Some never came back at all.
Leena knew all this, but her heart was already so engulfed with death and loss she could not bear burying a brother. She knew this—and she chose to seek the Saint of Silence anyway.
Margery saw the change in her face: the subtle lift of her chin, the determination that drew her dark brows in. The old woman lowered her voice. “Do you remember what he did to Mr. Jamil?”
Leena’s thoughts recoiled at the memory of the man who had once lived a couple of doors down from them. He had also been a refugee, escaping Algaraa at the same time as Leena’s parents did.
She remembered Baba’s distrust of Mr. Jamil; it was widely known in their small district that Mr. Jamil had been an informant for the Malik’s police back home. Gossip swirled that he’d been the one to turn in his own nephew for hiding illegal pamphlets belonging to the Liberation Party.
The nephew had been taken, then found a few weeks later, tortured into madness.
Leena had heard that the Malik had sent Mr. Jamil a slaughtered sheep for his acts of loyalty—a rarity as hunger swept through the country.
When the war broke out in Algaraa and the Liberation Party rose, Mr. Jamil had fled to Morland in fear of being captured and punished by the rebels for his terrible acts of service to the Malik.
Baba, ever the revolutionist, had warned Leena and Rami to stay away from Mr. Jamil, stating that those who turned on their countrymen on their own soil would not think twice of doing so in a foreign land.
Baba was not wrong.
Leena never forgot the way Mr. Jamil had looked after visiting the Saint of Silence nearly four years ago. They had found him in the morning, a crumpled mess on the stoop. The intersecting X on his mouth shone with blood, his broken body racked with shudders.I didn’t lie,he sobbed as Baba and a few other men carried him into his house.I swear I didn’t lie to the Saint.
He took to the bottle not long afterward. Hard drink. In one of his drunken stupors, he admitted to Baba that he’d thought no harm would come from telling the Saint of Silence small falsehoods about the neighbors to fill his gnawing hunger.
By that point, the alcohol had made Mr. Jamil’s belly protrude and the whites of his eyes turn a deep yellow.
He was dead by the spring.
“I do,” Leena said steadily, but her head throbbed. “Have you ever sought the Saint of Silence?”
Margery toyed with the pipe between her fingers. Finally, she nodded. “It wasn’t an act of release for me, though; it was reckoning. It felt like death…” She trailed off, a vague look in her rheumy eyes. “The nightmares that came afterward—he never even touched me—but the very act of confession…like being gutted…left to rot…”
The old woman took a long, desperate drag on the pipe, her eyelids fluttering from the effect of the drug. “Some say his mother’s a demon.”
“Demon?” Leena lifted her brows. Spirituality had faded in Morland with the first cropping of factories, leaving sparsely filled church pews in its staid and ghostly cathedrals, but some still clung firmly to their belief in Saints, demons, and curses.
Algaraans feared evil under a different name. Leena had grown up with stories of jinns, and even now her bedroom was filled with old charms shaped like eyes to ward them away.
There was not a lot of time in Leena’s life to debate the existence of jinns, demons, or even Saints, but all she knew was that none of them had helped her survive.
A faint humorous glint crossed Leena’s eyes. “Is he a Saint or a demon? He cannot be both.”
Margery’s lips thinned. “Do not make a mockery of things you do not understand.” With shaky hands, she pulled an idol necklace from her bodice, her lips muttering a whispered prayer to cast off wickedness. Leena peeked at the small wooden figurine of a woman holding an olive branch. She could not remember which Saint the imagery corresponded with, but the way Margery gripped the effigy made it clear that it brought her some measure of comfort.
Leena never assumed Margery was religious; fewer people nowadays believed in the old relics. Still, she bowed her head, apologizing for causing the old woman offense.
“Do. Not. Seek. Him,” Margery rasped again, interrupting her apologies.
“I don’t have a choice—”
“You always have a choice. Do not choose wrong.”
This time it was Leena who grabbed the old woman’s arm, the papery skin fragile in her grip. “Iwillfind him, with or without your help. So spare me and give me some guidance. I cannot waste any more time.”
Margery regarded Leena for a long moment: the brown Algaraan features, the firm eyebrows, the gaunt cheeks, the dark eyes that could not conceal a single emotion.
“Your face reveals too much,” Margery whispered, almost to herself. “A lie would look foreign on you. Do not attempt it.”
“I won’t.”
