Gasping, I ducked before he could see me.
I staggered off the boxes, but not before I heard Cullard’s low voice on the other side of the wall.
“That is good, Sister Cyprilis. You are dismissed. Go rouse Brother Kaspus and send him in, yes?”
My knees were weak and wobbly as I stumbled through the garden. A heady daze washed over me, giving me tunnel vision. I began to realize my entire young life had been a lie. TheHousewas a lie. It did not nurture the “Broken” . . . itcreatedthem.
This was not a place to lift the homeless out of despair. It only added to the despair I’d seen in the world, masking its sin with a varnish of good faith and honorable deeds for the needy and less fortunate.
Baylen, Cyprilis, myself. All the children who bullied others without recourse because that was “the way of the world” in Olhav.
We all had been victims of this nightmarish home, without having any means to get out of it.
Baylen was the lucky one,I realized.Getting exiled. Escaping this.
That night, I fled the House of the Broken for the first and final time. And I always wondered . . .
Maybe everything that transpired afterward would not have happened if I’d never left.
Chapter 4
It was not only disgust I felt that made me leave the House. I also missed Baylen dearly. I hadn’t seen him in years, even as I scoured the streets during my alms-collecting runs and inhabited old corners we used to work together.
He had either moved out of the southern district of Nuhav, gotten himself in a troublesome situation he couldn’t escape, or had fled the city altogether.
The Faithless knew he would never get far outside Nuhav. There was nowhere for him to go, no one for him to search for.
SoIwent searching forhim.
I stayed two and three districts away from the southern region, away from the House of the Broken. I used my skills in begging to earn a few coins—more often than not accompanied by glares from women and too-long sneers from older men.
Making sure to never visit the same area twice, in case ruffians or defilers decided to show up when their spouses and mistresses were not around, I quickly lost hope of ever finding Baylen. It was like he had vanished off the face of Nuhav.
To make matters worse, there werefarmore people inhabiting the city than I ever knew. More than thousands, more than I could count. Faces swirled by during the busiest hours of day like mirages. They started to look the same: rough, tanned from hard labor, leathery, and despicable.
I couldn’t look at another human without seeing glimpses of Father Cullard, Jeffrith and the bully boys, or even the meaner parts of Baylen. They began to blend together. I realized—for all I’d seen in my short life—I hated humans.
I ate scraps and whatever I could afford with the meager offerings I collected. The bazaars here were smaller, more spread out, with tradespeople setting up carts and tents in haphazard smatterings across the districts.
I never stepped foot into a shop. I had no business being inside one. I was not presentable enough to be anything other than a would-be thief in the eyes of storeowners and proprietors.
It dawned on me why these districts were gloomier and less populated than the southernmost one: The same district where the House of the Broken sat was also where the Temple of the True resided.
Every Seventh Day, I had gone to the temple with a vowager and the Housemates to pray. Its location had the effect of creating commerce around it, hence the vast bazaar and loads of coins jangling around the area. Here, in the southwestern region, I only spotted a garrison, the large heavens-reaching wall that surrounded the entire city, and many dour faces.
I avoided the militaristic Bronzes, who were a frequent presence here, and kept to the shadows and alleys.
It was there I met my first grayskin—a hooded, cloaked figure with waxen skin. His teeth were the first sign, slightly pointed. His eyes were a dark red. The man nearly snuck up on me from the back of an alley, frightening me worse than I’d ever been scared before.
He laughed, saying I had snuck up onhim.Then he left me alone. We never exchanged names. I was racked with fear all night. He stayed at least ten feet away from me as we shared the alley.
Against my better judgment, I fell asleep curled behind a trash barrel that evening, unable to keep my eyes open to focus on the grayskin.
I dreamt of a sunflower in a window. It swayed gloriously in a wintry, blue breeze. Raindrops fell upon the sunflower, and itspetals began to pluck and float down beyond my vision, beneath the windowsill. I stared at the yellow flower from the other side of a window where I could see the hint of my face in the reflection.
I startled at the sight of my face in the reflection, because my eyes were red, just like the grayskin’s. It showed a false version of myself.
After noticing my grotesque reflection, the raindrops turned crimson and bloody, tainting the sunflower until it was painted in red, without petals—a horrid bulb of its former self.
