Chapter One #2
She’d left the convent of Saint Vivia three days ago and traveled to Ingolstadt by foot and carriage.
At the city gate, she showed a slip with the convent’s seal on it and wasn’t asked questions despite her odd appearance.
Once on the narrow, muddy streets of the city she knew so well, she hesitated.
Her destination was Kr?henstein Academy, but instead of walking up the cliff to its wrought iron gates, she found herself descending the stone steps to the river.
She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed the smell of the Danube – fish guts and human waste, wet wood and the sharp tang of pitch from the barges – until she breathed in a lungful and her chest seized.
Home. But her real home wasn’t outside of the academy walls, it was inside, except she couldn’t make herself go to the porters and tell them her name.
She’d disappeared two years ago. Now, to return in the state she was in, looking the way she did, and tell them what had happened, confirm to them that Matteo da Siena was dead while she lived.
.. It was too much. How was she supposed to do it?
What words would she use? Matteo had been important to the academy; she’d just been his assistant who’d fallen in love with him and often distracted him from his work.
The work that the headmaster swore would help them win the war.
She was certain that while she was presumed dead, the resistance had held hope that Matteo lived.
His skills were too valuable, and if the enemy got him, then it meant they could get him back.
Seraphina couldn’t do it. Not yet. She needed a little more time to think, a day to walk the streets of Ingolstadt and get a sense of how much the city had changed since she’d left.
That was how she’d randomly found herself in a tavern for a bowl of stew, a piece of black bread, and beer.
She’d hardly dug in when she heard a voice carry from across the crowded room.
She would’ve recognized it anywhere, anytime.
Georg Hartmann. The scum of the earth who’d run with his tail between his legs when she and Matteo were attacked on the road, just two days away from Ingolstadt.
One year into the war, the headmaster had sent Matteo to visit his family in Tuscany, and Matteo had asked her to come with him, and her heart had leapt in her throat thinking they were finally making progress, since her man was ready to show her to his parents.
They had been given two guards, loyal to the academy and the cause, and one of them had been Hartmann.
The journey to Tuscany had been uneventful.
But when they’d returned, after crossing the dangerous Alps, when they were so close to home they could smell it, on a mountain road through forested foothills, just southeast of the city, they’d been attacked by four men with pistols and sabers.
Hartmann had run when the first round was fired.
The other guard had fought to a quick death.
And what had happened next... Seraphina didn’t like to dwell on it.
So, when she heard Hartmann’s booming voice in the smoke-filled tavern, her hand went for the knife tucked against the small of her back.
The other one was strapped to her thigh.
She waited, head held low, listening. When he proudly announced he needed to take a leak, she stood up and followed him through the back door, down a piss-soaked alley.
In a matter of minutes, she had him pinned, his pants around his ankles, cock and balls in the wind.
And she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t slit his throat.
Out of frustration, or maybe in hopes that if she drew a little blood, she’d get thirsty for it, she’d chopped off his dick.
He screamed, his comrades came to his rescue, and she was immobilized, identified, and dragged to the watch house.
Because of course Hartmann knew her and knew he deserved it.
And now she deserved to rot in a cell because she hadn’t had it in her to do what needed to be done.
The hours stretched long. When night fell, the relative quiet shattered. Men cried out in their sleep, a few were weeping openly, and someone was praying in a far cell. At the other end of the corridor, a man started screaming, and he screamed and screamed until a guard’s club silenced him.
Seraphina shook under her blanket. Every noise pierced through her, and every moan and cry of despair lodged into her gut.
There was so much pain, so much misery, nightmares and broken lives, and rationally, she knew most of these men were guilty and exactly where they were supposed to be – rotting in jail for their sins – but when they wept and wailed, they sounded like abandoned beasts, and she couldn’t help but wonder if it was the beast’s fault that it had been born a beast.
She opened her mouth, and a sound akin to a croak came out at first. Her throat was parched.
She tried again and produced a whimper. She halted it and bit her tongue before it evolved into a cry.
She didn’t want to wail like the others.
If she let herself fall apart, she’d never be able to pick up the pieces and glue herself back together.
“Sleep, little one, sleep,” the lullaby started as a whisper. “Count your bones from head to feet...” She choked on the last word.
Her voice sounded so feeble, on the verge of breaking, but the song soothed her.
Her mother had sung it to her when she was little and afraid of the dark, and she’d shared it with Matteo.
Then Matteo had played it for her on the piano during the many sleepless nights they spent obsessing over sketches and plans.
She started over from the top.
“Sleep, little one, sleep,
Count your bones from head to feet,
All arranged so small and neat,
Close your eyes, your rest be sweet.”
Her voice grew stronger, and silence fell down the corridor as the prisoners in the cells nearby listened. The second part poured out of her.
“Sleep, little one, sleep,
Sacred bones their promise keep,
Saints stand guard down in the deep,
Rest now, child, and do not weep.”
She heard a hum as she sang. It seemed to come from the cell next to hers. She sat up and pressed her ear to the wall.
“Sleep, little one, sleep.”
“Hmm... hmm... hmm,” the voice accompanied her.
A man’s voice. It vibrated low and grave, the deepest, smoothest baritone Seraphina had ever heard. She sang, and he hummed, and the sound sank into her body and unraveled all the tight knots in her muscles, smoothed all the ragged edges of her soul.
“Sacred bones their promise keep. Saints stand guard down in the deep.”
“Hmm… hmm… hmm…”
Except the war had started because of the bones. The sacred bones and their promises of riches, power, health, immortality. These sacred bones – these relics – had been around since the beginning of the world, and how na?ve had they all been to think they wouldn’t be humanity’s undoing one day.
“Rest now, child, and do not weep.”
The relic war will make you bleed.
She didn’t sing the extra line out loud.