Oaths & Venom

SERAFINA

The day my brother sold me, I was elbow-deep in potting soil, trying to talk a lemon tree

out of dying.

"You are being dramatic," I told it. "It was one cold night. Everyone in this house survives worse."

The lemon tree dropped another leaf onto my boot.

"Vaffanculo, then. Die. See if I care."

I cared. I always cared. That was the problem with growing things. You put your hands in the dirt and suddenly every sad little root in Sicily was your personal responsibility.

Not everything in here was sad, though. Along the back wall, where nobody but me ever went, the oleander was thriving. Pink flowers, glossy leaves, and enough poison in a single branch to stop a grown man's heart before dessert. Next to it, the foxglove. Next to that, a pot of monkshood I'd grown from seed and told my brothers was a kind of lavender.

Papà had called it my little hobby. Raff called it my garden.

I called it insurance. A girl who has been helpless once learns very quickly how not to be helpless again.

The greenhouse door banged open and let in a gust of November wind and my baby brother. Nico was sixteen and had recently grown four inches, all of them leg, so he moved through my greenhouse like a giraffe through a china shop.

"Mind the foxglove."

"I'm minding it." He knocked a pot with his elbow and caught it one-handed, grinning.

"Raff wants you."

"Raff can want."

"He's in the study." The grin slipped. "Fina. He's wearing the funeral face."

I went still.

Raffaele had three faces. There was the one he wore for the city, smooth and pleasant, the face of a man who owned half the port and would happily discuss olive prices with you while his men broke your knees in the car park. There was the one he wore for us, tired and dry and almost soft. And there was the one he'd worn the morning our father didn't wake up, standing at the foot of Papà's bed with his hands at his sides like he'd forgotten what they were for.

The funeral face.

I wiped my hands on my jeans, which did nothing, and followed Nico up through the garden.

Villa Corvino sat on the cliffs above Palermo like it had been dropped there by an angry god, all honey-coloured stone and iron balconies and too many stairs. Forty rooms, three hundred years of Corvinos, and hardly any of them had died old. The crows were out on the roof, hunched in the wind. Raff fed them every morning. He said crows remembered faces, and that it was good to be remembered kindly by something.

I had never decided whether that was the most romantic thing my brother had ever said or the most threatening. With Raff, it was usually both.

The study door was open. Raff stood at the window with his back to the room. Zio Gaetano was in the leather armchair by the fire, a glass of something amber balanced on his knee, and he rose the moment I walked in.

"Piccolina." He kissed both my cheeks. He smelled like cigars and the lemon cologne he'd worn my whole life. "You have dirt on your face."

"I have dirt everywhere, Zio. It's my natural state."

He laughed and squeezed my shoulder, and didn't let go.

That was when I got scared.

"Sit down, Fina," Raff said, without turning around.

"I'll stand."

"Serafina."

"Raffaele."

He turned then. My brother was beautiful in the way a blade is beautiful, all clean lines and dark eyes and no wasted movement. There was a red rose in a glass on his desk.

There was always a red rose somewhere in this house. Mamma had loved them. Raff had been thirteen when he watched her bleed out on the kitchen tiles. I had been five, folded small in the pantry where she'd shoved me, watching through the slats.

Nobody in this house ever, ever mentioned the roses.

"The Table met in Geneva on Thursday," he said.

"I know. You came back looking like someone had pissed in your espresso."

"The war with the Kavanaghs is over."

I blinked. Three years. Three years of burning ships and men who went down to the port and came back in pieces. Three years of funerals where the coffins stayed closed. Three years of Raff sleeping with a gun under his pillow and Nico not being allowed to walk to school alone. Over, just like that?

"That's good," I said slowly. "Isn't it?"

Raff didn't answer. He crossed to the cabinet, poured two fingers of whisky into a heavy glass, and held it out to me.

My stomach dropped through the floor. My brother did not pour drinks for me. My brother hid the good whisky from me, and counted the bottles, and once made Nico confess under oath that he'd seen me with a glass of grappa at a wedding.

I took it. I didn't drink it.

That was when I noticed the photograph on his desk, lying face-down beside the rose.

Just a white rectangle on dark wood. Nothing frightening about it at all.

I couldn't stop looking at it.

"What did it cost?" I asked. "Peace with the Irish. It cost something. It always costs something."

"Yes."

"Ships?" I tried. "The Trapani dock? Half the olive money?" I was babbling now. I could hear it. "Tell me it's the dock, Raff. Papà always said that dock was cursed anyway."

"It's not the dock."

Zio Gaetano cleared his throat softly, the way he did at funerals before he said something kind and useless. Nobody looked at him. Nobody looked at me either. My brother, who had once stared down a Calabrian boss across a table with a gun pointed at his chest, was looking at a rose.

"The Notary proposed terms. The Table voted." Raff's jaw moved. "There's only one law in the Accord that ends a blood feud."

I knew the laws. Every Corvino child learned them before they learned their times tables. No crown spills another crown's blood without a vote. Every crown holds its own waters. Disputes go to the Table.

A marriage between two crowns ends any blood feud between them.

The room tilted.

The whisky glass slid in my fingers. I caught it before it fell. In this house you learn young to catch things before they shatter, because the sound of breaking glass brings men with guns running, and somebody always ends up bleeding on the tiles.

Zio Gaetano's hand tightened on my shoulder, warm and heavy, the way it had when I was small and he'd steadied me on the edge of the harbour wall.

Only this time, I understood, he wasn't holding me back from the edge.

He was holding me still.

"No," I whispered.

Raff didn't blink. He said it the way he said everything. Calm. Final. Like he was reading me a shipping schedule.

"In three weeks, Fina, you're going to marry the Butcher of Dublin."