She nodded, head ringing with the echo of Elmere's delight and her own silent, stumbling prayers. "Do you want me to bring him here?" The Izir healed. Perhaps they thought he could heal whatever this was.

Abe cleared his throat, the words caught and gargling.

Then they came out:

"Izir Nemes has been preaching heresy."

"What?" The words were so incongruous they were nonsense. Izir were closer to Asten than anyone. The world may have lost the presence of the divine, but even the Severing couldn't steal the sacred blood of the infants left behind.

"He's been drawing worshipers from the church." Abe's voice thrummed with the fire of a sermon. "Claiming to see the dead, saying there are paths to grace before judgement, a time when the fate of souls is malleable. It's just the kind of thing that appeals to the weak, false comfort that if they die in Shadow, it's not the end." He gestured to the flickering seal. "We need the people's faith, now more than ever. He's brought doubt to our doorstep, and it's showing in service attendance. Anyone who trusts their soul to him..."

Would spend their eternity wrapped in nothing but hunger and self-flaggelating misery, forever apart from the divine. Knowledge was one of the four virtues, but only if it were true.

"I'd be happy to speak to him..." It was a strange mission. Csilla swallowed a bleak laugh at the idea that she could convince anyone of anything. Her skirts were stained from years of kneeling outside during services. No one listened to her about what to serve for breakfast, much less theology.

"We've already tried." Abe's voiced wavered with something she didn't understand.

Csilla tensed. '"But then what—"

The priest reached into a pocket of his robes and pulled out a necklace. A bird skull on a chain, the beak replaced by one made of silver filigree. The bleached bone and polished metal were awful and lovely in one, the hollows of the eyes almost alive with the flickering shadows.

Abe snapped off the beak, revealing a stoppered vial nestled inside. It was far smaller and slimmer than the medicine bottles she took her patients, and whatever in it was clear, not the brown syrup that soothed coughs. He put it in Csilla's hand and closed her fingers around it, the glass still warm from his body heat.

"Perhaps in your reading you've come across Scorn's Friend. You always were a studious little thing."

She was, and she knew the piece of death in her palm. Poison.

Her head dizzied, her face dampening with sweat despite the cellar cold. "But I'm a servant of the Church." Mercy workers saved. She clutched at the vial, metal digging into the flesh of her fingers. It was a dream, and this was the second when the beautiful turned grotesque and the shock of the impossible shoved you back into waking.

There was no waking. Only strokes of fire and shadow, the corroded magic, and the Prelate's unwavering gaze.

"You're not, though, are you? You wear our robes, speak our words, pray to our god." His voice wasn't unkind, merely flat with truth. "But you lack a soul. And that's why you're the only one who can do this. It's no sin for you. There's nothing of you to blacken."

"But murder..." No one stole the right of death from Asten. Even the worst crimes were punished by abandonment on the winter ice or in the forest ravines of the north, not execution. It may have led to death all the same, but it wasn't murder.

People die, she reminded herself, though her vision blurred. It was a mercy worker's job to know that, even more than carefully memorized prayers and the ratio of herbs to blessed water. It was a truth pressed into their hands every day as they folded endless bandages and soothed fevered skin.

Abe reached for her trembling arm. "All you'll be doing is delivering him back to the arms of the divine and saving the city from apostasy. It's not murder, it's mercy. For all of Silgard. The Incarnate himself has signed the order."

If the Incarnate signed the order, why do you still think it's a sin? How could the Prelate stand in this place of light and ask something so dark? She shook her head, not trusting her voice, and the new fabric scratched around her throat.

Abe's grip tightened. "If you won't do it, you can leave. You'll never pass a holiness test, child. Silgard has no place for you, and we've given you shelter long past what is owed by the tenants to care for orphans. An adult's duty is to take a role and contribute to order. If you won't serve, you're no use."

Her mouth twisted in open shock. What was treating the city's ill, washing its dead, and giving a lap to its children if not being of use? It didn't matter if she wore the brown lining of a novice or the brilliant white of a prelate or the hand-me-downs of no one at all, her work was good. "I don't want to..."

"Asten doesn't ask what you want to do for Them, but what you will do for Them and for our eventual perfection."

Csilla turned her gaze to the saints and martyrs watching the exchange. If she could pray for their strength and be answered, maybe this wouldn't feel so much like drowning.

"I don't understand..."

"Submission isn't meant to be light work. You don't need to understand to serve."

He was right. It was selfish, presumptuous, for her to argue. She wasn't anything, and she was being offered a way to do good.

Even if it was no kind of good she would have ever elected to do.

"All right." She barely recognized the voice that came out of her, choked and small. "I'll do it." If this really would protect the souls of the city, she had no choice.

Abe's smile, ordinarily so kind, curled her stomach. He beckoned her forward.

If she'd had a family, they would have bathed her in water infused with rosemary and mint and given her an equal dose of affection, sent her to her vows with a crown of poppies and her dowry in hand to offer at Asten's eye.

Instead she shivered, unadorned and empty. Together they knelt before the tattered magic of the great seal. She spread her fingers on the earth, taking a deep breath and taking heart with it. This was what every servant of the church did, and she was fortunate to be able to do it over the remains of Arany herself. In other territories they made do with facsimiles and floors stained with wine and varnish to look like a martyr's resting place.

Abe's chant caressed her to her bones. The sound grew as it echoed against the damp walls, as if the centuries of the faithful were speaking through the paint in welcome, the last saint Angyalka and first Incarnate Imre stand-ins for the kin she would never know. They would have to be enough.

"Csilla."

She opened her eyes again and offered her palm. He took her smooth fingers in his weathered ones.

"Do you swear to serve in perfect and perpetual obedience, to accept the Church as judge and justice of this world, to full-heartedly seek knowledge of the divine and Their creation, and provide unfailing mercy?"

"Yes," she answered before he'd even finished. Before she had any more time to think about the terrible nature of her calling.

Abe brought the knife to her skin, drawing a thin line of red to well on the surface. Then he squeezed, letting a drop fall to the gritty earth. The seal remained still, dashing a final, quiet hope. Her soulless blood didn't carry any spirit, couldn't do anything to strengthen the Faith.

The prelate rubbed his thumb through the dirt, her blood, and whatever echoes of Arany's holiness remained. She closed her eyes as he smeared a cold line down her forehead.

Bled and marked for the Church.

Called to service, just like she'd always wanted.

4

Csilla

There were three things everyone knew to be true of the Izir: he was beautiful, he was holy, and he never turned down wine. It had been easy enough to steal the bulb-shaped bottle now sloshing in her leather sack. If Csilla had a soul, she would have earned another black mark against her. And if she thought too hard about what was coming, she’d be drinking the wine.

He was a heretic. That was what she had to keep reminding herself as she trudged to the farthest of the eight city districts. The Izir was a heretic, no matter who his ancestors were. Asten had given harder tasks to Their followers in ages past. The Prelate had said it himself, and her stinging palm reminded her of who she belonged to with every nervous twitch of her fingers. Obedience was a virtue: obedience was submission.

The snow was thicker on this side of Silgard, and the roads darker, with many close-crammed houses that couldn’t afford a door lantern. Just two days ago a body had been found pressed into the squelching mud of the riverbank. The thought of the girl lying dead in the night for hours chilled worse than the air, and Csilla said a quiet prayer that her departed soul was at peace, that she’d been good enough in life to join the brilliance in the ether. She quickened her steps, touching the necklace to keep the chain from sawing at her.

In the square, orange fires burned in baskets set high on wooden pillars, flames flickering with each pass of breeze. The gathered crowd was a flock of ravens in the smoky light, all dark coats and anxious voices. A few specks of white and green—patterned kerchiefs, children’s gowns—peeped here and there as the throng shifted, but everything else was navy and black, colors that wouldn’t show soot or stain in the months when they couldn’t be easily washed.

Snippets of conversation reached her ears, wants and wishes and fearful requests, some in languages she didn’t speak. Anyone could petition to live in Silgard, as long as their soul was clean and they swore by the virtues. But these people, their faith so palpable it was almost a chorus, weren’t here for Asten. Their praise and yearning were all gifts for the Izir.