Chapter XXII Loren #2
‘I’m offering you a life on your own terms. I’m offering an ear that will listen,’ Julia pressed. ‘When your father comes to Pompeii, he’ll face the entire council before he can get to you. That I can promise.’
Loren thought about what waited for him outside this room. Elias’s cajoling, Livia’s pity, a position with the Temple of Isis stripped from him. No tie to the city to stop his father dragging him home. An empty bedroom. More visions he couldn’t make sense of. No friends.
No Felix .
He turned from the door.
The parchment waited on the table, outlining their agreement.
Loren skimmed the language transferring estate ownership, stretching from the home in Pompeii to holiday villas in Rome and Stabiae, into his name.
These contracts weren’t uncommon. His father protested them, believed blood a stronger bond than ink, but the rest of the Roman world had no grounds to question their validity.
Every estate needed an heir. If you couldn’t make one, you found one.
Julia passed him a stylus and ink.
Stop , said a scratching little voice. Loren wanted to believe he knew the source, but he wasn’t convinced Ghost-Felix was capable of caring. Don’t make this decision with your heart so raw.
She wants me , Loren thought louder. She, if no one else.
The ghost flitted away.
A scrawl of the stylus. He dipped his signet ring into puddled wax and pressed his seal beside his signature. When he finished, he slid the sheet aside so Julia could copy him. Scribble. Dip. Press. All too easy, too quick. Wax cooled, and neither spoke for a long moment.
‘Do you think your father will be angry?’ Julia said.
‘Anger requires feeling beyond indifference. I’m not convinced he’s capable.’
The ink tipped over. Julia scrambled to rescue the contract from the rapidly expanding black spill, clutching it to her chest as though a newborn. Loren grabbed for a cloth tucked under the tray of old food.
He froze. The plate was rattling of its own volition.
Across the room, a shelf collapsed and crashed against tile. Wood splintered. A jug on the windowsill toppled with a clatter, spraying deep red wine. Outside, something heavy, bricks or tile, broke loose and shattered.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. By Felix replacing the helmet, this was meant to stop .
Wasn’t it?
‘No,’ Loren whispered. ‘No, no.’ He reached for Julia, to hold her forearm as proof he wasn’t alone, but she dodged and ducked below the desk.
‘Under here!’
The roar of the shaking earth nearly drowned her voice.
Loren stumbled over rocking ground to huddle beside her.
He gripped the table leg tight as he could, knuckles white.
A crack in the wall split a fresco of a politician buying votes with bread.
Paint chipped from the plaster in a puff of dust. Loren blocked it from his lungs with his sleeve and screwed his eyes tight.
The quake lasted an eternity.
Until eternity ended. A final lurch sent his stomach rolling.
Julia panted in his ear. ‘Are you hurt?’
Loren shook his head.
He crawled through the wine puddle and vomited into the empty jug, throat burning. Julia spoke again through a dim filter, maybe expressing disgust, maybe scolding him. Loren couldn’t process. Numb, he rose on unsteady legs.
This broken place belonged to him now, per the contract Julia still cradled.
Loren swayed once. Then he bolted for the door.
Pompeii was no stranger to the earth’s angry fits, but as Loren staggered outside, today’s energy struck him as wrong as the stench of sour eggs flooding the streets – the smell Felix noted in the tunnels. Now it had intensified in the city. That couldn’t mean anything good.
Rubble from crumbling buildings littered the roads.
Smoke and dust swirled in the air, and Loren drew his sleeve across his face to shield his lungs.
People scrambled with urgency, all stomping feet and panicked voices.
Some were already at work on repairs, plastering cracks, sweeping debris, hauling aside bricks – Pompeii pressing on – but Loren noticed a few families frantically filling bags and loading carts.
They were leaving. Quitting the city before it quit them.
He should be glad they were finally heeding his warning from the Forum, but he was supposed to have stopped this.
Loren didn’t slow until he spotted the familiar paintwork of Livia’s shop. Only when he saw Aurelia upright and unharmed did he breathe. He swooped her in a frantic embrace.
‘Get off, get off,’ she chanted, wriggling free, but Loren kept a tight grip on her wrists. ‘You lunatic, let go.’
If Aurelia had the head to act like a menace, the shop must have fared well. ‘Where’s . . .’
His words fell away like roof tiles when he glanced up and found a horse staring back. Two horses, each with bulging saddlebags and still skittish from the quake. Dazed, Loren straightened, and Aurelia took advantage of his shock, twisting free. ‘Aurelia, how—’
‘Celsi owed me,’ she said in a rush. ‘I beat him at marbles, but his pappa doesn’t give him pocket money. He paid with these instead.’
‘Celsi has horses?’
She flashed a dark look. ‘Not anymore.’
One of the horses, a dappled mare, snorted. Stroking her muzzle did little to ease the knot in his gut. ‘You’re leaving.’
Aurelia twisted the toe of her sandal. ‘Mamma wants us on the road by noon. There’s nothing good left here. No future worth staying for. Only fire.’
Yesterday, giddy and lovesick on hope, Loren might have argued with her.
He’d thought he’d found proof that the future could be changed – that he could be the one who changed it.
Maybe he’d managed to stop the city’s destruction by Felix’s hand.
But the other future he wanted to build, the one where he and Felix walked together, was out of reach.
If Loren chose to stay in Pompeii with Julia, it wasn’t because of hope.
Rather, it was because he had to be right that Pompeii was safe, if nothing else.
‘Aurelia,’ Loren said, bile souring his tongue, ‘there is no fire. I solved it. The stolen helmet—’
The shop’s door opened.
‘Don’t call me a fool, Nonna,’ Livia said, exiting with Nonna hobbling at her heels.
She clutched a fabric bundle. ‘This place is due to sink into the sea any day now. So many quakes in a week isn’t right, on top of all this chatter about thieves and omens, and now Umbrius – Loren! Where have you been?’
Her cloth hit the cobblestones, and she wrapped Loren in an embrace.
As much as he ached to sink into it, a shade slipped over him, distance no hold could cross.
The sensation startled him. For the first time since he was twelve and new to the city, he felt like a stranger in Livia’s arms. Over her shoulder, Loren caught Nonna’s suspicious glare.
She leaned heavier on her cane than usual.
He had so much to tell her, but he didn’t know where to start.
Time for that later, Loren supposed. He wriggled free to collect the fabric Livia had dropped, taking his time straightening the folds before handing it over. She took it but didn’t bustle off as he hoped.
‘You’re terribly quiet,’ Livia said. She made to touch his face, but he turned his cheek.
‘I’m giving silence a try. For once.’
She didn’t laugh. Her gaze roved over him, all of him, then softened. ‘Felix left?’
Loren’s lungs seized. He tripped in his haste to back away, ducking around the mare. ‘You know how men are. Fickle. Never settle. ’
Nonna scoffed. ‘Too true.’
‘Loren, love—’
‘Where are you headed?’ Loren asked.
Pity still twisted her mouth, but she resumed stuffing the saddlebag of the other horse.
‘South. I have an uncle in Alexandria if we can catch a ferry across to Egypt. It will be an adjustment, but I’ll find work, and Isis has a temple there.
They’ll take you on as an attendant. Nothing much will change. New scenery, same life.’
‘I’m not going.’
Aurelia let out a sharp cry. ‘But—’
‘This is not up for debate.’ Livia clapped Loren with a look that pinned him in place. ‘I will not raise my children in a city of shaking earth and assassinating snakes.’
Loren blinked. ‘Assassins?’
‘Assassins?’ Aurelia asked with too much grim curiosity.
‘Go and pack,’ Livia ordered her. ‘This isn’t for your ears.’
‘ Mamma! ’
Livia cast an imploring look at Nonna, who acquiesced with a threat to pinch, and only then did Aurelia scamper inside.
Dropping to a whisper, Livia leaned close. ‘Didn’t you hear? Nonna brought the news before the quake. Priest Umbrius was murdered in his bed. Bruises all around his throat.’
‘May Charon carry his soul swiftly,’ Nonna said with no shortage of glee.
Loren went numb. He must have misheard. No wonder the city was on tenterhooks. Divine signs came in threes, and people could tolerate only so many crises. Thieves, quakes, now murder.
But another source of anxiety pulsed through Loren. With Umbrius dead, Julia’s sway over the council was weakened. Servius had moved in for the kill. Did Julia know? Was that why she was so desperate to finalise the contract? Why hadn’t she told him?
‘Livia, I can’t leave. I have—’
‘You have what?’ Livia snapped the saddlebag shut. ‘You have a little girl inside that shop who will be wrecked if she loses you. So will I. Family doesn’t abandon family.’
He stared at his feet, blistered from his hike up Vesuvius. Livia said family, but Loren heard only Julia’s gnawing term: clinging. Burdens clung. Burdens lied about their true weight, and he couldn’t ask Livia and Aurelia to carry him any longer.
Julia was his new family. That decision now dried in dark ink.
‘I’ll walk you as far as the gate,’ he said firmly.
He expected Livia to protest, but her lips only pursed, like she didn’t believe him. She probably wouldn’t relent until Loren was a speck in the distance.
‘Besides,’ he said, forcing a smile, ‘someone needs to stay with Nonna.’