Artemisia Moretti's Arc

Chapter 4 of 7

Three days after Beatrice chose to keep her false memories, Artemisia went looking for proof they were only in Beatrice's head. She had written the town's history in the front of an old ledger years ago. She meant to check it against Beatrice's talk of a striped cat and a turret house. She expected to find the memories nowhere but inside one woman's mind. She was wrong. The ledger listed a bakery on the corner. Artemisia had never written that line. The ink was old and faded like her own. She walked to the corner in the morning cold and found the shop standing there. An old woman sold her a loaf. A striped cat slept in the window. The baker said her family had run the place for forty years. Artemisia had passed that corner a thousand times. Until this week it had been an empty lot. Her hands shook worse than any stitch had left them. The memories were not trapped in Beatrice. They were leaking into the world. The thread had reached past one woman and begun to sew the town itself. She hurried back and found Beatrice at the workbench, sorting spools by color. Beatrice wore her burgundy lace hat, though they were indoors. She had taken to wearing it while she worked. "The bakery is real," Artemisia said. "The cat is real. None of it existed a fortnight ago." Beatrice set down a spool. "I know the cat's name. I did not, until now." She did not sound afraid. She sounded like a woman who had solved something. "You did not fix a lie. You made it true." Artemisia sat down hard. She had feared her magic tore lives apart. Now she saw it did the opposite. It did not paper over gaps. It filled them, all the way through, until the story held from the person to the street to the ledger. Nothing broke. Nothing showed a seam. She took her enchanted thimble from the kit and turned it in the light. Her initials caught the sun. For weeks she had touched her tools like a woman handling a knife she did not trust. Now her fear drained out of her. Her work was cleaner than she had ever dared hope. A stranger sewn into Valserra would not merely hide here. They would belong, backward and forward, root and branch. "Then there is nothing to undo," Artemisia said. She almost smiled. "No," Beatrice said. "There is only more to make." She touched the locket at her throat. "But think what it took. To grow me a mother, the town needed her too. Somewhere out there is a woman who now remembers a daughter." Artemisia's smile faded. She had not thought of that. Her stitch did not add a person quietly. It reshaped everyone the new past touched. She had wanted to give strangers a place. She had not counted the strangers her thread would rewrite to make room.