She fell silent, not knowing what else to say. In truth, she didn’t know why she’d started pouring her heart out like that, telling him details that didn’t matter to him at all. Only to her. To her, they mattered, because Matteo had been the one to tell her she’d been named after a saint after all. Matteo, like her mother, had called them consecrated. Because he’d been a purist.
And it had been so ironic – and fitting, at the same time – that she’d started defining herself as a pragmatist when she was only twelve, just to spite her mother and prove she wasn’t anything like her. Then she’d gone ahead and fallen in love with a purist years later.
“A purist’s daughter?” Rune asked, sounding uncertain.
“Yes. My father was one, too. I wanted to go against both of them. Be different, wild, a rebel.” The last words were marked by sarcasm.
“I... I don’t know what a purist is.”
“Huh?” She turned her head toward his voice, scooting closer to the wall that separated them. “Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
“Did you live under a rock?”
“I... I lived a sheltered life.”
He said it as if he was embarrassed by it. Seraphina wondered what it meant. Who lived a sheltered life? Only wealthy people could afford it. The nobility? The royal family? But that was silly, because Rune didn’t sound like someone from the upper echelons.
“Would you two shut the fuck up?” a prisoner yelled. “Some of us are trying to get some sleep in.”
“Yes,” someone else grumbled. “Before night comes and this shithole turns into a madhouse of cries, and screams, and bad fucking dreams again.”
Seraphina fell silent. If she held her breath and listened carefully, she could almost hear Rune breathing softly on the other side. Or she could’ve imagined it, though these days, her hearing was especially sharp. Nothing escaped her.
“Will you sing tonight, miss?” a third prisoner asked, a man whose voice sounded old and tired.
Her chest ached, and she thought about beasts again. The ones born, the ones made, and the ones aspiring to become.
“I will,” she promised.
Chapter Three
A person must voluntarily choose to die to save the life of another.
Cocooned in the thick blanket, Seraphina dozed off. Outside, the rain had stopped. She was sitting with her back against the wall that separated her from Rune, in a nest of straw she’d made for herself. The hours passed slowly. It must’ve been evening by now, but she couldn’t tell for sure.
A tap coming from behind the wall startled her from her fitful sleep.
“Seraphina?”
His voice sounded loud even when he whispered. It was the depth of it that made it vibrate through the air, the wall, and through her very bones. She heard him with her body more than with her ears.
“Rune?”
“I was wondering if you’d tell me what a purist is.”
“You really don’t know?”
“No.”
He sounded uncomfortable, as if he were ashamed he had to ask her. Seraphina bit the tip of her tongue to stop the questions from pouring out. Sheltered – how? There was no amount of sheltered that would keep someone from knowing how the world worked. Then again, there were people who weren’t interested in stories of saints and miracles of bones. Working people who kept their heads down and put food on the table, too burdened by poverty, sickness, and the war to have a single moment to wistfully think about how a holy bone – a fibula, a mandible, a carpal – could’ve eased their load and made their hardships fade away like echoes of another life.
Relics weren’t necessarily rare, but they tended to be hoarded by a handful of people. And the ones who needed them most usually never got to touch a bone in their life.
“Do you know about the Sarumite Order?”
“I’ve heard about it.”
