‘Celsi says whatever gets him attention.’ Loren’s mouth pinched. Aurelia’s story offered little of substance. A divine helmet was utterly priceless; it would attract anyone with sticky fingers, pirate or not – Felix was proof. But that told Loren nothing about Felix’s connection to the helmet. Defeated, he let the silk flutter into her hand, and she grinned.
‘Try Nonna next,’ she suggested. ‘She must be as old as Mercury himself by now. She might know more. Now,look.’
Without further ado, she yanked the cover off her loom, and Loren’s blood ran cold.
The wooden frame held Aurelia’s latest project, yarn interwoven in an abstract tapestry. She pieced her weavings together with threads from Livia’s scraps, collecting colours like a crow collected trinkets, but she had a way of making something greater than its parts.
Her tapestries told stories. Told visions.
Now the loom depicted the swallow of a wave, but not of the sea. Black surged in a noxious curl, cut through with red, strands of twisting grey . . .
‘There’s an ending hidden here somewhere,’ Aurelia mused. ‘But I can’t quite find it.’
Copper and silver, woven throughout.
Loren’s stomach soured. He’d seen plenty of those colours lately. So, it seemed, had Aurelia. This was precisely what he feared, why he never shared specifics about his own dreams with her. A single vision was a single possibility. Two was confirmation.
Copper and silver. A thief and his stolen treasure at the end of the world.
Knees shaking, Loren sank onto the edge of the bed. ‘It’s . . .’
‘Missing an element, I know.’ Aurelia raised the navy silk. ‘This, maybe? How would you finish it?’
‘I’m not a weaver.’ He fought to keep his voice steady as he tore his gaze from the loom. ‘Perhaps you should shelve it awhile. Work on something new.’
‘I’m afraid I won’t have time.’
‘You’re young, Aurelia. You have all the time in the world.’
‘Mamma says I have an old soul.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘She says the same about you.’
Loren frowned. ‘You need friends your own age.’
‘I have Celsi.’
‘You hate Celsi.’
‘Not true. It’s Celsi who hates everyone. Except me, of course. But especially you.’ Aurelia plopped at his feet. ‘Braid my hair.’
Her rambling shifted to idle street gossip, critiques about Nonna using too much salt in her flatbread, fights she’d picked with other children lately, but Loren didn’t miss the way she left the weavinguncovered, a blight in the room he once called home. Nor could he shake Ghost-Felix’s silent words, looping his mind and winding tighter with every pass, a thread tensing to snap . . .
You did this to yourself.
Chapter IX
FELIX
Whatever bond Livia and Loren shared was beyond Felix’s understanding.
It wasn’t that he didn’t miss his mother. More like, he didn’t have a mother to miss. She left soon after he was born. End of story. Felix’s father never spoke of her, so he didn’t know what she looked like or what her favourite flowers were. And if sometimes he pictured the twisting road leading from Rome – the same road he took eleven years later, in the after times – and wondered if she had his same eyes, well. That was his business.
Once Livia herded Felix into the fitting room, she wasted no time ordering him to remove his scarf and strip, leaving him in nothing but shorts. Discomfort lodged in his throat, but when he clutched his old tunic to his chest, a last shield, she prised it gently from his grip.
‘You’re safe here. I’m a seamstress, I’ve seen it all.’ She laid the tunic across a drafting table and studied old stains, mending stitches, blood splattered along the too-short hem. ‘How long have you had this?’
The tunic had been his father’s, still oversized on Felix when he fled. Intervening years wore it ragged as he ran between towns, fabric shrinking against his growing body. Still, he hadn’t shed it, even if that broke his rule about attachment.
Tangible items frayed, but they didn’t muddle the way of memories.
