Arcadia Awakens by Kai Meyer

cry.”
    “And smells better, I hope.”
    He opened it and put his nose between the pages. “Not as good as when it was freshly printed, but it’s okay.” Her first reaction didn’t seem to deter him. “My father gave it to me before he sent me off to boarding school in the States.”
    She bit back a comment and just watched him. His gaze wandered over the countless faces in the photographs on top of the tombs, most of them old and curiously indistinct, like ghosts. Many of the arrangements on the tombs were dried flowers.
    “They die so quickly,” she said.
    “I can tell you,” he replied quietly, nodding in the direction of the Carnevare family vault, “on his tomb they’d wither even without any heat.”
    She fished the book out of his fingers. “Let me take a look.”
    His smile returned, wandering from the corners of his mouth up to his green eyes, which momentarily distracted her attention from the little leather-bound book she was holding. But then she examined it more closely and saw there was no wording on the front and back covers, where the leather was scratched. The title was on the spine, in pale gold lettering: Aesop’s Fables .
    She looked questioningly at him, and he showed her that smile again. When she realized that she was returning the sign, she instantly restored her expression to its usual mixture of arrogance and bad temper. She had several variations on it, and this one would make anyone run away. Except train ticket inspectors.
    And Alessandro Carnevare.
    “Do you know Aesop?” he asked.
    “Sounds like an airline.”
    “He was a Greek slave—lived six hundred years before Christ. He collected stories about animals. Well, really about human beings and their qualities—mainly the bad ones—which he attributed to appropriate animals.”
    “Like the tortoise and the hare?”
    “That’s the general idea. Except that one isn’t in Aesop.” His smile seemed a little arrogant again, but he probably couldn’t help it. “He never got to write them down himself; someone else did it a few hundred years later. Only a few of the stories that are called Aesop’s fables these days were really by him.” He shrugged his shoulders, while his eyes stayed sharp and piercing. “I liked them a lot when I was younger.”
    “And now you’re giving them to me?” She didn’t want to sound sarcastic, but there was no way around it. “How sweet.”
    She opened the little book and touched the binding with the tip of her nose. It did smell good—strange and unusual. At home in New York she’d had paperbacks, but none as old as this. The smell made her think of the library in the Palazzo Alcantara. She’d glanced into it in passing that morning. But still, this book smelled different. Not at all musty, but rather more like it had been opened again and again over many years, as if people had leafed through it and then settled down to read it.
    And she realized that the book still meant something to him. Which made it even harder to understand why he wanted to give it to her, of all people.
    Aesop’s Fables. Stories about animals with human qualities. He was watching her.
    “Thanks,” she said, closing it again. “I like books. I just haven’t ever had many.”
    “A baby book, you said.” His eyes were sparkling. “Let one in and the next will arrive by themselves.”
    She scrutinized him through narrowed eyes, interested but a little irritated. “But that’s not all,” she said. “Is it?”
    “Like I said, I wanted to invite you out. I haven’t been in Sicily for years except on vacations, so I’m basically as new to it as you.”
    “And you think that makes us friends.” She said that fast, in a cold, hard voice, and she could see that it had hit home.
    But he was trying not to let it show. “Several of us are going over to Isola Luna tomorrow. It’s just a big chunk of rock, really. Volcanic rock with a few houses and a landing up on the north coast.” He shrugged his