the entire Montebianco family, that chain of men and women stretching back hundreds of years. “How can I know, when even you couldn’t find anything?”
“It is very simple, Alberta,” Vita whispered, her strength gone. “Look carefully at the tribe. If a descendant of Leopold has survived, certain kinds of physical traits will be present. There may be pigmentation to the skin or hair—this would be a sure sign. Our kind is smaller. Our skulls are shaped differently. I looked for such traits years ago, when I went to the village. I found nothing then. But, as you know, inheritance is a trickster. One generation may hide its genetic treasures, while the next will put them fully on display.”
Twenty-Eight
From the start, I struggled to climb the mountain. My leg was weak, still tender from the gunshot wound, my vitality swept away by months of lying in bed. My muscles had withered, taking with them the strength I’d had just months before, when I’d scaled the mountainside in Nevenero. I had felt then that I could climb to the top of the world. Now, after five minutes on the path up the mountain, I was on the verge of collapse.
Yet, I wasn’t about to go back. I had the leather sack with the medical supplies Aki needed, and Vita’s voice at the back of my mind urged me forward. Promise me, she had said, squeezing my hand as I stood to leave her. Promise you will look for the descendants of Leopold. If you find one, bring him here.
I climbed onward, pushing myself up the rocky trail. It wound higher and higher, switchbacking up rocky promontories, around deep, bottomless crevices, through thick groves of trees. The cold spring air tingled in my lungs. The scent of pine needles and limestone and wet earth hung heavily around me. I imagined the generations of men and women whose feet had worn down this rock, so many centuries of movement that had left the stone smooth and slippery.
Exhausted, my leg aching, I paused to catch my breath at the base of a waterfall. I dropped the leather pack. I took out a bottle of water, drinking it quickly and then filling it in a pool below the waterfall. Spring had melted the snow, sending water gushing down the mountain. It burst from a crack in the rocks, falling over a clutch of stones below, sending up swirls of mist. Sunlight churned in the air, splintered into a rainbow of colors that lifted, held form, and dissolved back into the mist again. In the winter, this free fall of water would freeze, coating the granite in clear, glistening ice. But for now, it gushed down to the valley below, soaking the earth.
By then, I had come to see that the true mysteries of the Alps had nothing to do with the legends of dragons and cretins and beasts, or any of the other stories passed down over the generations, but with the mountains themselves. The desolation of the peaks, the murderous indifference of black granite, the calamity of ice and snow—this was nature in its most indomitable and glorious expression. The feeling of vertigo as I stood before the waterfall was not so very different from what I had felt that first day at the castle, when I had gazed out the window over the peak of Mont Blanc: awe and wonder at the power of nature. An acute awareness that the mystery of creation and destruction existed here, in these mountains. Time, millions and millions of years of it, more than I could even imagine, had passed through these gorges, moving fast and treacherous as snow melt. The mountains had stood against it, strong and indifferent. The fierce beauty of it all made me tremble with humility and terror. What was I—what were any of us—compared to this?
I hoisted the pack on my back and pushed myself onward. I climbed for some time before I heard a noise ahead, a branch snapping, the scrape of feet over rock. I stopped, listening.
“Hello?” I called into the shadowy nothingness above me.
I reached into the pack and pulled out the knife I had taken from the kitchen. How well I could defend myself against a wild animal wasn’t something I had considered. I steeled myself and continued on the path when, above, on a ledge of granite, I saw Aki.
For a long, tense moment, he stared at me, a look of surprise in his eyes. He seemed to