“If you’re so convinced of the worthiness of your friends, why do you never speak of your own history, even with the people you claim to trust?”
He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “They know enough.”
Elsa cast him a skeptical look. “I have to wonder whether you’re trying to convince me or yourself.”
This time, Leo didn’t answer. His gaze shifted to the window, the beginnings of a scowl furrowing his brow.
Elsa bit her tongue, fearing she’d pushed him too far. She should not have been so forward, not here and now, not with Leo, whose help she needed.
Her mother had raised her to be forthright, to speak her mind. Never forget that words have power, Jumi would say, pacing the slate floor of the cottage while Elsa sat diligently at the writing desk. We use them to remake the world. Our best weapons are words. Jumi had taught her how to make war with words, but not how to make peace with them. And even a sword made of words has two edges.
7
POURING FORTH ITS SEAS EVERYWHERE, THEN, THE OCEAN ENVELOPS THE EARTH AND FILLS ITS DEEPER CHASMS.
—Nicolaus Copernicus
Leo found he couldn’t look Elsa in the eye for long—there was something disconcerting about her gaze. Maybe it was the chiaroscuro effect of her dark skin turning those green eyes startlingly clear and bright, like spotlights in an opera house. Or maybe it was the way she seemed to look right through him, as if she could read his thoughts as easily as she could the words on a page. Certainly, she had demonstrated an uncomfortable tendency to skewer the truth no matter how carefully he concealed it beneath layers of lies.
Leo did not want to examine why he felt the need to hide it in the first place. He did not want to admit to the disservice he did his friends, even if it was out of self-preservation. To share the truth would be to make it more real, and it already felt too real to bear.
It seemed safest to stare out the window, only acknowledging Elsa with the occasional sideways glance. She had a sharp beauty, and he fancied it might cut him if he gazed upon it too long. Exotic was the word he wanted to use, though Faraz abhorred it (Exotic, meaning “from the outside,” Faraz would say, someone who can never, no matter what they do, count as “one of us.”). But in truth, Elsa was exotic, she was as exotic as it was possible for any human to be: she was not from Earth. And if he read her properly, she intended to return from whence she had come as soon as physically possible. Yet another reason to keep her at arm’s length.
In the end everyone left, one way or another. Aris, who had seemed an unstoppable force of nature right up until the moment he was stopped. Little Pasca, brilliant and sensitive. Father, who had never fully been there in the first place, his mind always on matters larger than his sons. All of them gone.
Even Rosalinda—who had dragged Leo kicking and screaming from the house fire in Venezia, who for weeks afterward had sat up with him when the nightmares made sleep impossible. Even she let him go when the Order demanded custody, as they did for all mad orphans. Not that Casa della Pazzia turned out so bad for him, but as a frightened, traumatized ten-year-old, the last thing he’d wanted was to be dragged away from a familiar face and thrust in amongst strangers.
In any case, Elsa was not here to stay. So Leo knew very well he ought to keep his distance.
*
They changed trains at the station in La Spezia, and by the time they were pulling out to follow the Cinque Terre line, it seemed to Elsa that Leo had regained some of his usual spirit.
The terrain outside the window had transitioned from rolling hills to sharp little mountains. They passed through a series of tunnels and emerged quite suddenly into the glare of sunlight scattering off waves. The enormity of the ocean made Elsa’s breath catch. Her mind struggled to accept that any world could contain such a vastness of water; Veldana’s little sea seemed nothing but a puddle by comparison. The distant horizon filled her with an awe bordering on dread.
They pulled up at a train stop, and while other passengers were busy disembarking, Leo grabbed her hand and led her across the train to an empty compartment on the other side. Elsa was too shocked at the sudden physical contact to protest; his touch felt almost electric against her palm, like the buzz of a finished worldbook.
“We don’t have time for sightseeing, but you should at least get a glimpse of Riomaggiore,” he said.
Bright-painted buildings rose up on two sides of a narrow valley, blocks of red and orange, salmon-pink and white. The train tracks bridged over a narrow, sea-green inlet lined with colorful rowboats. The surrounding landscape was a jumble of exposed gray cliffs and greenery, with a mountain rising up behind the town as if to shield it from the rest of the world.
The whistle blew, and Leo and Elsa returned to their compartment. The train followed the coast from there—sometimes passing through tunnels, sometimes clinging precariously to the cliffside, the blue-green ocean lapping at the rocks below.
Soon the train was pulling into Corniglia station, and Leo was standing to retrieve the carpetbag from the luggage rack. They stepped out onto the open-air platform. It was the lone construct down near the sea, at the foot of the steep slope leading up to the town. Unlike the first two fishing towns they’d passed through, Corniglia was built atop a towering cliff.
“I’m afraid we have to proceed on foot,” Leo said. “The locals don’t have much use for hansoms in a village this size. Will you be all right?”
Elsa looked up. A broad set of brick stairs switchbacked up the cliff side. It was, admittedly, a climb of perhaps a hundred meters, but it wasn’t as if he were asking her to scale the bare rock. “It’s not a problem.”
“Are you sure?” He gave her a worried look.
His skepticism irked her; she was Veldanese, not some soft highborn lady. “There are stairs. I doubt they were built for their aesthetic appeal.”
So they climbed. Despite her confidence, the corset was more of a hindrance than she’d expected, and Elsa felt quite winded by the time they reached the village at the top. The brightly painted houses clung together in tight, precarious clusters on either side of a main road that ran the length of the town. It took them only a minute or two to cross the width of the narrow village.
Terraced vineyards dominated the valley on the other side, and so they descended into a landscape of stone walls, rough-hewn steps, and verdant grapevines displaying clusters of tiny young grapes. It all looked startlingly overengineered to Elsa’s eye. Corniglia itself couldn’t have held more than two or three hundred people—close to the population of her own village in Veldana—but they had practically rebuilt the entire landscape by hand in order to grow sufficient crops.