“Tell me howto seek the Saint.”
The old woman stared at the girl for a long moment, eyes narrowed, shriveled lips pursed. Without lowering her gaze, she inhaled a slow drag from her pipe. “Got a confession, Leena?”
Leena shrank back, although the emaciated form of the old woman posed no threat to her.
“Margery…” Leena began, then paused, her conviction dimming. “I only mean to seek him out.”
Faster than she thought the old woman could move, Margery dug her yellowed nails into the soft flesh of Leena’s forearm. “No one—and I meanno one—goes to see the Saint without a reason,” Margery snarled. “Are you looking for a bit of coin, girlie? Some pretty baubles?” Her grip bruised. “Donotseek him.”
Leena didn’t respond as, not for the first time, something else had caught her attention. Her gaze flickered to a point past Margery’s shoulder, and she stared at it for a second too long. When Margery turned to look, there was nothing there but peeling papered walls.
“What are you staring at, girlie?” Margery demanded.
Leena startled before shaking her head.
Leena’s eyes roved the interior of Margery’s home, directly abutting her own. Each house was an exact replica of the other—squat and terraced with sparse windows and a barely functioning fireplace, their only source of water an outside pump.
The old woman had lived here for as long as Leena could remember, the only resident in these clustered spaces of cramped houses who was not an Algaraan refugee. Unlike Leena, whose own parents had fled the Algaraan civil war more than twenty years ago before settling uneasily into Morland, Margery was salt-of-the-earth and Morish through and through.
Leena did not think the old woman had ventured once out of Golborne, Morland’s capital city, or even farther than the limit of her own house these days, her fluid-swollen legs barely carrying her past her front step.
Despite Margery’s lack of mobility, Leena never dared question how she seemed to procure a steady stream of Tar.
Whenever Leena knocked on the old woman’s door, it was always the same picture: Margery hunched over a hookah, her eyes red from the cloying Tar smoke, her blue-veined hands shaking for the next addictive puff.
“Rami is unwell. He is going to…” Leena trailed off. “Ineedto see the Saint.”
“Your brother?”
It took all of Leena’s strength to force her voice to remain steady, even as terror slithered down her body at the mere utterance of the illness. “He has Sweeper’s Cough.”
Margery withdrew, leaving half-moon welts on Leena’s skin. “I had it once and barely survived it.”
Leena knew this, or else she would never have dared enter Margery’s house and invite the sickness into her home. Sweeper’s Cough could only be had once and never again—as long as one survived it. Baba had once said Leena had caught it as a young girlin the refugee camps, and she had been so unwell that the camp overseer had told her mother to start sewing a white burial shroud.
“So, you see, my worry is justified.” Leena pulled at a stray thread unraveling from the hemline of her skirt. “I must go see the Saint of Silence.”
“No—eventhatis not enough.” Margery swallowed harshly. “What secrets can a green girl like you have? The Saint of Silence does not accept schoolroom scandals.”
Once again, Leena’s eyes flickered to the nothingness behind Margery’s shoulder.
“Have you not heard the stories that swirl around the Saint?” Margery demanded again, and Leena stiffened.
Of course she had heard the rumors; everyone had. He was the first of his kind to pay for secrets; the more shameful the divulgence, the higher the price. But even the most trivial of confessions, seemingly useless to anyone, received some coin. So at first, the rest of the cityfolk—Leena included—thought it was an act of charity: another so-called philanthropist who had made his wealth in the factories, or abroad in the wars, and decided togive back.A do-gooder who had arrived suddenly in this soot-ridden city eight years ago and would disappear just as abruptly.
Although his name was St. Silas, he was often referred to as theSaint of Silenceinstead—a play on his surname, after the country’s oldest Saint, whose crumbled statues still littered the outside of cathedrals and cemeteries. A Saint who had once granted blessings in exchange for sins back when Golborne was a mere settlement, not a thriving metropolis built of smoke and greed.
No one prayed to any of the Saints anymore.
People wanted bread, not sacraments.
But if this new Saint of Silence, like his former namesake, was willing to offer coins for a few measly secrets—the fool—why stop him?
It soon became apparent that it was not charity.
And that he was no fool.
Rumors began to spring up. Those who confessed to him came backchanged,as if despair and terror had carved a home between their eyes. Others—those St. Silas claimed had lied in their confessions—had their tongues cut out. Ribs cracked. A bloodied X sliced through their mouth, the vermilion border of the lips gouged and carved: the scar of the Saint.
