Further instructions will follow.
Long live the People.
Long live the People.
Leena remembered how desperately she had wanted to fling those words at the Warden when he had cornered her, hissing in her face:Long live the King.
What he had really meant to say was: Long live the corruption that lined his pockets with bribes and coins from desperate families begging for a word from an imprisoned loved one. All made possible by an infirm King who did not, ironically, have long to live.
Leena was startled out of her dark reverie by the ghost of a Morish boy that she recognized. Last she’d seen him, he was alive, handing out pamphlets in the same determined manner as the girl. Even now, he still wore the twine of rope on his chest.
Yet the ghost bore the marks of his death.
The sinuous muscles of his back lay in tatters; it was clear he had been flogged without reprieve until the bloody whites of his ribs showed—each slash of skin a punishment for his supposed treason. Leena muffled an exclamation, averting her eyes, the hunger disappearing suddenly from her stomach.
It was a jarring reality to see the ghost standing beside the girl. To Leena, it looked as if she was watching an inevitable future play out—that one day she would return to this street and it would be someone else handing out the flyers, and the girl nothing more than a whispered echo of a call to rise.
No.Leena’s chest was already filled with all the things she could not change. She would not allow this feeling of helplessness to settle inside her, taking root and breeding complacency.
Leena, who had seen the blue-uniformed soldiers enter the market at the same time she had, slowed her steps before passing the girl, warning her in a low voice, “There are soldiers coming your way.”
The girl gave a curt nod and discreetly tucked the papers into her cloak before blending back into the market, lost within moments. The ghost of the flogged boy followed closely at her heels. Leena knew that she would be back tomorrow.
Leena wished she could come every day to warn the girl when trouble followed, just as she wished someone had warned her father, but she knew that it would be impossible, especially now that she was contracted to the Saint of Silence.
It took a few more minutes before Leena arrived at the small stall she was used to visiting whenever her pockets could spare it. She bought herself and Rami two rolls of bread each, freshly baked, with butter and jam. The small jug of milk was a luxury she was willing to indulge in; Leena could not remember when they had last had fresh milk.
When she returned home, it was to find Rami taking slow steps from his bed. Seeing his growing energy, Leena tried to suppress her excitement, especially when he allowed her to feed him a few morsels of bread and butter.
Rami never liked to be fussed over.
On the next day, which marked the fifth day since starting the medication, Rami all but growled at her to leave him alone so that he mightrecover in peace.This led Leena to leave the house with a sense of relief that he was, albeit slowly, on the mend. She found her way to the lending library, a much-frequented address.
—
The lending library held a sense of tranquility that was hard to come by in the endless bustle of the New Algaara District. A once heavily frequented church, the abandoned building had been transformed into a book room sometime in the last decade. Its dome still arched proudly over the texts, the pews turned into a sitting area for the readers. Windows, large and magnanimous, shone colored light onto the columns of books, creating a world that, to Leena, looked like a painting belonging to another century.
Even the ghosts that frequented the library were different from the ones in the market. Leena did not venture to find out their stories and avoided them whenever possible, but a few she guessed to be scholars—though one or two phantoms still confused the placefor a church from a time gone by, moving in an unhurried manner, as if in endless prayer.
Today, Leena wasted no time in beginning her search for any information about thisWakethat her mother had spoken of in her dream. Perhaps it was a mad notion, but she could not shake off the heavy feeling that her mother’s appearance was more than just the manifestation of her fever and anxiety.
That it held a meaning.
Leena began her search by rifling through old newspapers, journals, and any stored archives from the last decade. But there was nothing to be found there, and after hours of fruitless searching, she left depleted and hungry.
Perhaps, Leena thought with some trepidation as she made her way to the district’s most disreputable pub, her answers were not to be found in old texts. Here was a place that was frequently visited by guards finishing their shifts at Newtorn Prison, where information was traded for a price and criminals held more knowledge than judges.
She released her hair, pinched her cheeks, and smiled sweetly at some of the more seasoned-looking guards. There was little doubt that they were, indeed, entranced by her and would have happily talked to her about anything once the cheap ale started flowing, but their expressions shuttered the moment she began inquiring about the Wake, subtle though she thought she was.
That in itself was suspicious.
Hard as she tried, all roads were barred.
It was in those dejected moments as she made her way back home that she questioned whether she was, in fact, slowly slipping into madness. Had she taken the misgivings of a fevered dream and spent precious hours searching for an answer to a question that never existed?
All Avons are demon-kissed.
Lord Avon, on the other hand, was not so difficult to find information on. Back at the lending library she had learned, amongdecades-old copies ofPeerage Review,some useful intelligence which she transcribed carefully into the few empty pages at the back of herGuide to Botany.
