The Orphan's Song by Lauren Kate

Author:Lauren Kate
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-06-24T16:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

ON THURSDAY EVENINGS, La Sirena hosted unofficial gatherings for three orders of mystics. The white-bearded cabalists claimed the large center table beneath the chandelier, the Freemasons poured their wine and threw their cards at the booth nearest the barmaid, and the alchemist Rosicrucians sat at the back by the musicians.

Carlo introduced Mino to the Rosicrucians the first night they patronized La Sirena together. At first, what Mino liked most about these alchemists was their sworn enmity to the Freemasons. The leader of the Freemasons was the man who had sent Mino to the whorehouse.

But hating the Freemasons wasn’t the only thing Mino and the Rosicrucians had in common. Though he could not afford to gamble with them (he always showed up at the end of their long turn at whist), he read their pamphlets and pondered the existence of an elixir of life that might cure them all. He admired the brothers’ seriousness, their unprejudiced minds. He even liked their pendants—the wooden rose over the cross.

“It is not a Christian symbol,” Carlo explained. “The order of the Rosicrucians predates Christianity. The cross represents the human body. The rose is what unfolds in one’s consciousness over the course of one’s life.”

Mino liked imagining a rose slowly opening inside him. Since he’d left the Incurables, this brotherhood was the closest thing he had to a family. He liked their theory that base matter might be transformed into something nobler.

“When we speak of transmutation, do we mean only turning metal into gold?” the senior brother asked Mino over a bottle of wine. Gianni wore a bright, stiff wig and a mask too small for his large face. He had traveled to Germany, where the original manifestos of the order had been written, and he seemed to Mino to be a man of great wisdom. “Or can we attest to the transmutation of the human character, from dull to brilliant?”

“I hope both are possible,” Mino said. “In my experience, metaphorical changes are often bound up with physical ones.” He thought of the day he met Sprezz, and the gift of those boots. He thought of how what he’d felt for Letta in his heart had seemed to ripple through his body, too.

Mino longed to change nearly everything about himself—his loneliness, his self-worth, his dismal sleeping quarters, the length of time that had passed since he’d held a violin, his memories of that afternoon with Letta. . . .

Before he met the alchemists, he had been convinced he lacked all means to change his circumstances. But recently, especially by the end of these Thursday nights, he felt the urge to become something better growing inside him.

In late September, late in the evening, when all the bottles on the table were empty, Carlo was lamenting his love for Carina. Mino had a single soldo in his pocket, not enough to fund the evening when his friend got like this. He signaled Nadia, the barmaid, and she brought Carlo a dram of acqaioli.

“She promised me dinner, in

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