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  Copyright © 2026 by Heba Al-Wasity

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  Hardcover ISBN 9780593982570

  Ebook ISBN 9780593982587

  Book Team: Production editor: Loren Noveck • Managing editor: Paul Gilbert • Production manager: Erin Korenko • Proofreaders: Alice Dalrymple, Megha Jain, and Bridget Sweet

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  Cover design and illustration: Micaela Alcaino

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  ep_prh_7.3a_155144341_c0_r0

  Contents

  Dedication

  Part One: The Reckoning

  Chapter 1: The Saint of Silence

  Chapter 2: Newtorn Prison

  Chapter 3: A New Contract

  Chapter 4: The Salt Circle

  Chapter 5: The Old Market

  Chapter 6: The Interrogation

  Chapter 7: Bleeding Confessions

  Chapter 8: Little Distractions

  Chapter 9: The Return of the Confessor

  Chapter 10: The Festival of Demons

  Chapter 11: The Pistol

  Chapter 12: War’s End

  Chapter 13: Lord Hargreaves

  Chapter 14: Mr. Orley

  Chapter 15: The Burial

  Chapter 16: Theodore Daye

  Chapter 17: The Injured Boy

  Chapter 18: The Courtyard

  Part Two: The Revelation

  Chapter 19: The Binding

  Chapter 20: The Prisoner

  Chapter 21: The Metal Box

  Chapter 22: Moira

  Chapter 23: The Hunting Party

  Chapter 24: The Season of Wolves

  Chapter 25: Lady Hargreaves

  Chapter 26: The Crypts

  Chapter 27: The First Promise

  Chapter 28: The Old Housekeeper

  Chapter 29: The Winter Sea

  Chapter 30: The Cave

  Part Three: The Ruin

  Chapter 31: The Hall of the Lake

  Chapter 32: The Slaughter of Sheep

  Chapter 33: A Safe Passage

  Chapter 34: The Motherless Boy

  Chapter 35: A Duel of Honor

  Chapter 36: Lord Kilworth

  Chapter 37: Detritus Poison

  Chapter 38: The Moors

  Chapter 39: The Posting Inn

  Chapter 40: The Barricade

  Chapter 41: The Vessel

  Chapter 42: The Timepiece

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  _155144341_

  To Mays Al-Wasity Abbas

  Before anyone, you were

  The first reader.

  The first editor.

  And the first to be haunted by Weavingshaw.

  “Tell me how to seek the Saint.”

  The old woman stared at the girl for a long moment, eyes narrowed, shriveled lips pursed. Without lowering her gaze, she inhaled a slow drag from her pipe. “Got a confession, Leena?”

  Leena shrank back, although the emaciated form of the old woman posed no threat to her.

  “Margery…” Leena began, then paused, her conviction dimming. “I only mean to seek him out.”

  Faster than she thought the old woman could move, Margery dug her yellowed nails into the soft flesh of Leena’s forearm. “No one—and I mean no one—goes to see the Saint without a reason,” Margery snarled. “Are you looking for a bit of coin, girlie? Some pretty baubles?” Her grip bruised. “Do not seek him.”

  Leena didn’t respond as, not for the first time, something else had caught her attention. Her gaze flickered to a point past Margery’s shoulder, and she stared at it for a second too long. When Margery turned to look, there was nothing there but peeling papered walls.

  “What are you staring at, girlie?” Margery demanded.

  Leena startled before shaking her head.

  Leena’s eyes roved the interior of Margery’s home, directly abutting her own. Each house was an exact replica of the other—squat and terraced with sparse windows and a barely functioning fireplace, their only source of water an outside pump.

  The old woman had lived here for as long as Leena could remember, the only resident in these clustered spaces of cramped houses who was not an Algaraan refugee. Unlike Leena, whose own parents had fled the Algaraan civil war more than twenty years ago before settling uneasily into Morland, Margery was salt-of-the-earth and Morish through and through.

  Leena did not think the old woman had ventured once out of Golborne, Morland’s capital city, or even farther than the limit of her own house these days, her fluid-swollen legs barely carrying her past her front step.

  Despite Margery’s lack of mobility, Leena never dared question how she seemed to procure a steady stream of Tar.

  Whenever Leena knocked on the old woman’s door, it was always the same picture: Margery hunched over a hookah, her eyes red from the cloying Tar smoke, her blue-veined hands shaking for the next addictive puff.

  “Rami is unwell. He is going to…” Leena trailed off. “I need to see the Saint.”

  “Your brother?”

  It took all of Leena’s strength to force her voice to remain steady, even as terror slithered down her body at the mere utterance of the illness. “He has Sweeper’s Cough.”

  Margery withdrew, leaving half-moon welts on Leena’s skin. “I had it once and barely survived it.”

  Leena knew this, or else she would never have dared enter Margery’s house and invite the sickness into her home. Sweeper’s Cough could only be had once and never again—as long as one survived it. Baba had once said Leena had caught it as a young girl in the refugee camps, and she had been so unwell that the camp overseer had told her mother to start sewing a white burial shroud.

  “So, you see, my worry is justified.” Leena pulled at a stray thread unraveling from the hemline of her skirt. “I must go see the Saint of Silence.”

  “No—even that is not enough.” Margery swallowed harshly. “What secrets can a green girl like you have? The Saint of Silence does not accept schoolroom scandals.”

  Once again, Leena’s eyes flickered to the nothingness behind Margery’s shoulder.

  “Have you not heard the stories that swirl around the Saint?” Margery demanded again, and Leena stiffened.

  Of course she had heard the rumors; everyone had. He was the first of his kind to pay for secrets; the more shameful the divulgence, the higher the price. But even the most trivial of confessions, seemingly useless to anyone, received some coin. So at first, the rest of the cityfolk—Leena included—thought it was an act of charity: another so-called philanthropist who had made his wealth in the factories, or abroad in the wars, and decided to give back. A do-gooder who had arrived suddenly in this soot-ridden city eight years ago and would disappear just as abruptly.

  Although his name was St. Silas, he was often referred to as the Saint of Silence instead—a play on his surname, after the country’s oldest Saint, whose crumbled statues still littered the outside of cathedrals and cemeteries. A Saint who had once granted blessings in exchange for sins back when Golborne was a mere settlement, not a thriving metropolis built of smoke and greed.

  No one prayed to any of the Saints anymore.

  People wanted bread, not sacraments.

  But if this new Saint of Silence, like his former namesake, was willing to offer coins for a few measly secrets—the fool—why stop him?

  It soon became apparent that it was not charity.

  And that he was no fool.

  Rumors began to spring up. Those who confessed to him came back changed, as if despair and terror had carved a home between their eyes. Others—those St. Silas claimed had lied in their confessions—had their tongues cut out. Ribs cracked. A bloodied X sliced through their mouth, the vermilion border of the lips gouged and carved: the scar of the Saint.

  Some never came back at all.

  Leena knew a
ll this, but her heart was already so engulfed with death and loss she could not bear burying a brother. She knew this—and she chose to seek the Saint of Silence anyway.

  Margery saw the change in her face: the subtle lift of her chin, the determination that drew her dark brows in. The old woman lowered her voice. “Do you remember what he did to Mr. Jamil?”

  Leena’s thoughts recoiled at the memory of the man who had once lived a couple of doors down from them. He had also been a refugee, escaping Algaraa at the same time as Leena’s parents did.

  She remembered Baba’s distrust of Mr. Jamil; it was widely known in their small district that Mr. Jamil had been an informant for the Malik’s police back home. Gossip swirled that he’d been the one to turn in his own nephew for hiding illegal pamphlets belonging to the Liberation Party.

  The nephew had been taken, then found a few weeks later, tortured into madness.

  Leena had heard that the Malik had sent Mr. Jamil a slaughtered sheep for his acts of loyalty—a rarity as hunger swept through the country.

  When the war broke out in Algaraa and the Liberation Party rose, Mr. Jamil had fled to Morland in fear of being captured and punished by the rebels for his terrible acts of service to the Malik.

  Baba, ever the revolutionist, had warned Leena and Rami to stay away from Mr. Jamil, stating that those who turned on their countrymen on their own soil would not think twice of doing so in a foreign land.

  Baba was not wrong.

  Leena never forgot the way Mr. Jamil had looked after visiting the Saint of Silence nearly four years ago. They had found him in the morning, a crumpled mess on the stoop. The intersecting X on his mouth shone with blood, his broken body racked with shudders. I didn’t lie, he sobbed as Baba and a few other men carried him into his house. I swear I didn’t lie to the Saint.

  He took to the bottle not long afterward. Hard drink. In one of his drunken stupors, he admitted to Baba that he’d thought no harm would come from telling the Saint of Silence small falsehoods about the neighbors to fill his gnawing hunger.

  By that point, the alcohol had made Mr. Jamil’s belly protrude and the whites of his eyes turn a deep yellow.

  He was dead by the spring.

  “I do,” Leena said steadily, but her head throbbed. “Have you ever sought the Saint of Silence?”

  Margery toyed with the pipe between her fingers. Finally, she nodded. “It wasn’t an act of release for me, though; it was reckoning. It felt like death…” She trailed off, a vague look in her rheumy eyes. “The nightmares that came afterward—he never even touched me—but the very act of confession…like being gutted…left to rot…”

  The old woman took a long, desperate drag on the pipe, her eyelids fluttering from the effect of the drug. “Some say his mother’s a demon.”

  “Demon?” Leena lifted her brows. Spirituality had faded in Morland with the first cropping of factories, leaving sparsely filled church pews in its staid and ghostly cathedrals, but some still clung firmly to their belief in Saints, demons, and curses.

  Algaraans feared evil under a different name. Leena had grown up with stories of jinns, and even now her bedroom was filled with old charms shaped like eyes to ward them away.

  There was not a lot of time in Leena’s life to debate the existence of jinns, demons, or even Saints, but all she knew was that none of them had helped her survive.

  A faint humorous glint crossed Leena’s eyes. “Is he a Saint or a demon? He cannot be both.”

  Margery’s lips thinned. “Do not make a mockery of things you do not understand.” With shaky hands, she pulled an idol necklace from her bodice, her lips muttering a whispered prayer to cast off wickedness. Leena peeked at the small wooden figurine of a woman holding an olive branch. She could not remember which Saint the imagery corresponded with, but the way Margery gripped the effigy made it clear that it brought her some measure of comfort.

  Leena never assumed Margery was religious; fewer people nowadays believed in the old relics. Still, she bowed her head, apologizing for causing the old woman offense.

  “Do. Not. Seek. Him,” Margery rasped again, interrupting her apologies.

  “I don’t have a choice—”

  “You always have a choice. Do not choose wrong.”

  This time it was Leena who grabbed the old woman’s arm, the papery skin fragile in her grip. “I will find him, with or without your help. So spare me and give me some guidance. I cannot waste any more time.”

  Margery regarded Leena for a long moment: the brown Algaraan features, the firm eyebrows, the gaunt cheeks, the dark eyes that could not conceal a single emotion.

  “Your face reveals too much,” Margery whispered, almost to herself. “A lie would look foreign on you. Do not attempt it.”

  “I won’t.”

  The old woman brought a trembling hand to her forehead. “He’s in the Northern Quarters…” Her thin chest rattled with emotion as she detailed the exact directions. She huffed another puff of smoke, a tinge of pink appearing on her wrinkled cheeks, before she continued in a hazy voice. “What isn’t learned in the cradle…”

  “…will be learned too late. Thank you.” Leena rose to leave, but the old woman’s voice stopped her.

  “Do not lie to him, Leena,” Margery warned again.

  Once more, Leena’s gaze focused on the corner of the room.

  Once more, Margery turned to look. Nothing.

  “Mrs. Khalid next door tells me that you’re mad, girlie,” Margery said, peering closely at her. “You have already lost one promising employment due to your…eccentricities. How much further will you allow yourself to fall?”

  Leena had been a lady’s companion, back when her future still had promise. She had fled that life when her circumstances changed and she realized she could not swallow her new oddities. If the aristos had noticed her strange behavior, they might lock her in the asylum. Now, rather than an esteemed lady’s companion, she was the gossip of old crones, the shame of their street, a warning to all immigrant parents about the dangers of overeducating a girl.

  Leena’s eyes blazed. “Until there is no distance left to fall.”

  * * *

  —

  Leena knew the city like the back of her hand, even in twilight.

  After Baba was taken, she’d roamed these streets either looking for a job or searching for Rami. She’d often found her brother in the shadowy corners frequented by the Black Coats. She passed three of them now on the steps of a well-known brothel, slinking around a tired-eyed woman with painted lips, each smoking cigarettes imported from Algaraa.

  The Black Coats stopped their chattering once they saw her, watching Leena as she attempted to move past them as quickly as possible. Rami had once told her that each Black Coat hid a knife in their sleeves, and she kept her head low to avoid attention.

  One recognized her anyway, likely from all the times she’d dragged Rami back home, usually by the collar, while they both hollered at each other.

  “Your brother all right?” the Black Coat farthest to the left shouted, a tall, freckled boy with a cap pulled low over his ears. “Not seen him in a while.”

  Leena didn’t answer, quickening her stride although it caused a stitch in her side.

  The boy continued, his voice now taking a jeering edge. “He’s missed one fight. Mr. Orley won’t be pleased if he misses another.” She felt his gaze burn into her. “Perhaps the boss will take you as payment instead. Lucky man.”

  Leena swallowed, breaking out in a near-run, leaving the Black Coats’ mocking laughter behind. She didn’t stop until she’d reached the small abandoned church that straddled the edge of New Algaraa District. She heaved in lungfuls of air beneath the shattered remains of a stained-glass window, surrounded by the statues of the five Saints, their stone bodies defaced with paint-splattered words: The Saints don’t see us.