accord. Mari turned her body to hide this from the girls, but the quivers went on until nearly all of the water had sloshed out of Mari’s palms.

Mari took a long breath. Though she was uneasy for a reason she couldn’t quite place, still she’d never seen water tremble so violently in her hands. She tried again, quickly lifting her hands to her lips. As she sipped the water, her thick hair fell forward, grazing the sand.

Just salt , she thought as she tasted it, and minerals . She’d know if there was something foreign in this water, something like gunpowder or grease or the subtle tang of decomposition. She’d know if a nearby brig had jettisoned goods or if a pirate ship had dumped bodies.

She’d tasted these things in the water before.

Mari motioned to the two girls, indicating they should do the same as her. Side by side, they knelt down and cupped their hands. Pippa didn’t so much as flinch, but Lia made a face when the seawater touched her tongue, spitting it out with a grimace. Mari couldn’t help but smile.

Once in the boat, Mari tossed an extra length of rope to Pippa and instructed her to make a butterfly loop. Wordlessly, Pippa obeyed, forming a perfect knot in less than thirty seconds.

“Excellent,” Mari said. Pippa had been practicing knots for months and was very good at them. Strega or not, Pippa wanted to go to sea in a few years, and Mari knew it would happen. There weren’t many women on merchant ships, but there were a few. The ones with grit found a way.

Mari began to row and soon found herself subdued by the rhythmic, meditative pull of the water against the oars. Forward they went, the oars making perfect halos. Ahead, peeking out from the water, something glistened, the color of silver. Mari knew just what it was. She smacked the oars several times against the water, then—to amuse the girls—she feigned surprise as several dolphins appeared either side of the gozzo .

They cried in delight as the dolphins surfaced and blew their breath into the air, showering them all with mist. Even Mari laughed; she knew this pod well. They liked to follow the boat a long ways, and she always felt a sense of safety with them so close. When she and Sofia were young, they would lie back and let their hair tumble over the gozzo ’s edge. The flash of red against blue caught the dolphins’ attention, and they would nose and nudge their way through the thick masses of hair, playing with it like they might strands of seaweed.

Times like that, the sea was not so loathsome.

As they rowed along the rocky coastline, Lia pointed. “A net,” she said. Ahead, an enormous seine was wrapped tight around a boulder. Such litter was left by foreign mariners who cast traps like this along the delicate coastline, ensnaring entire schools of fish—sometimes hundreds and thousands at once. Far more than any village could eat.

“Good, Lia.” Mari smiled, impressed as she often was with the child’s keen eye.

The streghe knew the danger posed by these nets. They were traps for wildlife. Plovers, gulls, crabs. Mari had seen their carcasses countless times, caught up in dragnets just like this one.

They rowed toward the boulder. Together, using a small knife, Mari and the girls worked to remove the net. Mari rolled it into a ball and tossed it into the boat to discard later.

“Plenty of problems,” she reminded the girls, “can be solved without stregheria . Magic doesn’t solve everything.”

After a few more minutes of rowing, Mari spotted the black mouth of a grotto ahead. This was their destination. It was a cave, only partially immersed, with enough light to see by, to teach by. The opening to the grotto was well-camouflaged; the cliffs jutting into the water were rugged, full of black pits and protruding boulders. Unless one knew precisely where to look, the grotto was all but invisible.

Before steering the gozzo into the mouth of the cave, Mari advised the girls to stay very quiet. She rowed the boat forward and back several times, taking close note of her surroundings. No one, not even a fisherman from her own village, was in sight.

Quickly, she rowed the boat into the grotto. The dolphins followed, playfully twirling. As they entered the cave’s opening, the two young girls gasped in unison: the water inside was a radiant sapphire color.

Once she had the gozzo situated toward the back, Mari leaned over in the boat and plunged her hand beneath the blue depths, feeling for the cave wall. She touched something spongy and soft, bringing it to the surface. It was a clump of sea algae. She held it out for Lia, pointing to a cluster of tiny spheres, resembling yellow bubbles, hidden among the algae. Fish eggs.

“How many?” Pippa asked, leaning forward.

Mari squinted in the low light, counting. “Hundreds,” she said, feeling pleased.

“Because of the incantesimo dell’elemento ?” Lia asked, fumbling over the words. “The one where we use the dried-up fish snout?”

“Close,” Mari replied, “but not quite. For this, there is no need to change the composition of the water. Only the temperature of it, which is the incantesimo raffreddare .” Such cold-water spells resulted in good conditions for breeding. It also attracted tiny organisms, which meant food for larger fish. “Do you remember which tool that spell requires?”

Lia frowned for a moment. “The mermaid’s purse.”

“Right.” Mari nodded. “The shark egg-sack.” She lowered the clump of algae beneath the water, returning it to its dark crevice. “The water is still very cold. Much colder than outside the cave.” She nodded at the girls to feel the temperature for themselves.

“I would not like it cold,” Lia said, “if I were a little egg.”

Mari smiled. “That is why you are not a fish. The fish love the cold. The colder it is, the more food there is.”

“But what kind of food do the eggs eat?” Lia asked.

Beside her, Pippa stifled a laugh.

“The eggs do not eat,” Mari explained. “But as soon as they hatch, they will be very hungry.” She took Lia’s hand in her own and pointed to a tiny, almost invisible freckle on Lia’s thumb. “Beneath us now, in the water, are tiny living things we cannot even name. As countless as the stars, and too small to see. Smaller, even, than this freckle.” At this, Lia’s eyes grew wide, and Mari went on, “These things cannot swim; they merely drift where the currents take them. And once the baby fish hatch from the eggs, they will be ravenous, and they will eat the little floaters.”

“How sad,” Lia said, her face falling. When her tiny hand went limp, Mari gave it a good squeeze.

“It gets better,” Pippa added, grinning. “The baby fish will get eaten, too. A shark, or maybe one of these dolphins, will devour it.”

Mari threw Pippa a warning glance, but still, she was right. “That is how it works, yes,” Mari said. “The bigger fish always eat the little fish. It begins with the invisible organisms floating around us, and ends with…” She paused, thinking of the village men trawling the coastline now. “Well, it ends with us, and the food on our plates. The fish are what sustain us, what keep us alive. And that,” she whispered, “is why we three are here, ensuring the water is still very, very cold, so the babies will survive. So the village does not go hungry.”

She’d almost said our village . Already, she’d begun to consider herself an outsider.

The three took the small boat around the cave, Mari testing the chill of the water in several more places. As a whole, she was pleased with what she found. It meant a good fishing season ahead, yet again—though this time, she wouldn’t be around to see it.

When they were finished, Mari rowed the boat to the outside of the cave and set the oars down. There wasn’t much of a current along this part of the coastline, and the boat bobbed along in place. A few meters away, enormous slabs of limestone sloped gently downward, creating a natural beach. Before Sofia’s death, Mari would occasionally row herself out here to lie on the rocks and sunbathe, daydream. Sometimes, others had beat her to the spot: above this natural beach was a narrow, steep pathway leading upward to the road.

The natural stone beach was empty today. Done with their task inside the cave, Mari withdrew a few lemon candies from a bag and gave them to the girls. She heard the beating of wings nearby, and a pair of cormorants flew past as though spooked, their long necks stretched eastward.

So near the beach, Mari wondered if they should disembark and have their candies on land.

She jumped as Lia suddenly threw her skinny arms into the air. “Spin for us in the water!” she exclaimed. “ Ruota! ”

Mari looked over the side of the boat. The sea was as beautiful as it had ever been—crystalline blue, studded by glints of diamond-white, reflections of the sun above—yet Mari still had no desire to get in. “No,” she said softly.

“Please,” Lia said now. “Just once, for—”

“Yes!” Pippa interjected. “It is almost Lia’s birthday, anyhow.”

Mari looked at the girls’ pleading expressions and felt her chest tighten. Moments like this were numbered. Or perhaps this was the last of them entirely.

She would try one more thing, testing the girls. “I don’t have my bag of attrezzi ,” she playfully argued.

“Nice try,” Pippa said. “ Incantesimo vortice doesn’t need any.”

Mari huffed. “You are too good,” she conceded.

The girls cheered as Mari readied herself to put on a display. Standing only in her undergarments, she stepped off the boat and into the ankle-deep water. She walked deeper and deeper, and then, knowing precisely where the underwater drop-off began, she dove in with a swoosh.

At first, she let herself sink. She knew this part of the sea: there was nothing here to fear, and besides, the two dolphins had followed her into the depths and now flipped playfully just below her. She kept her eyes open, for she’d grown used to salt water many years ago. Here and there, she caught the silvery flash of a young fish.

Reciting a few words, Mari stretched out her arms and fluttered her fingers, feeling the water around her begin to spin. It whirled slowly at first, then faster and faster, and Mari let it twirl her around a few times, like she was a dancer doing a pirouette.

After a few moments, she lowered her arms and let the whirling subside. Then she blew air out of her mouth, watching as the bubbles floated upward to the surface. For all the sea had taken from her, she could appreciate moments like this: the weightlessness of water, the soundlessness of it.

Suddenly, Mari felt a whoosh of water nearby: Pippa had just dived in, too. She did a few somersaults, a grin of delight on her face. Mari expected Lia to jump in any moment—even at her young age, she was an excellent swimmer—but when she didn’t, Mari began to kick for the surface. Meanwhile, the dolphins suddenly darted away, making for deeper water. Mari thought it strange, how quickly they’d gone.

As she kicked for the glinting, crystalline surface, she heard a muffled cough. It was not the sort of noise Lia herself could have made; it sounded like a man. Pippa must have heard it, too, for they glanced at each other underwater, eyes wide.

Mari’s blood went cold. She gave a final kick, finally breaking above the water. Then she smelled it, something pungent and foul.

Sweat.

A man with shoulder-length curly hair was crouched on the limestone slope only meters away, looking ready to lunge, to attack. How long had he been watching them? Long enough, Mari feared, to see her dive into the ocean and twirl the water with her hands…

But Lia. Where was Lia? As Mari touched her feet to the rocky bottom—she was standing now, in hip-high water—she looked frantically around. Lia was not in the boat, not on the beach. She looked for bubbles, wondering if Lia had jumped in elsewhere, but saw nothing.

“Where is she?” Mari cried, vaguely aware that the water around her was growing colder with each passing moment. She saw no other boat, which meant the man must have come down the narrow trail, leading from the road.

Horrified, Mari could only reason that the man had yanked Lia from the gozzo when she and Pippa had been underwater. Or had the girl somehow escaped? Perhaps now she was hiding behind a boulder or even scrambling up the cliffside. Mari hoped so—hoped little Lia had done whatever it took to put distance between her and this stranger.

“Get over here, both of you,” he demanded, running his eyes over Mari’s sodden undergarments. A knife flashed on his hip. As he stood, he stumbled forward a step, visibly drunk. A flask lay discarded on the rocks.

Mari was struck with a feeling of vague recognition. She had seen this man before, she felt sure of it.

She turned to Pippa, whose wet hair was plastered to her shoulders. “Go,” she demanded with a whisper. “Back into the water. Swim as deep as you can.”

“What are you saying to her?” the man called out. Fear glimmered in his eyes as he watched Pippa slip backward into the shallow water, then quickly disappear, leaving only a few ripples.

Mari ignored him and waded forward. The water around her had grown so cold, like ice, that she could barely feel her feet. “Lia!” she screamed, darting her eyes back and forth. “Lia!”

There was no reply. Not a rustle, not a soft cry. Mari didn’t understand. How had the child disappeared so quickly, so completely? “Where is she?” she demanded again.

He bent down for his flask. “Don’t worry about her.” He uncorked the flask, pressed the metal to his lips. “We’ll take good care of her in Naples.”

Mari’s lower belly churned. No. No, this cannot be. She felt heat prickling in her hands, her feet. Instinctively, she reached for her cimaruta , delicately fingering the tiny piece of coral.

In a flash, she lunged for him, surprised by her own speed and agility. Though he saw her coming, the man was intoxicated, his reactions slow. Mari went for his groin and gave him a hard kick. He doubled over, fell to his knees, and cried out. When he lifted his hand, Mari saw that he’d cut it on the rock when he fell. Blood trickled onto his forearm.

She kicked him again, this time in his lower belly, and he wheezed, short of air.

She didn’t waste a moment. Knowing he would be disoriented only momentarily, she wrapped her arms underneath his shoulders and dragged him into the shallow water. His weight posed a challenge at first, and he flailed his limbs, digging his fingernails into the flesh of Mari’s thigh, leaving her with a bloody scratch. She nearly lost her balance. If this man somehow overtook her or pinned her arms against her sides, she’d be useless, as good as a fish in a net. Pippa and Lia would be left to watch as he hauled Mari onto the rocks to do God-knew-what, then he’d drag her back to Naples. His newfound loot.

No. Mari would not let it happen.

She regained her balance and pulled him deeper into the water. Soon, he was buoyant, easier to manage. Here in the ocean was exactly where she needed him—here, she could do what she needed to get him out of her way, so she could go find Lia.

With the man halfway immersed, Mari released him. He began to flail his arms again, the blood from his hand mingling with seawater. He tried to keep himself upright, his head above the surface, but his feet slipped on the slick rocks. Quickly, Mari waded a few steps away and plunged both of her hands into the water.

Softly, she began to recite the incantesimo vortice .

The water around the man began to spin. It intensified quickly, sucking his body into its rotation, pulling him under. He made a futile effort to plant his feet, to steady himself, but when he realized the maelstrom’s power, he turned his attention to breathing. Eyes wide, he gulped for air. He’d begun to drown.

Mari could stop it now in an instant—could, quite literally, pull the water from this man’s lungs if she so chose. She had never killed a man before, but nothing in her hesitated now. She was tired of losing everything she held dear.

She ran her fingertips across the surface of the sea, her lips moving. With the natural ebb of the tide, the underwater cyclone began to shift out, deeper into the center of the small bay. This man would die momentarily, leaving any passerby to put the puzzle together for themselves: the discarded flask, his abandoned coach on the road above. They’d assume he’d drowned from being too drunk. Too dehydrated. It happened all the time. This cliffside coastline was dangerous, and people often met hazards they couldn’t have prepared for.

As the whirlpool moved deeper, the man reached his hand out, as if grasping for the sky. There came a gurgling cry, something like an underwater wail, and Mari lifted her fingers from the water.

The whirlpool slowed, ceased. The man’s body had been sucked under.

All fell silent and still, not so much as a bubble.

He was dead.

Eventually, maybe in a few days, his body would wash ashore. And to think this morning had been so dull when it began…

The water around Mari began to warm again. A moment later, something small and narrow glimmered in the water, right where the man’s body had gone under. The object made a slow arc toward Mari, still propelled by the whirlpool’s rippling remnants. Mari frowned. It was solid and cool, like metal, but one side was abrasive—a man’s nail file.

She spotted a tiny inscription and lifted the nail file closer. Aut inveniam viam aut faciam , the first line read. And beneath this, Massimo Mazza .

Mari gasped, the nail file slipping from her fingers and sinking at once. She clasped her hands over her mouth and shook her head back and forth.

She had not just killed any man.

She had just killed one of the Mazza brothers. One of the most powerful, wicked men in Naples.

Now the two brothers were only one.

She briefly thought of Holmes. He held nothing but disgust for the brothers and would be unaffected, at least emotionally, by Massimo’s death. Nevertheless, she wondered about the Fratelli Mazza as a company, and whether this might affect Holmes’s employment, his future.

No matter. It was a minor worry compared to the present crisis—finding Lia.

Mari needed to get away from this scene, and quick. She heard a splash and turned to find Pippa’s eyes just above the waterline; she was treading deep water a few meters away. The two shared a silent nod before swimming frantically for the shore.

“Lia!” Mari called out again now, wondering if she had witnessed the drowning. If she had, she could come out of whatever hiding spot she’d been in. Mari called for her three times, four times.

Still, nothing.

A few seconds later, Mari and Pippa reached the shore. They began to scramble up the beach, but—

“Wait,” Mari hissed, holding Pippa back. She’d just spotted something—a flash of red—above them, on the trail leading up the cliff. There, near where the trail met the road, stood a man.

In his arms, with a canvas sack tied over her head, was a child. Lia.

How had Mari not considered it? There’d been two of them—one to snag Lia, one to distract Mari. While Mari had been addressing Massimo, this second man had been silently traversing his way up the hill with Lia.

Mari could only guess that Lia was gagged and unable to scream out. Her disheveled hair jutted out from the sack’s bottom, strands the color of apple blossoms. From this vantage point, she looked exactly like Sofia, with her small frame and light hair.

Sofia. Lia. And this time, Mari could not even blame the sea.

Her horror intensified as she got a good look at the man holding Lia. He was the spitting image of the man she’d just killed—the same broad shoulders, the same pointed chin.

He could only be the second Mazza brother. Matteo. The older, more wicked of the two.

Mari knew, instinctively, that he’d seen it all—what she’d done to his brother. How she’d harnessed the sea. How she’d killed a man without so much as touching him.

She might have chased him down, but there was no chance she would make it in time. Matteo was but steps from the road, where his horse would be waiting. Even at a sprint, it would take Mari several minutes to maneuver her way up the rocky trail.

If only she could fly. If only she could kill a man with a stare. If only the sirens had bestowed upon the streghe more than seven curses, all for use on the sea and the sea alone.

Mari fell to her knees and let out a wail. Lia , she thought, watching the man roughly tug the child along for the last few steps. Lia has been seized, and it is all because of my carelessness.

Over and over and over, she kept failing the people she loved.

Pippa stood next to her, breathing hard, an anguished look on her face. Pippa wasn’t the sort to cry—she was too tough for that. Still, Mari had never seen her wear such a tormented look. “It is my fault,” Pippa whispered.

Mari glared at her. “No—no. Do not say that.”

“I jumped in after you. I left her alone.”

“I shouldn’t have jumped in at all. I shouldn’t have left either of you.” It occurred to Mari, then, how close she might have been to losing Pippa, too. What if each of the men had snagged one of the girls? “You will not take the blame for this,” Mari insisted. She grabbed Pippa’s hand, pulled her toward their gozzo . “We need to go tell the others. We’ll gather the men, go to Naples—” Her voice cracked. She couldn’t manage another word. Naples was a day away by horseback, which felt impossibly far.

And… Ami . Her best friend, and Lia’s mother. How on earth could she break this news to her?

Back in the boat, Mari pulled at the oars as hard and quick as she could. Sweat pricked at her brow, and her forearms burned. She’d never rowed so hard. Her palms stung with blisters, splinters.

When she’d rowed a short distance away, she turned. Matteo still stood at the top of the trail. A small horse-drawn coach was just behind him. In front of him, Lia stood pitifully motionless, frozen with fear, the sack still over her head. The poor girl wasn’t a fighter, not like Pippa.

Matteo stood tall on the precipice, a predator satisfied with his catch.

He called out a single, slow word. It echoed off the cliff side, ringing in Mari’s ears.

Her blood ran cold.

“ Tornerò ,” he shouted. I’ll be back.