Artemisia Moretti's Arc

Chapter 3 of 7

A week after the stitching set, Beatrice moved through the workshop like a woman born to it. She took her mint each morning. Her voice held the town's cadence. Artemisia had begun to believe the work was finished. Then Beatrice mentioned the bakery on the corner where she had bought bread as a girl. Artemisia set down her scissors. "You never bought bread there." "I did." Beatrice frowned, as if the memory surprised her too. "The old woman kept a striped cat. It slept in the window." She touched a silver locket at her throat, one Artemisia had never seen before. "My mother gave me this. On my tenth birthday. In the turret house on the hill." Artemisia's hands went cold. There was no mother. There was no turret house. Beatrice had fallen through her ceiling a fortnight ago from a century not yet born. Yet she spoke of a childhood in Valserra with plain certainty. The stitch had not only changed her manner. It was growing her a past. "Beatrice." Artemisia kept her voice steady. "What did you study, before you came to me?" Beatrice opened her mouth. She stopped. Her eyes lost focus, then found it. "I... wrote papers. Three of them." She said it slowly, like reciting a fading dream. "On this time. On these houses. I had a letter. I meant to send it." She pressed the locket. "But I grew up here. Both are true. I cannot make them stop being true." Artemisia understood then. The magic filled every gap she left open. She had pictured a Valserran woman and sewn that shape onto Beatrice. The shape needed a history, so the thread invented one, thread by thread, until it swallowed the woman underneath. She had to know how deep it ran. She slid on her thimble. It warmed at once. "Hold still. I need to look at the stitch." She threaded her needle and reached toward Beatrice's throat, near the locket. She did not pull. She only followed the seam she had made, feeling where it caught. Under her fingers the false memories lay thick as new cloth, layered over the historian like lining over a coat. She could not tell the two apart. To cut one would tear the other. Her hands trembled before she finished. She lowered the needle. "Do you want them gone?" Artemisia asked. "The Valserra memories. I could try to unpick them." Beatrice was quiet a long moment. "No." She looked down at the locket. "They are kinder than being no one. Leave them." Artemisia nodded and put the needle away. But her stomach turned. The stitch that hid a traveler did more than hide. It rewrote them, and she could not control how much. Every stranger she sewed into her time would lose the life they came from. She had wanted to give them a place here. She had not meant to take everything else.