Archive of Our Own

The boat sways, one two three, a metronome without a beat, silently gliding through the spray. A woman sits at the bow, back straight, in a linen shirt and dark, flowing trousers. Sunglasses, sharp and elegant, shade her eyes from the glittering reflection of sun on the serene, sparkling surface. Behind her, sat on the very edge of the starboard, is an older man. His hair is light, sun bleached and thinning, and he adjusts the collar of his buttoned shirt for the tenth time already. The girl at the bow notices but doesn’t mention it. 

The boat driver, a stranger, mans the tiller with practised ease, cruising them through the slip and around the headland of the peninsula. The wake from the boat disrupts the mirror of the surface, throwing ripples that billow away from them like a cloud caught on a breeze. The water is a broken, haphazard reflection of the open, empty sky. Above them, it is a brilliant blue, stretching for miles without interruption. Stretching the whole world it seems, just for this very moment.  

Before them, their destination rises out of the cliffs. A villa. The remains of one, high and marooned against the backdrop of blue. Walls partially crumbled, the half destroyed arches of its spine; a house reaching towards the sky without a roof. The bones of history, stacked up in brick dust mortar centuries ago. Hands long dead easily traced in the architecture. 

On the telephone back in England, the authoritative, gruff voice of the lead archaeologist had crackled through the line. A Roman site…the potential for world renown…artefacts that need to be properly authenticated. 

Money had exchanged hands. The books will say it was above board. The man at the starboard had made sure that he and his assistant would be the ones doing the authenticating. 

Three days later, they were on their way. 

‘Why this place?’ the girl, Kleya, had asked as they’d boarded the Orient Express in Paris. The track rattled underneath them, as they stood braced by the window of the sleeping carriage. The whole of Western Europe flitted by, the fields and mountains and civilisations merely motes of dust in the air as they went. 

‘The beauty,’ the man, Luthen, had said, He gave her one of his enigmatic smiles.  

Kleya knew then, she would never really know why they had come here. One of Luthen’s silent pilgrimages, his past a ruin waiting for an excavation that would never come. 

The boat carves its way across the lake, closer to the shore now, skirting around the cliffs and towards the dock which floats, aimless, ahead of their arrival. 

Kleya leans forward, hand raised to shield her eyes from the sun as even with her glasses the glare is brutal. And there, on the dock before them, there is a single, ghostly figure. A woman in a light, airy dress, golden hair haloed around her face, skin white like porcelain. 

‘Signora Mothma,’ the driver says in stilted English, nodding at the figure.

‘Her family own the site,’ Luthen adds, because of course he already knows. ‘They have a villa, a fully formed one, a kilometre from the dig.’ 

Kleya rolls her eyes. 

‘Is the dig a vanity project?’ she asks. Luthen turns a little, an eyebrow slowly raising. Oh, Kleya thinks, she’s judged this wrong. Not a rich daddy’s girl looking to unearth an expensive trinket. 

‘She’s a diplomat,’ Luthen says, instead, as they close in on the jetty. 

Kleya absorbs this information and traces the small movements on Luthen’s face. To everyone else, he’s always been a closed book. But Kleya has been training as his translator for years, his face a text she works hard to decipher. He has been the Rosetta Stone of her entire existence; her world view shaped and understood through his prism of his. 

She can speak six languages, reads Ancient Greek poetry like it is Punch Magazine, and still, there are some parts of Luthen that are lost to her like a dead language only he speaks. 

The boat docks at the jetty. It rocks against the swell. 

Kleya smiles, wide. Let’s go, she thinks. 

Time for a performance. 

…

The site is a massive, almost two hectares, and still partially unearthed, and right in the middle there sits nearly a thousand olive trees, or so Kleya’s quick mathematical calculations say. 

Trees, spittling and curving, their branches sharp and certain, throwing pools of shadows over what was once an elegant, airy, garden. Now, it is a grande oliveto, and it feels like it sits, atop the cliffs, at the very end of the whole world. Kleya walks through its very centre. Daisies, delicate harbingers of the halo of sun, poke up from the grass, alongside bright dandelions. A meadow, which right now seems as if it’s all hers. 

Luthen is talking with the signora. The boat, along with its driver, has departed. Kleya is evaluating the site. Which is fine with her. Luthen will explain his plan soon enough and, anyway, Kleya enjoys the silence. Away from London, it is easier to think, away from her radios and telephone lines, and the breathy voice of informants in the attic of their flat in Marylebone. 

A war is coming, Luthen tells her. They just don’t know when. And they will be prepared; their network spans the whole of western Europe, its spines as sure and certain as the olive trees that now shade Kelya. It’s April now, and though Kleya doesn’t know this yet, it is the final spring of peacetime for over half a decade. The fronts will come, the troops, the steady march of mud and boys and death, and through it all, these olive trees will stand firm and ready and certain. 

Nothing else will. Not even Kleya herself.  

But for the moment, Kleya walks through the olive grove, weaving in and out of the ruins. She walks right to where the cliffs kiss the remains, until she finds the remnants of a trifora, a three arched window. This one looks out over the lake and up to the sky and, on a day like today, the two merge like there is nothing separating them at all.

‘La trifora del paradiso,’ a voice says, from out of nowhere. The window of paradise, and if that’s the name of what lies behind her, Kleya would definitely agree. Despite her reasoned thought, the words themselves are a bolt from the blue, interrupting Kelya’s silence. A surge of annoyance runs like electricity runs up her, and she turns away from the window. 

And there she is - the Italian interloper. A woman, sitting on an arch in the sun, knees up to her chest. Her blonde hair is braided over one shoulder and she’s wearing dark slacks and white, button up shirt, as if she’s playing at being an adventurer. She remains Kleya irrationally of a cat, basking in the sun; a wide, slappable grin on her face. 

‘È appena una finestra,’ Kelya shrugs, despite knowing it’s not true. It’s not just a window. The woman is right: the trifora, with its view across the lake, is very beautiful. Kleya folds her arms tightly across her chest, biting down the sense of annoyment that rises like bile in her throat. 

‘Di chi?’ the stranger asks. Kleya runs her tongue along her teeth and then takes a deep breath. Who are you? It shouldn’t be a difficult question, but it is. Luthen has raised her to be his own private ghost; a memory of a meeting they have both long since tried to forget. Kleya has been too many people in the intervening years. The girl under the surface long since vanished. 

And still, she speaks to a stranger with barely a moment’s pause. An answer, previously prepared, pours out of her like it is nothing. 

‘Il mio nome è Kleya Marki,’ she says, by way of introducing herself. ‘Sono un'archeologa lavorare per Signor Rael, siamo qui per lo scavo,’ she adds, defensively, as if she’s taking part in some odd, ritualistic interview. Of course, it must be obvious that she’s here for the dig. There’s nothing else but the great, ceaseless lake here right at the end of the peninsula. 

The other woman nods, slowly. 

‘Sei la figlia della Signora Mothma?’ Kleya asks. She can see a family resemblance to the woman on the dock, the same curvature of the cheek bones, eyes which catch like marble in the glare. That this woman is her daughter makes sense. 

‘Figlia della Signora Mothma? No. Ma grazie,’ the stranger laughs, arching her head backwards and exposing the tanned skin of her neck. There’s something in the way she laughs that sets Kleya on edge. A cynicism that doesn’t belong in such a beautiful place.   

‘Allora, chi sei?’ Kleya asks, starting to get impatient. Not a daughter then, no. Kleya swallows a note of annoyance that she got it wrong, and instead fixates on finding out who this stranger actually is. 

‘Sai, non c'è bisogno a parliamo in italiano,’ the woman says, ignoring the question completely with a sense of reverence that, honestly, is quite admirable. Kleya goes to shake her head - no need to stop talking in Italian, hers is fine thank you very much, but the other woman keeps speaking. ‘My English is good,’ she says, with only a slight Italian accent.  

‘Come sai che sono inglese?’ Kleya snipes back, now fixating on how this stranger can tell she’s English. Her Italian is perfect, there shouldn’t be a trace - this other woman shouldn’t have been able to realise. Kleya prides herself on this very fact. Sharply, she flicks an errant strand of hair out of her face. 

The stranger raises her eyebrows and lets out a bark of laughter which lights up her face. Kleya frowns. 

‘Really?’ Kleya asks. 

‘Really.’ 

The other woman leans forward and sticks out her hand. ‘I’m Vel, by the way.’ 

Kleya brushes past the introduction and leaves the hand hanging in the air. 

‘So you’re not her daughter, then who are you?’ she asks, crossing her arms out of frustration. 

‘A thief, obviously,’ is the instantaneous, infuriating, reply.  

‘Obviously not,’ Kleya replies, fixing this Vel woman with a frustrated glare. 

‘I’m Mon’s cousin,’ Vel eventually says. ‘I was sent here for misbehaving. A rather beautiful place for an exile, don’t you think?’ 

It's Kleya's turn to ignore the question. Misbehaving? That could be anything from having an affair with a Russian Diplomat to trying to topple the British Government. 

‘Which way is the museum?’ she asks instead, glancing around. There’s a few more modern buildings dotted around, and a few older, but not destroyed ones. The Villa Mothma must be one, and that castle she read about in the guidebook in the airport. But the museum is where Luthen will be. So it’s where Kleya should be, really.  

‘The museum’s boring.’ 

‘You’re talking to an archaeologist.’ 

‘And I know better.’ 

Kleya stares at the stranger - Vel - and tries to get the real measure of her.  

‘Come with me,’ Vel says, before turning on her heel and walking away. For a moment Kleya entertains staying exactly where she is. It’s not like she’s one for being told what to do. And anyway, being instructed usually just makes her angry. 

But when Vel reaches the very edge of the promontory, where the path almost crumbles to cliff, she steps up onto an old, Roman staircase and turns back. The sun frames her face, a glorious golden girl with her tumbling down her shoulders. 

‘I ran away,’ Vel says, calling across the dusty track that now separates them. 

‘That doesn’t sound so serious,’ Kleya replies, arms still folded.  

‘Well, it wouldn’t be if I’d gone to Milan. But I do feel Madrid was the better option.’ 

‘Madrid?’ Kleya says, letting an eyebrow raise a little. 

‘You must’ve seen the papers,’ Vel says, nodding her head. ‘How awful it’s been over there. If I’d been a man, I’d have signed up for one of those international brigades.’ 

Ah, yes. The Spanish problem, their civil war that’s turning out to not be so civil. Kleya has spent months - years - talking to returned journalists, soldiers.

‘What is it you want to show me?’ Kleya asks. Vel lights up, starts walking. It’s all Kleya can do to follow. 

…

‘They found this about a week ago,’ Vel says, lowering herself into a dig trench, half a meter or so deep. Dust explodes up from where her boots hit the ground, and Kleya waves it away with an outstretched hand, crouching. 

Around them, small wooden markers dot the earth, little fluttering ribbons attached to the end. They must signify finds, Kleya thinks, cataloguing them all in an instant. There must be ten, at least. Maybe a dozen. And if half of them are as preserved as the one Vel has brought her to see, then this place is a spectacular find. 

Vel is hunched over a smaller part of exposed earthworks, covered with a lattice grid of string which crosses the whole horizontal plane. Kleya cranes her neck, turns a little, and then the light shifts and she sees it.

A fragment of a fresco. Faded, but still visible: a male figure wearing a toga with a scroll in one hand. There’s a familiar rush in her chest - a discovery, an indelible proof of the past. That link, so real and there and in her reach, that people all those centuries ago were just like us, really. It reminds her of the graffiti they found in Pompeii, reading it for the first time in her undergraduate dorm under the arched windows, curled up in an old dress shirt of Luthen’s that she borrowed without asking. 

Hic amor sapiet

Here love will be wise

‘They think it’s Catullus,’ Vel says, softly, reaching to brush a little dust off the fresco. Her hands are delicate but precise. An archaeologist's hands, Kleya muses. 

‘The poet?’ 

‘The very one. He lived here, in the town.’ 

‘It’s beautiful,’ Kleya says. 

Vel smiles, wide and true and real. 

‘It’s just love. Some people don’t understand that.’

‘But you do?’ Kleya asks, softly. 

They stay for a moment, watching the fresco and trying not to watch each other. 

Suspended in the air, like dust in the sun, waiting to fall. 

Vel doesn’t reply.

…

Kleya lies with her face to the sun, the grass brushing her neck so lightly it feels like a summer breeze. The warmth of the glare makes her feel alive, makes her feel like the world is here and waiting and ready. 

Vel has disappeared, chasing the echoing bell that signalled lunch and broke their quiet reverence at the dig site. Kleya wasn’t hungry. Or not hungry enough to stomach the performance required for a form meal yet. She is still sussing out this place, and Luthen’s plans for it. 

Through the trees, she can see the dazzling blue of the sky, deep like ocean. Not a cloud in sight, just the endless azure of spring. Before the haze sets in, and the air smells heavy and floral and so overwhelmingly of promise. 

Kleya thinks she could stay here forever, waiting for the sky to turn and the spring to loosen its unsteady grip on the beauty. For summer to come rushing in like a knight on a dangerous pilgrimage. 

‘Sunbathing?’ comes a familiar deep laugh. Kleya looks up, shielding her eyes from the glare. 

And there he is, the sun overbright and certain haloing him. Luthen, sitting with arms crossed on a small marble bench not far from her, his face set is a rugged smile, leathered and creased and sure. She wishes she had his conviction sometimes. Often pretends she does, because what is her job if not pretending. She’s good at it, oh she is, but not a patch on him. He could teach her for a century and there would still be things to learn. 

‘Resting,’ Kleya replies, reclining on an outstretched elbow. ‘And before you say it, I know we don’t have the time for such frivolous things.’ 

‘You’re not a mind reader, Kleya,’ he says, lopsided smile still there. 

‘No?’ 

‘No. Relax. Take a moment,’ he says, perplexingly. ‘There won’t be many more moments like this.’ 

Kleya watches him, waiting for the shoe to drop but nothing does. He stays like that, the sun showering down on him, and the more she lies there, with the warmth like a blanket over her body, she realises that he is right. That things won’t be like this forever, even if she wishes they could be. 

They have lived this charmed life, with this veneer of skill and luck and by god it has been hard sometimes. It has been two am hunched over a radio while the ice froze to the inside of the windows, and Luthen barking instructions while his breath puffs in clouds. It’s standing in a room of strangers and laughing when powerful men make bad jokes, of having hands on her body that she doesn’t want and not flinching. It has been waiting, for so long, for the very bad thing to happen and not knowing when it will be. Kleya thinks she has been waiting her entire life, that she will continue to do so for a very long time.  

Later, when she is old and the world has been unkind for so long, Kleya will think back to this moment. She will remember it with a startling, certain clarity. A beauty that defies time, that defies truth. And maybe it wasn’t that beautiful, really. Not at the time. But the years will press it, like a clover in the flyleaf, into this frozen image. The sky, the grass, the trees, all gleaming with light. And Luthen, with her, not talking but waiting. The comfort of being seen, and nothing more.

She is twenty three years old, little more than a girl with the world set out before her and the sun welcoming her with open arms. 

She falls asleep, like that, the steady beat of the light on her skin. 

…

Luthen is watching her when she wakes, face caught in a look of care that she wishes she could never forget but knows she will. As she blinks into the light it is already fading like smoke, up, up and away. Luthen, his mouth now set in a cool, unreadable line. 

He nods at something in the distance, back towards the house, and Kleya twists to see. 

‘They’re going out this evening, a dinner in Verona. They won’t be back until late.’ 

Kleya sees them now, Signora Mothma on the track outside the museum, her husband beside her as they chat animatedly about something Kleya cannot hear. Vel appears behind them, still wearing her high-waisted slacks and a white, wide collared button up shirt. Unlike the others, Vel isn’t dressed for a party - no gorgeous Italian silk gown for her. Kleya swallows a feeling of disappointment. 

‘I like the girl, Vel,’ Kleya says, practically. ‘She could be useful.’ 

‘She’s too eager to impress.’ 

‘I rather like it when we don’t have to compel people against their will, Luthen.’ 

‘She’ll get herself killed.’

‘At least she’ll die trying.’ 

Luthen lets out a short, dark bark of laughter.  

‘Just what we need - another over committed child.’ 

‘She was in Spain.’ 

‘And do you know what happened to her out there?’ Luthen says, darkly. He rings his hands, before softly resting them on the plane of his thighs. One of his signet rings - a re-homed 17th century piece from Venice - catches in the sun and dazzles her. 

Kleya shakes her head. Beyond Luthen, Vel is saying goodbye to Signora Mothma, all laughter and melodic, expressive Italian echoing through the late afternoon air. 

‘Brunete, the battle there.’ 

‘Yes,’ Kleya says, with a little sharpness. ‘I do read the dispatches, Luthen. The Republicans had to retreat. Heavy losses if I recall correctly.’  

‘And?’ 

Kleya shrugs. She’s in no mood for Luthen to lecture her about recent history.

‘A journalist was killed, wasn’t she? Some kind of car crash.’ 

‘A photographer,’ Luthen corrects. ‘Cinta Kaz. Rather good at her job, I think. Your new friend was there.’ 

‘She knew the girl?’ 

‘They went out there together.’ 

‘Did your new friend Singora Mothma tell you that?’ 

‘It’s wonderful what you can pick up when someone is nervous.’ 

Kleya is about to reply when the kickstart of an engine roars to life, splitting the air with an overbearing boom. The rumble of it seems so out of place here in the meadow, and for a moment Kleya’s attention turns to watching the car. 

It’s a Lancia, she thinks, as she watches it arc its way around the drive. Of course, the Mothma’s would choose an Italian manufacturer, and one of such stature. Squat nosed, with white panelling and a teal wheelhouse: it’s a beautiful car. 

‘It’s a fourth series Astura model,’ Luthen says, with a sense of certainty. His ability to remember makes and models has always astounded her; like he has an encyclopedia of the world's commerce, a filling cabinet of facts waiting to be deployed. ‘New,’ he continues, nodding to himself. 

‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Kleya says, though Luthen seems occupied by the sight of the car, parading its way past the ruins and towards the access road out of the complex. Lancia’s are expensive, a luxury brand, and watching it through the gaps in the potted Roman arches seems almost obscene. An excessive show of wealth in a broken, beautiful place.

‘I wonder where the Mothma’s got money like that,’ Kleya muses. 

Luthen, quick sharp and sure, replies without skipping a beat. ‘Maybe your friend knows.’ 

He flashes her a look and then turns away. 

Kleya follows his eyeline, and traces it over to the museum. Ah, she thinks. Luthen is looking right at Vel, who stands in the dust with her hands in her pockets. But Vel isn’t watching forlornly after the Lancia. 

Instead, she’s staring right back at Kleya and Luthen. Eyes keen and sharp. 

Waiting. 

‘See what you can do,’ Luthen says, a taciturn sense of approval for Kleya’s vision in his voice. ‘Do your best.’ 

‘Of course,’ Kleya says, pushing herself off the grass and dusting her trousers down. ‘I always do my best.’ 

And with that, she walks away from Luthen and towards Vel. 

There seems something in that. 

Kleya doesn’t dwell long on it. 

…

They eat dinner, flatbread and oils, in a small tiled room in the Mothma’s villa. Just her and Luthen and the cool lake breeze slipping effortlessly through the open window. The chairs are straight backed, regal, and she and Luthen speak little as they eat. 

Whenever they go away, Kleya finds them slipping into these roles with ease. Him, stately and well-spoken, and her fading a little into the background, efficient and quick witted. A double act decided long ago. It lets her get on with her work, if someone thinks her Luthen’s lesser, and allows him the space for his sales pitch of sedition. It’s just an accident, really, that if you saw the two of them in this room, light lapping at the open window, that you might mistake them for father and daughter. The simplicity as she passes him the salt, him pouring her a glass of water from a glazed carafe.  

The way he says, ‘There are wonderfully preserved polychrome mosaics here.’

And she replies, ‘I’ll have a look in after dinner.’ 

‘Mosacis have always been your favourite,’ Luthen says, his empty plate before him. 

Kleya smiles. It’s as much affection as he knows. She holds it in her chest, tight and close, and pretends that the stirrings in her heart are merely a byproduct of the meal. 

Their relationship is founded on an intimacy of lies. A rockbed of shared goals and his insistence, always, that this is a choice they have to make and they do so, everyday. She knows that one day, when the war comes and oh, it will, they are set on a path from which there is no escape. 

‘Thank you, Luthen,’ she says, softly. He does not reply. She does not need him to. 

Vel enters when they are nearly finished, and stands at the head of the table, leaning on the spine of a chair. Her fingers rest in the curve of the carving. 

‘You’ll be up early, tomorrow?’ she asks. Luthen nods. The best archaeology, they know, is done when the sun is rising. 

‘There’s something I want to show you,’ Vel says, well practised and nearly confident enough to hide the hesitation in her voice. 

Kleya turns her head to one side. She catches Vel’s eyes.

They are alive with fire. 

…

A church. It’s small, only one room, a transept with a vaulted roof breaking up the room. A pulpit made of aging wood creaks in the breeze, while a window of coloured glass catches the light in a kaleidoscope. On the south wall, which points towards the closest town, Sirmione, there is a faded fresco. The colours have long since bled, and in places is entirely missing. 

The three of them stand in the centre of the space, between two small rows of pews. Vel is slightly ahead, hair in a braid which runs like liquid gold over one shoulder. 

Kleya rolls her shoulder, slowly, the aftermath of a night spent in a bed that was slightly too small for her. A child’s bed, she thinks; belonging to the Mothma’s daughter - a girl of just sixteen who was recently wed to a local boy of quite some standing. Vel, as she showed Kleya to the room, told her it was a political marriage. 

To Kleya, all marriages are political. 

‘Why are we here?’ Luthen asks, just the right side of curt. 

Kleya runs her tongue along her teeth as Vel turns to face them. 

‘Nobody comes here anymore,’ she says. ‘They say they are religious, but they would rather go to the church in the town. It’s a performance really, more than anything. The family haven’t had communion here in years. I wanted to show you this.’ 

Vel moves down the aisle, towards the fresco. Kleya turns slightly, and from her new position she realises what it shows, the image which time has tried to take away. 

Circles. Dante’s circles. Limbo and Lust and Heresy, and all folded atop one an one another. 

‘They say my great-grandfather painted this. He was an artist from Tuscany, and the family asked him at great expense. They wanted it to seem old, even though it wasn’t. Then he came here and chose to paint Dante’s circles of hell, and he fell in love with his employer's daughter and never left.’ 

‘He sounds like an interesting man,’ Kleya says, stepping forward to look at the fresco more closely. 

‘He was a bastard, by all accounts,’ is Vel’s reply. ‘I only mention him because he was also a carpenter by trade, before he was a painter. Disappointed the whole Tuscan branch of the family by giving it all up to draw scenes of Hell.’

‘He built something here?’ Luthen asks. 

‘Yes,’ Vel says, raising a hand to the fresco. She reaches towards a babe, frolicing in what Kleya believes is Limbo. Vel pushes slightly, and the squeaking of a wooden mechanism echoes though the room. 

‘Hidden behind a cherub’s smile,’ Kleya laughs. ‘How poetic.’ 

‘What’s inside?’ Luthen asks sharply. 

‘Sirmione’s secrets. I’ve been making a record.’ Vel reaches in and pulls out a small leather bound book. ‘People here think I am an exile. I won’t marry who they want. Perform the way they do. Love how I am supposed to,’ Vel says, sharply. ‘They think sending me here is a punishment.’ 

‘Love is never wrong,’ Luthen says, glancing between Vel and Kleya with a pointed expression on his face. 

Vel laughs, hollow. Kleya purses her lips and doesn’t quite meet Luthen’s eye. She wasn’t sure if he knew - her love life has never been the subject of discussion - but then it’s foolish to think he wouldn’t notice. He is, after all, the most perceptive man she has ever met. Maybe there are just some things better left unsaid. He could romance the whole of Paris and Kleya wouldn’t dare mention it. 

‘Not everyone here is so enlightened,’ Vel shrugs. ‘But anyway, they don’t see me as a threat. It means I can take certain liberties, because they think so little of me that they won’t gossip or talk right in front of me.’ 

Vel gestures with the book and then hands it to Kleya, who scans a few pages out of curiosity. Details of arms shipments, and troop deployments from a local barracks. Schedules for trains. Information gleaned from radio news reports. A little of everything, in a curled, simple hand. 

‘I don’t believe in God,’ Vel says, closing the compartment with a soft click. ‘But I do believe in you.’ And with that, she leaves them both in the church. In its silence and its secrets.    

…

Kleya spends the afternoon in the museum records room, collating information Signore Mothma gives her. Legitimate business listings, artefact provenance documents. 

Real work, that swamps her and however briefly, distracts her from Vel’s little book and the implicit promise that she is on their side now. 

Luthen has taken the notes, already has plans to smuggle them to a contact in Milan. 

As the afternoon wears on, Kleya finds herself in the museum basement. She likes it there, in the cool dark corridors. She walks between the wooden shelves, filled with a litany of tagged finds: fragments of mosaic, shards of pottery, paper curled up unread for centuries. 

There is a mustiness here, a familiar smell to which Kleya is drawn. 

The past, in the air and around her. Calming and certain. But never quite over.

…

The cliffs call her like a siren, their beauty hiding their danger. She knows the very edges are unstable, and that in some places the old villa teeters on foundations long since found out. But she is drawn anyway, through the meadow, to a spot which overlooks the lake; where you can see it curving around in an oval, other towns and villages dotted like pins on a map in front of her. 

She knows them all. Learned them for strategic reasons before she and Luthen set out. He didn’t tell her, but she knew the advantage it might give them. A little local knowledge goes a long way in a place like this. When they were on the train to the port, Luthen told her a story of a man he knew, once, who spent a summer abroad in Peschiera Del Garda, a town across the lake from the villa she is now in. This man, Luthen told her, slept in an attic belonging to an old woman he did not know very well, and lay on a bed carved in the eves. He read poetry to pigeons and sang old songs when he could not sleep. He learned Italian from churches and sermons, even though he was not religious. Every morning he would wake up and burn toast in an oven that spat smoke from years of hard labour. He would butter the toast with knives that cracked and broke with use, and when he went to return home, he told the old woman about the knives. She thanked him for his honesty and in return gave him a small silver blade, engraved with an olive tree. 

He died in the first war, Luthen would say. This man, who wanted to see the world, and did in the end with a helmet in his hands and a rifle on his back. 

‘Where was this man from?’ Kleya asked him, once. 

Luthen laughed. ‘Somewhere that no longer exists.’ 

She knows it is not entirely true. But then, Kleya knows what it takes to die and to continue living. To become someone else so entirely it renders the distinction obsolete. So maybe that man from across the lake, who so long ago slept in a small attic and read books on poetry, he lives on. He was there the day Luthen and Kleya met, when he found her hiding on a boat, and freed her using a knife with olive trees carved into the blade.   

Kleya closes her eyes, just for a moment, until she is distracted by the sound of approaching footsteps. 

She twists, just in time to see Vel walking towards her through the olive grove. The other woman notices Kleya and gives a small wave, and a wide smile. The sight of it makes Kleya want to smile too, though she doesn’t. 

Without saying anything, Vel approaches Kleya’s cut out quiet and sits beside her in the dust. They sit with their legs crossed, the two of them, like children and before them, the sky burns like someone has taken a match and set it ablaze, the sun sinking like a sailor abandoning ship. 

Down at the bottom of the cliffs, the water laps gently at the cliffs, rhythmic and steady, the beat of a song Kleya feels she will never forget.  

‘My cousin wants to invest in Luthen’s project,’ Vel says, finally, with a quiet conviction. The quiet ebbs, flows. 

‘Oh, I see. I hoped she would,’ is Kleya’s measured reply. 

Vel nods to herself, twisting a daisy into a knot between her thumb and forefinger. Kleya continues on, pausing only briefly. 

‘And you?’ 

‘Me?’ 

‘Would you like to help the cause?’ 

‘Would I be useful?’ 

‘Anyone can be useful, if they’re committed. You won’t be safe, though,’ Kleya cautions. 

Vel laughs, and the sharpness of it takes Kleya by surprise. ‘I don’t care for safety these days. I know what it is to lose something precious. There isn’t much else.’ 

‘I heard what happened to you in Spain.’ 

‘It didn’t happen to me,’ Vel says. ‘And anyway, is that what you people do? Come here and dissect my pain as if it is an exercise?’ 

‘I think that’s rather harsh,’ Kleya says, but Vel cuts back in before she can finish. 

‘It’s made me stronger, you know,’ she says. ‘Cinta, the girl I was with. Do you know how she died?’ 

‘An accident,’ Kleya replies, simply. 

‘An accident, in a place like that. People shot in the streets for what they believed, churches burning, families torn apart. Madrid bombed like it was nothing, and she died in an accident. A stupid, foolish boy driving a car too fast, not listening to anyone. He will carry that forever. I carry that inside me every single day.’ Vel takes a steadying breath and Kleya just watches her, no thought to interrupt, to clarify or explain or recruit - god, sometimes she hates that word. No, she just watches as the other woman rights herself, and exhales until there is nothing left. 

‘Cinta had to have died for something. I will not let her die for nothing.’ 

It hangs between them, just for a moment. And then Kleya reaches out. It is as if she is possessed, however briefly, by the little girl who watched everything she had ever loved disappear before her eyes. She understands everything Vel is saying. 

There has to be an end to this. 

They will make an end.

Kleya touches the inside of Vel’s wrist, a ghost barely there. The lightest of things, really, almost an accident. Except for the hesitation, in the air like static, that catches between them. Kleya knows most of what she wants to say is held in that moment, inexpressible, waiting for the right moment. 

The right moment will never come, of course, in a world such as this. There will always be more important tasks, and plans and truths. 

The heart comes last. Kleya resigned herself to that long ago. She knows Vel is acutely aware of it. 

Vel rocks forward, pulling her knees up to her chest. A single strand of her braid has become loose and falls in front of her eyes, which are fierce and certain and ready. 

‘I have a postcard for you,’ Kleya says. ‘I can give it to you this evening, if you like. It explains what comes next. A way you can help. Have you heard of the Aldhani Vault? It’s in Switzerland.’ 

Vel smiles, wide. And Kleya knows she has chosen right. 

She spends the next thirty minutes explaining the plan, clearly and simply. Vel listens with rapt attention. 

And the understanding is still there, of course it goes nowhere, but the moment has passed. It has slipped away on a wave, inconvenient and mis-timed. There’s no place for it in a world on the cusp of war. Maybe one day they will find themselves on the right side of peace. 

And then…

Yes, then.  

For a moment, Kleya imagines staying here forever, in this meadow on the right edge of the cliffs on the precipice of the world and a war. Her and Vel, still as anything while time moves around them; the grass getting longer with promises of rain, moss growing like children in the crevices of archways, the chalk cliffs eroding one wave after another. Their bodies becoming tangled with the dandelions, the roots of a tree winding themselves around their remains; rib cages turned into vases for themost beautiful flowers. 

The two of them, side by side for eternity, growing weary and old and becoming the very bones of the world. 

Time, like sand in an hourglass, tipped steadily from one side to the other. 

…

Years later, after the world has set alight and the flames have been doused and not quite put out, Kleya and Vel stand on a boat coming in to dock at Sirmone. 

Luthen’s ghost sits at her shoulder, a mere memory of the last time she made this journey. 

The sky is a blinding blue, not a single cloud in sight. 

And Vel, putting her hand lightly on Kleya’s arm, real and true and there. 

‘What now?’ Kleya asks. 

‘Now,’ Vel replies. ‘We live.’