Page 1 of Saint
PROLOGUEISOLDE
There was a blue door with a black lantern on Forsyth Street.
Behind it was a man who could make me disappear.
My hand dragged over the uneven brick wall as I paced up the walk, the heels of my boots a sharp clip in the night. Rain still dripped from the edges of the rooftops, beading down the single-pane windows, and the damask silk of my skirts was heavy with the damp.
North End’s intricate tangle of alleys and streets unfurled into the wet corners of a city that had just seen a storm. It was a labyrinth I didn’t know. Bastian was my home, but I’d never been to North End, not even with my father. A girl like me had no reason to. I was the daughter of a merchant who’d lived every day of her life to please her mother, even if I’d leftthat version of me back at Azimuth House. But there was no betrayal like the one I carried in my pocket. Now, I was no more than a traitor.
“Blue door. Black lantern,” I whispered to myself again.
My eyes skipped over the buildings and I squinted, trying to make out their shapes and colors in the dark. The helmsman of theCravenwas a man I’d seen many times at my mother’s house and on her ships, but he’d kept his distance from me like most of her traders did. No one wanted to touch the flame that burned at the center of my mother’s hands. She protected her precious things.
But the helmsman had been my father’s friend. So, when I’d pulled him behind the gauze curtains that looked out over the candlelit gala and whispered to him that I needed to leave the city, he’d told me how. I could hardly pick out his deep voice over the sound of the music, and now I wondered if I’d heard him right at all.
North End. Look for the blue door with the black lantern on Forsyth Street.
That warm light at my mother’s gala was still alive around me, as if it were clinging to my edges as I slipped through the dark. But I could feel it bleeding from me, like the slow smear of ink in water. Threads of color that stretched until they disappeared. The glint of the gold wallpaper of my mother’s study. My father’s portrait looking down at me. The way the midnight’s song had filled the room until my ears were ringing with it.
In a matter of seconds, that world had come crashingdown with only three words spoken from Holland’s lips:a necessary sacrifice.
It had taken me the length of a breath to decide to open the gem case. To walk out that door. And I was never, ever going back.
I wiped the tear from my numb cheek, walking faster as the street curved deeper into the borough. When the glossy blue door of the row house finally appeared, it was easy to spot. The paint looked fresh, almost wet, and the black lantern that hung over the threshold was fitted with not one flame, but two, illuminating the alcove that sat hollow at the top of the steps.
I glanced over my shoulder before I climbed them, knocking softly with a trembling hand. It was the middle of the night, but if what I’d heard about North End was true, it wouldn’t be so unusual to have a visitor at this hour. The work on these streets was done in shadow, out of view of the guilds and the harbor watch and the Trade Council. I suspected that was why the helmsman of theCravenhad sent me there.
I raised my fist to knock again before the door’s lock turned and it opened, revealing the face of a girl not much older than me. One long braid was pinned over the crown of her head and the color of her simple frock matched it, made notable only by the bright silver chain of a pocket watch tucked into her belt. Her dark, owlish eyes raked over my gown before they shot to the street behind me.
“I think you knocked on the wrong door.” There was acutting edge to her voice that hardened the soft curves of her face.
My hands clenched tighter in my skirts, a bead of sweat sliding down my spine, and the hair beginning to unravel from its pins blew across my cheek as another rain-soaked gust of wind swallowed the street.
“I’m looking for Simon,” I said.
The name the helmsman of theCravenhad given me seemed to surprise her, but the look on her face quickly turned into curiosity. She studied me another moment, the set of her mouth steady as her gaze tightened on my face. She was looking for something there, I realized, and once she found it, she let the door swing open.
I glanced once more at the empty street before I stepped over the threshold, into the amber light that filled the narrow hallway. The floorboards popped beneath the soles of my boots, the windows of the house rattling in the wind, but the sound buzzing in my chest was a different one. Gemstone.
The hum hovered between the walls in a chorus that reverberated in my bones. It was everywhere, coming from all around me.
There was a moment, a fleeting one, when I wanted to reach for the door before it closed and run from that feeling that had haunted me since the day my mother first realized what I was. But as quickly as the thought came, it was gone again. There was no going back. Not now.
The door’s heavy bolt slid into place and the girl turned to face me. There was a beat of silence that made me thinkthat she, too, was reconsidering whether she should have let me inside.
Her chin lifted. “Follow me.”
The fabric of my thick skirts brushed along the walls of the cramped hallway, making me feel like it was growing narrower by the second. The familiar sounds of garnet and emerald and diamond caught my ear, interlaced with a dozen others, but they didn’t belong here. The tiny, run-down row house wasn’t the home of someone who wore a merchant’s ring from the Gem Guild, which would deem the trade inventory under this roof a legitimate one. North End was famous for its criminals, and they’d made my mother’s life very difficult over the last few years. I could only hope that meant this was the last place she’d come looking for me.
The hall came to an end, and I followed the girl down a winding staircase, catching sight of her face only briefly as she looked back at me. “You’re lucky you didn’t have those jewels and that ridiculous frock ripped off of you in the street.”
The words weren’t laced with a threat or even any kind of reproach. In fact, she sounded as if she was genuinely marveling at the fact that I’d made it there in one piece. And she was probably right. I’d walked all the way from the merchants’ district, keeping to the alleys so I wouldn’t be spotted. My mother would have already noticed I was gone, and that wasn’t entirely unusual. But when she saw what I’d taken with me, she’d have the whole city combing the streets and the harbor.
The girl opened another door and we entered a large,dark cellar lit only by a small fireplace tucked into one corner. The walls were almost entirely hidden by stacks of closed crates that reached to the ceiling, marked with port seals I recognized. They stretched from the Unnamed Sea to the Narrows.
It took me a moment to spot the man sitting at the long wooden table on the other side of the room. Simon, I hoped. He looked up from a stack of parchment, eyes struggling to focus on me. His light brown hair was a wild sweep across his forehead, the buttons of his shirt half undone.
“She’s looking for you.” The girl’s fingers slipped from the door handle as she watched me.
