Chapter 2 Newtorn Prison
Leena waited for a reaction, an exclamation, a shudder of revulsion, but was only met with stark silence. Her nerves on fire, she rushed to fill the vacancy.
“I wasn’t born like this. I began seeing the dead three years ago, days after I turned seventeen. I wish I knew why they suddenly became visible to me, but they did, and I cannot stop them, nor can I control them.”
He continued to watch her from behind his heavy-lidded eyes. “Ah.”
It was the lack of response that fanned her already strained temper. “Bless you, sir. Was that not a sneeze?”
“Hardly a sneeze, madam, but a proclamation of doubt.”
“Doubt…” she responded slowly. She had expected this, but she could not stop the sudden fear that roared through her chest.
“The dead do not go on living after death.”
“Then you have a very limited viewpoint, indeed.”
His eyes widened and he let out a surprised half-laugh.
She had meant it not as a jest but as an entreaty for him to broaden his mind, but her tongue had slipped before she could curtail it.
He continued after a moment, the laughter dropping from his mouth. “You must understand, Miss Al-Sayer, that in my line of work I am often met with lies. A lie for a noble reason is still a lie—and it is not in my nature to look kindly upon liars.”
Her heart sank. “I can assure you that I am not lying.”
“But how can this be proved?” he asked, with a flash of teeth. “I am all eagerness to help your situation—and I wish a rapid recovery to your loved one—” He said this as an afterthought, before his voice dropped dangerously. “But I will not be made a fool.”
“What must I do?”
He leaned forward. An odd hunger transformed his features, chasing away any vestiges of false sympathy. “Can you see any apparitions now?”
Leena scanned every crevice of the small room, across the multiple ledgers stacked in high shelves, toward the hearth that housed a healthy fire—Why was it still so cold in this room?—even behind the armchair.
Only the living remained. The ghost that had led her here—a boy dressed in white, his temple shattered by a rock—had been flickering in and out on the steps of St. Silas’s shop when she’d begged him to take her to the Saint.
But he’d disappeared the moment she’d crossed the Saint’s threshold.
She sensed that the dead were not pleased with the Saint of Silence.
Could she lie? But Margery’s warning came back to her and she banished the temptation.
Finally, she whispered, “No.”
“How convenient. Your secret happens to be one that cannot be proven.” There was now a trace of anger hidden behind his easy tone.
She brought a hand to her forehead, and St. Silas followed the motion. His eyebrows lifted as if he noticed something in that movement, and a strange chilling expression momentarily crossed his features.
She should run now—before he held her down, before his knife slid through her skin, splitting the tissue and tearing the vessels, marking her forever.
Still, Leena did not leave.
“I don’t know why you collect secrets, Mr. St. Silas, or what you seek. But would you let this one go if it had only the smallest chance of proving true?”
A pause. He met her eyes. She didn’t lower her own.
“You are clever.” He weighed his next words carefully. “I’ll give you an opportunity to prove the validity of your statement. Do you agree with this?”
“I’ll agree to anything.”
“Follow me.” He stood up, leaving the room in long strides while commanding that his carriage be readied immediately.
She was led from the study, down the same bright hall, and back to the stone courtyard outside.
There, a well-sprung vehicle, expertly crafted but inconspicuous, was waiting for them, two large grays already in the harness.
St. Silas issued an order to the driver, too low for her ears to pick up, before he climbed into the seat across from her.
Leena tucked herself as far into the corner as possible to avoid accidentally brushing against him, but this was difficult.
His lithe form spread across the aisle with ease, his long legs taking up half the room.
Their moods were in direct contrast. If Leena’s muscles were tightly wound, St. Silas was at his leisure. She wondered if he enjoyed eliciting such strong reactions in others, if he enjoyed grasping such power.
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 sharp she 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 am only susceptible to flattery.”
Although it was only the beginning of the colder season, a thick mist clung to the cobbled streets, hiding the downtrodden, the shabbiness 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 steady clop-clop of 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 crooked fingers.
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.