She heard the rattle of reins and the carriage picked up speed, navigating the bend toward the main thoroughfare.
“Tell me about who you’re saving,” St. Silas murmured.
The carriage lamp lit Leena’s face but kept St. Silas’s in shadow. Perhaps that was why he had chosen his seat, so that he might have a chance to study her while remaining in darkness. She could only hear his voice, so simultaneously smooth and sharpshe wouldn’t have known she’d been cut until the blood stained her dress.
“My brother, Rami. I’m older than him by two years,” Leena replied slowly. She didn’t want to continue. Having always been furtive with love, she feared revealing herself too much now.
“Rami Al-Sayer?” St. Silas leaned forward. “The Black Coats’ sword fighter?”
“Rami’s not a Black Coat,” Leena replied curtly. She didn’t like people thinking her brother was part of a gang. “He merely competes in their duels.”
St. Silas raised his eyebrows. “I’ve seen him fight. He’s talented. How did he lose the arm?”
Leena also hated that question, which reduced Rami to a single painful experience, a moment of tragedy that had birthed him. “A riding accident when he was fourteen. But he fights better now than he ever did back then.”
Perhaps sensing her offense, he didn’t press further. Instead he settled back, head leaning on the rest. A passing streetlight reflected a sudden harsh glare on his face, and she saw that his eyes were coldly observant, almost catlike, before he was plunged once more into the shadows. In contrast, his words were honeyed. “You’re trying to save him—even going so far as to seek me. I am used to requests for cruelty, but your reason has honor.” She squinted at him in the darkness but still she could not see his face. “At the very least, I admire that. Very few come to me with kindness.”
A man like St. Silas didn’t admire kindness; he manipulated kindness.
“Thank you, sir,” she said, almost primly, “but I’m not susceptible to flattery.”
He laughed, his teeth flashing white. “A dissimilarity we share. I amonlysusceptible to flattery.”
Although it was only the beginning of the colder season, a thick mist clung to the cobbled streets, hiding the downtrodden, theshabbiness of the shops, the crumbling buildings, as if attempting to cover the city’s shame.
They passed an eerie cathedral. A single burning candle shone through the stained glass, illuminating the stony faces of the five main Saints and a few of the lesser ones carved into the exterior. From the eaves, gargoyles and banished demons snarled down upon the street. Even though Leena was not Morish and rarely set foot in a church, she still recognized a few.
The Saint of Healing, depicted as a statuesque woman holding a blackened heart. The Saint of Fools, a lesser Saint that Leena always remembered since the grotesque grin stretched wide on his lips used to frighten her as a child. The largest idol, chiseled in the center of the cathedral, was the Saint of Silence. Leena’s eyes lingered on the sculpture—at the face that was neither old nor young, the mouth covered with a thin gauze, symbolism for his devotion to silence. If that face was kind, then his namesake—the man sitting in front of her—was colder than stone.
The turn of the carriage led them farther into the interweaving alleyways of Golborne, the steadyclop-clopof the horses’ hooves breaking the odd stillness of the night. The Northern Quarters gradually gave way to cramped, thin houses in which curtains were permanently drawn for a semblance of privacy. But Leena knew from her own experience that privacy was a luxury not meant for these parts of the city. Not when paper-thin walls revealed every whispered fight, not when cheaply made floors echoed every footstep, every raucous laugh, every slamming door. Only heartbreak went unnoticed in this city—except by those who profited from it. She glanced sideways once more at the Saint of Silence, merchant of misery, but his own attention was fastened outside the window.
“We’ve arrived,” he said easily.
Leena looked out the window as well, and her breath hitched.
Ahead of them loomed Newtorn Prison.
It was a hideous building, disfigured, its many towers like crookedfingers. So often she’d found herself outside the iron gates begging the guards to deliver a package to her father. So often she’d been turned away. The prison lay in the center of the city. Every road, every byway, every path led toward it. It was the heart around which Golborne was built, from which it nourished itself, from which it profited. It was the largest prison in the living world, even housing political criminals from other countries for a fee—a behemoth that seemed to eat the youth of this city whole. Half of the boys Leena had grown up with—the motherless boys, the refugees, the eternally hungry—now lay on the other side of that divide. As well as Leena’s own father.
“They’re adding another tower,” St. Silas observed mildly, indicating the stacks of bricks and scaffolding left abandoned until the morning.
“Did you know that Newtorn Prison has never finished being built?” Leena whispered. Her heart quaked in her chest, the sight of the towers sending shock waves through her body. “It’s larger than even King Edmund’s palace. They keep adding more cells, more blocks, more padlocked gates.”
He raised his brows, the deeper ache beneath her words seemingly not lost on him.
The carriage slowed by the broad iron barrier, a dappled moon lighting the walkway. The driver descended first and, after a brief exchange with the guard, the gate swung open and the carriage rattled on. She observed in stony silence the utter lack of green in the courtyard. Everything was gray: gray bricks, gray towers, gray pillars. She wondered if Baba missed the plants he had left thriving on the windowsill in their home.
By the time they arrived, a man stood waiting for them near the great steel entrance. Lanky, with hollowed cheeks and an ashen complexion, he rubbed his hands with nervous energy as they approached. He came to the window at once, holding up a lamp to peerin.
“Mr. St. Silas, what an honor,” the man wheezed, eyes jolting from St. Silas to Leena. “If I had known earlier you’d be visiting, I would’ve made preparations…”
St. Silas held up a lazy hand to interrupt the man’s hurried speech. “No need, Warden. I’ve come to call on Colson.”
The Warden’s mouth fell open. “Wha—Why?”
St. Silas lifted his brows. “Because I choose to.”
The lamp in the Warden’s hand jerked, and he hastily interjected, “It is merely protocol, sir. A-and who is your companion?”
