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Chapter VI

LOREN

I f Felix wouldn’t offer answers, Loren would find them himself.

He loved the temple best in the after-hours hush, when fading light stretched over the courtyard, and the columns cast shadows spindly and searching as fingers in prayer.

When he sat alone with the cats and quiet reverence.

When he could untangle thorn-snared thoughts and riddle through how to turn his curse into a gift.

Castor and Pollux greeted Loren at the entrance, winding between his legs as he pulled on his robes.

The altar bowl still smouldered with slow-burning incense.

Just that morning, he’d smashed this same bowl over Felix’s head.

Loren winced at the memory as he stamped out ashes.

At the supply cabinet, he thumbed the cork of a jug of pricey Lassius wine.

More satisfying to take it, certainly, but he was breaking enough rules.

Besides, the bottle of Eumachius was already open, left over from when they bled Felix.

Poor battered Felix. Loren hardly blamed him for wanting to leave.

The sooner Loren figured this out – the sooner he stopped whatever disaster loomed – the sooner he could let Felix go.

Even if it took all night, Loren would uncover what the helmet could do.

Because the longer the helmet stayed within Felix’s grasp, the worse the danger grew .

Bowl and wine in hand, Loren unlatched the cella door.

Isis glowed in the ever-lit lamp, marble features soft. Loren was drawn to her the way a night lily tilts to find the moon and, for a moment, his anxiety ebbed. He knelt on the dais and touched the stone-cool hem of her gown, inhaling deeply. He could do this.

Wine pooled into the bowl, swirling, murky as an unrefined ruby.

He sat cross-legged, bowl on his lap, and rotated his finger sunwise across the surface of the wine, willing his mind to open.

That morning, he’d been so close to scrying something, scenes moving deep in the liquid, but he lost his grip when the quake struck.

He needed to reach that point again to ask the wine about the cataclysms. About Felix and the ghost. About how the helmet tied them all together.

Most important, Loren needed to know how he could change the outcome.

In his dreams, Felix always died.

When he first slipped into Loren’s dreams years ago, the details were vague, shapeless, a wall of black descending on them both. Felix would cry, or sometimes offered Loren only an empty stare, and the world rolled out to nothing.

Then came Felix’s anger. Months of silent tears and dead eyes turned into nights of copper-streaked chaos.

He burned in a wave of destruction, turning everyone Loren ever loved to ash.

Aurelia and her mother, Livia. Nonna. Elias.

His parents. His childhood nurse, his favourite tutor – all made dust. When Felix finished, he’d turn on himself, and Loren watched that, too.

Each dream brought new details, until finally, six months earlier, a city had materialised around them, a change from the void Loren had come to expect. Red and yellow awnings, pomegranates in the sun, knee-high crossing stones. Nonna’s bakery.

That’s when Loren knew: Felix intended to bring about all of Pompeii’s doom. Not just Loren’s .

Felix would look at Loren straight on. Lift a wood-and-iron knife.

Slit the seam of the sky. Bury the city alive.

Once – the night before Felix tripped into Loren’s life – Felix floated, suspended in the blast of a great force, and Loren crawled to meet him. Stretched his hand. Their fingers brushed. He noted each of Felix’s eyelashes, the lay of every curl, tiny details – the finest, clearest yet.

Then Loren drove the knife home.

The memory soured his stomach, and his shaking hands shivered the wine.

‘Open,’ Loren urged. ‘Show me.’

Wings splayed across the wine’s surface.

The cella door swung open, and light streamed stark against the dim chamber. Loren startled. Cold wine sloshed over his lap, shattering the image.

‘Working late?’ asked Camilia.

‘What are you doing here?’ Loren demanded.

He immediately regretted asking. She was angry. Beyond angry. Fists clenched at her sides, she shot him silent with a gorgon’s stare.

‘The Priest,’ she said, ‘asked me to help him consult the smoke. An emergency reading. Imagine my shock when I arrived to find the altar bowl missing. Again.’

Her tone was lethal, but her words made his heart flutter like a bird’s last hope. Loren latched onto it. ‘Let me help with the reading. I saw something, just now. Wings, or—’

‘Clean up. Bring me the bowl.’

Camilia spun and strode out.

Loren nearly knocked the lantern off the dais as he scrambled up. What a sight that would’ve made, to watch the temple catch fire from one clumsy act. Story of his life. He stabilised the lantern and poured what remained of the wine back into the jug.

At the altar, Camilia crackled like a summer storm. Loren approached her cautiously, bowl held as a peace offering. She snatched it, slammed it down and busied herself lighting a fire.

‘Your hands are trembling,’ Loren said after her third attempt to strike flint failed. Wrong move. He had never solved a problem by talking more.

She rounded on him, eyes glossy. ‘Hold your tongue for once. I warned you to mind yourself months ago. I told you not to follow this path. Still, you sneak around and pretend we don’t notice. You reek of desperation.’

‘I’m only trying to help.’

‘Help yourself, you mean.’

Tear pricked the corners of Loren’s eyes. Wine dripped a slow beat from his sodden robes. ‘I am not selfish.’

Camilia huffed and pressed the flint into his hand. ‘Light it. Go on.’

Loren clutched the sharp stone until it threatened to pierce his skin, add a trickle of blood to his mess. ‘I don’t know how.’

‘Right. You never had to learn. Someone did it for you.’

Loren tugged the cord around his neck, twisting it in his fingers.

She didn’t know the truth about where he came from.

Nobody did. But Camilia was always quick to notice little things, like how Loren couldn’t do laundry when he was new to the temple but knew the difference between weaves of fine silk.

How he could write in three languages but couldn’t mail a letter.

‘I see things, Camilia.’ His throat bobbed. ‘Horrible things. And I know they’re set to happen. I came to Pompeii to learn how to stop them.’

‘You have bad dreams. Not visions.’

‘Why don’t you believe me?’

‘Because you’re delusional. Because you think you’re an oracle, and you aren’t. You can’t have a nightmare and decide it’s the future. That isn’t how it works. ’

‘But just now—’

‘Look around you.’ Camilia jabbed at the altar, the cella, the door that led to the rest of Pompeii.

‘Look beyond yourself for a moment. Quakes shaking the city, that helmet going missing – the gods are angry, yet you continue to disrespect them. There are tracks to become an augur for a reason. Go beg Umbrius to let you into the Temple of Jupiter if you’re that desperate to pursue it.

Or if you want to play-act so badly, join the theatre. ’

Unsurprising that they were rehashing the same argument from six months ago when Loren first tried confiding in her, after his dreams showed him, concretely, Pompeii’s doom. Back then, she’d laughed in his face.

Now she’d sooner slap him.

Loren set the flint on the altar. Wordlessly, Camilia lit the flame with a single stroke, and the crackle-pop of incense filled the silence.

He kept his lips pressed in shame. Something soft brushed his ankles.

Pollux. Or Castor? Telling them apart was hard enough even when tears didn’t blur his vision.

‘I wish Celsi hadn’t left. I wish you hadn’t replaced him.’ Camilia scrubbed her face and hastened to procure more herbs to burn.

Loren stood rooted at the altar as her blow crept beneath his skin.

Her story had never been a secret: a child when her family died, the temple had stepped in to raise her.

Celsi became like a younger brother to her, but his father soon struck it rich and moved up in society, taking his son away from the dregs of Isis.

For Camilia, the wound of losing Celsi never healed.

As much as Loren had tried to fill Celsi’s absence in the years since, he was cut in a shape that didn’t fit.

‘Loren,’ said the Priest of Isis.

Habit drove Loren to turn and dip his head in obeisance, a motion he hardly felt. The Priest leaned heavily on his walking stick, quietly stern. Loren hadn’t heard him enter the temple at all. He wondered how long the old man had stood there, how much of their fight he’d heard .

‘Good evening, Priest.’ Loren nodded again for the sake of doing something. ‘I’ll fetch a stool.’

A gnarled hand gripped Loren’s forearm before he could dash. ‘Where is the boy you are protecting?’

‘I left him in my room. We thought it best he stays out of sight for now.’

Which made it sound like a mutual decision, and not Loren keeping Felix in a tight cage while he puzzled through the mystery alone.

‘Out of others’ sight, or yours?’ The Priest frowned. His eyes, normally clouded by haze, shot an arrow straight through Loren. ‘You should be with him.’

‘I was hoping I could help you with the reading. I saw . . .’ Loren cut off, thumbing the fabric of his robes he tended to so carefully, blue linen now soaked purple.

Here was a chance to confess his dreams to the Priest, his visions, what he was certain would happen.

The Priest might listen. Might take Loren under his wing, train him, believe him.

Or write Loren off as mad, the way his parents had.

‘I have an interest in divining,’ he finished, sounding as pathetic as he felt. ‘In augury.’