The Stolen Saints

Chapter 1: The Cathedral of Bones

The saints never blinked, but Hanna Tarján sometimes felt they watched her.

She knelt on the cold marble floor of the Cathedral of the Hallowed Court, her knees aching against stone that had been polished by a century of genuflecting worshippers. A rag in one hand, a bucket of lye-water at her side, she scrubbed at a dark stain that had appeared overnight near the base of the seventh reliquary. The stain was the color of old rust, and it smelled faintly of something sweet and wrong—like fruit left to rot in a sealed room.

Above her, encased in a crystal coffin held aloft by pillars of carved alabaster, lay Saint Ágota the Merciful. The saint's body was impossibly preserved, her skin the color of pale honey, her hands folded across her chest as though she had merely fallen asleep a hundred years ago. Her lips were slightly parted. Her dark hair, still lustrous, fanned across a silk pillow embroidered with golden thread.

Hanna did not look up at the saint. She never did, not if she could help it.

The Cathedral of the Hallowed Court dominated the center of Göreszvar's capital like a stone fist raised toward heaven. Its nave stretched two hundred paces from the great bronze doors to the high altar, and along each side, set into alcoves of carved stone and lit by perpetual candles, stood the reliquaries of the twenty-three saints. Twenty-three crystal coffins. Twenty-three perfectly preserved bodies. Twenty-three anchors of divine power that—according to the Hallowed Court's doctrine—kept the kingdom safe from plague, famine, and invasion.

Hanna wrung the rag into the bucket and watched the water turn the color of weak tea. The stain was not coming out. If anything, it seemed to have spread since she'd started scrubbing, its edges creeping outward like the roots of some dark plant pushing through the marble.

She sat back on her heels and pressed the back of her hand to her forehead. The cathedral was cold—it was always cold, even in summer—but she was sweating. The smell from the stain had intensified, and now it carried something else beneath the sweetness: a whiff of decay, of meat left too long in the sun.

"You're still at it?"

Hanna looked up. Margit, another servant, stood at the end of the aisle with a broom propped against her hip. She was a stout Királyi woman in her fifties with ruddy cheeks and a perpetually harried expression.

"It won't come clean," Hanna said.

Margit squinted at the stain. "That's new. Wasn't there yesterday."

"No."

"Looks like something's leaking." Margit's eyes traveled upward to the reliquary, and she made the sign of the Court—a fist pressed to the sternum, then opened over the heart. "Blessed saints preserve us. You don't think—"

"I don't think anything," Hanna said quickly. "It's probably just condensation from the crystal. The seasons are changing."

Margit did not look convinced, but she was not the sort of woman who lingered near problems she couldn't solve with a broom. She muttered something about fetching the deacon and shuffled off down the nave, her footsteps echoing in the vast emptiness.

Hanna waited until the echoes faded. Then, very carefully, she leaned close to the stain and inhaled.

The smell hit her like a slap—sweet, cloying, undeniably organic. And beneath it, something else. Something that vibrated at the edge of her awareness like a plucked string. She felt it in her teeth, in her sternum, in the hollow of her throat where sound was born.

She knew that vibration. She had felt it as a child, sitting on her grandmother's lap in a highland cottage while the old woman sang songs that made the fire dance and the rain change direction. Songs in the old Tudori tongue. Songs that were now punishable by death.

Hanna pulled back from the stain as though it had burned her.

She gathered her bucket and rag and stood, ignoring the protest of her knees. She would report the stain to Deacon Tamás and let someone else deal with it. She was a servant. A Tudori servant in the Királyi capital, which meant she was already watched more closely than anyone else in the cathedral's employ. She could not afford curiosity. She could not afford to feel the old magic stirring in her blood like a half-remembered song.

She was halfway down the nave when she heard it.

A sound. Not a sound, exactly—more like the memory of a sound, or the space where a sound should have been. It came from behind her, from the direction of Saint Ágota's reliquary, and it was the saddest thing Hanna had ever heard. A single note, sustained and trembling, like someone crying out from behind a wall of glass.

Hanna stopped walking. Her hand tightened on the bucket handle.

Don't turn around, she told herself. Don't listen. You're imagining it.

But she wasn't imagining it. She could feel the note in her bones, resonating with something deep inside her that she had spent her entire adult life trying to silence. The fragment of song her grandmother had planted in her was responding, vibrating in sympathy like a string tuned to the same pitch.

Hanna closed her eyes. Her lips parted. And before she could stop herself, she hummed.

It was barely a sound—a breath given shape, a whisper of melody that lasted no more than two heartbeats. But in the vast acoustic space of the cathedral, it carried. It rolled down the nave and echoed off the vaulted ceiling and found the reliquary of Saint Ágota the Merciful, and for one impossible moment, the note from behind the glass and the hum from Hanna's throat braided together into something that made the candle flames lean sideways.

Then silence.

Hanna opened her eyes. Her heart was hammering. She looked around wildly, but the cathedral was empty. The candles had righted themselves. The saints lay motionless in their crystal coffins.

She fled.

---

The servants' quarters were in the cathedral's undercroft, a warren of low-ceilinged rooms that smelled of damp stone and tallow. Hanna shared a room with three other Tudori women—all of them highland-born, all of them working in the capital because there was no work left in the highlands. The Királyi conquest had broken the highland economy along with everything else.

Hanna sat on her narrow cot and pressed her hands together to stop them shaking. The other women were still at their duties. She was alone, and she was grateful for it, because she needed to think.

She had hummed. In the cathedral. Near a reliquary.

If anyone had heard her—if anyone had recognized the melody as Tudori—she would be arrested. Tried. Executed, most likely, though the Hallowed Court preferred the word "purified." They burned witches in Göreszvar. They had been burning them for a hundred years.

Hanna's grandmother, Eszti, had not been burned. She had died in her bed in a highland village, old and frail and largely forgotten by the authorities who had once hunted women like her. But she had lived in fear every day of her life after the conquest, and she had passed that fear to Hanna along with the fragments of song.

"You have the voice," Eszti had told her, near the end. Her own voice had been a ruin by then, cracked and whispery. "The breath is in you. But you must never let them hear it, Hanna. Promise me. They took everything else. Don't let them take your voice too."

Hanna had promised. She had kept that promise for twelve years, through her journey south to the capital, through her years of service in the cathedral, through every moment of every day when she felt the old magic pressing against the inside of her throat like a bird beating its wings against a cage.

Until today.

She pressed her fingers to her lips and tried to understand what had happened. The sound from the reliquary—that wasn't possible. The saints were dead. They had been dead for a century. They were holy relics, preserved by divine grace, silent and serene in their crystal coffins.

But the sound she had heard was not serene. It was anguished. It was the sound of someone trapped.

Hanna shook her head. She was imagining things. The stress of the stain, the smell, the change of seasons—it was all playing tricks on her mind. She would go back to work. She would keep her head down. She would not hum.

She was still telling herself this when the door to the undercroft banged open and Margit appeared, red-faced and breathless.

"Hanna. The Bishop wants to see you."

Hanna's blood went cold. "The Bishop?"

"Not him directly. One of his knights. There's been an incident with the seventh reliquary. They're questioning everyone who was in the nave this morning."

"I was just cleaning—"

"I know. That's what I told them. But they want to talk to you specifically." Margit's expression was caught between sympathy and the particular Királyi discomfort that arose whenever a Tudori servant attracted attention. "Just answer their questions and keep your head down. You'll be fine."

Hanna nodded. She stood, smoothed her rough servant's dress, and followed Margit up the stairs into the light of the cathedral.

She would be fine. She had done nothing wrong.

Except she had. And somewhere deep in her chest, the fragment of her grandmother's song was still vibrating, still reaching for the voice behind the glass.