Burning Glass (2 page)

I
CLUTCHED THE CARVED FIGURINE OF THE GOD
DESS UNTIL A
splinter of wood bit my finger. The sting was only a fraction of the pain I felt—pain that wasn’t entirely my own. “You shouldn’t be letting her bleed.”

Sestra Mirna startled, whirling around with wide eyes. When she saw it was only me, her face settled back into its complex array of sags and wrinkles. “Sonya, what are you doing here?” She pressed a bandage to the crook of Yuliya’s arm. “Novices aren’t allowed near the diseased.”

Ignoring her, I crept farther into the convent infirmary.

I breathed through my mouth to avoid the stench of sickness in the air, lifted the hem of my nightgown, and tiptoed around the blood spatter on the floor. Despite the coldness in the rest of my body, the heat from the fireplace stung my eyes, and the tiles near the hearth baked the soles of my feet.

I pulled my shawl closer across my chest and peered around
Sestra Mirna. A notched porcelain bowl rested on Yuliya’s bedside table. Blood skimmed its highest measurement line. My friend’s eyes were closed and her ginger hair lay plastered against her bone-white face. I swallowed. “There must be another way to treat her. She doesn’t have any more blood to lose. Have you seen her legs? She cuts herself.” I winced as the figurine’s splinter dug deeper past my skin.

“It’s her emotional release,” Sestra Mirna said, and rubbed her brow with the back of her hand to avoid her stained fingers. She wasn’t careful enough. A smear of blood marred the kerchief tying her gray hair away from her face. “You would do well to find one, too.” Two harsh lines formed between her brows. “Perhaps then you would be able to refrain from sneaking into forbidden wings in the dead of night.”

I pinched my lips and curled my toes, fighting to keep my frustration at bay. I wanted self-control without cutting myself like Yuliya, pulling the hair from my head like Dasha, or weeping night and day like Tola. Besides, my frustration wasn’t entirely my own. I must be allowing Sestra Mirna’s emotions to nest inside of me.

“I came to give Yuliya this.” I held out the figurine of Feya while keeping my shawl together with one hand against the chill. My time with the Romska had dispelled any religious notions I’d had, but Yuliya was even more devout than the sestras of the convent. I hoped seeing the goddess of prophecy and Auraseers nearby would give her strength to recover from the ague.

As I watched the faint rise and fall of her chest, I bit my
trembling lip. The rattle of her breath was too soft, her pulse too slow.

The truth was
I
needed Yuliya to be better. I couldn’t endure this place without a friend, without someone to make me smile and tell me stories into the long hours of the night.

Sestra Mirna took the figurine and the lines on her face softened, changing pattern. The frustration inside me also faded, though I grew colder as she reached up to set the goddess on the frost-rimmed windowsill, all the while keeping her hold on Yuliya’s bandage. Outside, the snowfall kept its steady torrent.

My stomach rumbled. Sestra Mirna must be famished. When had she last allowed herself a meal or a moment’s rest? Little Dasha and Tola, fast asleep in their beds on the other side of the room, had regained some of the color in their skin, and many of our peers had been excused from the sick wing after recovering from the epidemic. But Yuliya kept declining.

When Sestra Mirna began murmuring prayers to the goddess, I took advantage of her eased guard and sat beside Yuliya, my dark-blond braid falling over my shoulder. If my hair were any longer, it would have brushed her bloodied arm.

My gaze traveled to her lifeless hand. Did I dare touch it? Sestra Mirna would make me leave at once if I so much as whimpered with Yuliya’s pain. Still, I wished to give my friend my vitality, even if such a thing wasn’t possible, even for an Auraseer. All we were good for was divining what others felt. An agonizing way to live and a pitiful existence. Being born with the gift meant becoming the property of the Riaznin Empire
and being trained in this convent for one purpose only—to protect the emperor. Most girls involuntarily revealed their ability when they were old enough to learn their letters but too young to control their feelings. Evading the empire until the age of seventeen was unheard of until eight months ago when the bounty hunters had brought me through the convent’s doors.

“I’ve brought you your idol,” I whispered to Yuliya. Halfheartedly, I waited for her eyes to open. Once we’d played at trading the color of our irises, her sapphire blue for my hazel. “I’ll give you mine,” she had said. Yuliya was the only girl at the convent who dared to befriend me. “The girl raised by gypsies,” the others would whisper when they thought the stone walls of the corridors wouldn’t carry their voices. Little did those Auraseers know Yuliya and I would sneak into their rooms at night and guess at the dreams they were having.

Our games taught me more about my ability than any of the sestras’ fruitless exercises for separating what I felt from what everyone else did. At least Yuliya believed in me. She had a way of making me feel her equal, despite being two years older. Even if she outlived the other Auraseers and became guardian to the emperor herself, I trusted I could always depend on her genuine friendship. That was why she
needed
to live, why I ached to give her some means of healing, instead of a lump of wood depicting a nonexistent and powerless goddess.

“You’re trembling.” Sestra Mirna’s attention returned to me, her wrinkles twisted with the shape of worry.

I shrugged a shoulder. That strange and still-present hunger
gnawed inside me. “Yuliya must be cold.”

The sestra’s wrinkles deepened. “Yuliya has a fever.”

“Then you must be cold,” I said while she felt my brow.

She was no Auraseer, but her sharp gaze seemed to look through me.

Unease prickled the downy hairs of my arm. “I am cold?” I didn’t mean for my voice to sound small or my words to be a question. Because I was more than cold. Deep in the pit of my stomach, an unknown something was forming and clawing its way through the rest of me. Worse than hunger, it made my hands clench with urgency, my jaw lock with an angry need, my eyes mist over with helpless desperation.

“This room is a furnace, child.” Sestra Mirna frowned. “And your skin is like ice.” Her wrinkles crisscrossed into fear. I felt fear, too, its force thudding my heart against my rib cage.

“Am I ill?” Perhaps she was right; I shouldn’t have come to the infirmary. But I’d had the ague last winter at the Romska camp, so I thought myself immune.

She stood and released the pressure from Yuliya’s arm. “Hold this,” she commanded.

For a brief moment, I hesitated, watching the blood pool from my friend’s inner elbow. Then I inhaled, squared my shoulders, and pressed the flat of my palm to Yuliya’s bandage.

At once my muscles cramped, my spine rounded, my breath spilled out in a ragged gasp. A weak but determined longing seeded in my chest. A fight to live. Pure and simple.

Sestra Mirna squinted out the window. Warm light danced
across her face. I mistook it for the glow of the candle bouncing its reflection off the glass. Until the sestra’s weathered lips parted in horror. “Feya, protect us,” she whispered, and made the sign of the goddess by touching two fingers to her forehead, then her heart. “They have come.”

Her fear—my fear—perhaps
both
our fear—collided.

“Who?” I angled my position in an effort to see what she could. “What is happening?”

When she didn’t answer, my trembling doubled and the yearning in my belly grew teeth. I needed to eat. Now. Something. Anything.

I slackened my hold on Yuliya’s arm. Blood trickled between my fingers. It almost looked the color of wine. Staring in fascination, in desire, I raised my hand near my mouth to smell it.

Basil burst into the room. The old man bent over, hands on knees, panting to catch his breath.

I blinked at the blood and wiped it off onto my nightgown.

“Peasants . . . at the gates,” he managed to say between rasps. His bald head gleamed with a sheen of sweat. “A mob—no, more like an army—of them.”

I took a step to the window, but caught myself as I remembered Yuliya’s arm. “What do they want?”

Sestra Mirna’s shriveled lips pressed into a flat line. “What they always do when they bring torches and every sharp implement they farm with—our food.” She looked back at me, her gaze skimming me over. “Let me guess, you’re not only cold now?”

In response, my stomach emitted a vicious growl.

Her eyes narrowed on my mouth. “What is that?” She stepped closer. “Did you taste blood?”

I shrank back. “No.”
Did I?

In an instant, her countenance changed. “Basil, take her away this moment. Lock her in the east wing with the other girls. She is a danger to us with so many emotions on the loose.”

I pressed the crook of Yuliya’s arm with renewed purpose. “I’m not leaving.”

The sestra yanked me to my feet. My shawl fell to the tiles smattered with Yuliya’s blood. “You must accept your fate and at least
try
to control your ability.” She gripped my shoulder. “You put us all at risk!”

I winced, the hurt registering deep in my chest. “I would never harm Yuliya.” I struggled to reach her bleeding arm again, but Sestra Mirna held me fast.

“Do you know what starving peasants are capable of?” Her gaze bored into mine. “Shall I tell you of the three widows from my village who lured strangers across their threshold, only to poison them and eat the flesh off their bones?”

My hunger briefly subsided as my gut roiled with nausea. “My caravan heard that same story spread from town to town. It’s a folktale. No one would resort to that.”

Her graveness settled over me and rooted my legs to the floor. “You are wrong, Sonya. This is the fourth harsh winter in Riaznin. You survived with the Romska because you traveled south. We survive here in Ormina by the grace and rations of the emperor. The peasants have nothing.”

My mouth watered and the animalistic hunger inside me drifted to thoughts of the convent’s pantries and cold storage cellars, fit to overflowing. “We have more than we need. We should help them.”

Sestra Mirna’s eyes went flat and transformed the cold in my veins to ice. “Basil, take her
now
.” She shoved me at him and threw my shawl after me.

Faint cries pierced the air as the peasants advanced nearer. My knees shook, threatening to give way. “Please, please, I beg you.” I looked between Sestra Mirna and Basil. “Just a few loaves of bread. If you could feel—”

“Enough!” She escorted me to the door herself, where Basil took my elbow by a gentler hold.

From the far side of the room, Tola and Dasha awoke in their beds. They felt the mob, too. I knew it. Tola’s face was tear-stained as she moved to Dasha’s bed, where the younger of the two little girls clutched her hair at the scalp.

“Once she is locked in the east wing,” Sestra Mirna said to Basil, “barricade the front door. Are the gates reinforced?”

The old man nodded. “I hope it will be enough. With any luck, the wolves will come before the peasants find a way to break through.”

I gaped at him. “You wish the wolves to devour them because they are hungry?” Basil’s floppy ears and close-set eyes always made him appear sweet. But even he had no pity. “What a horrible thing to say.”

“Not another word!” Sestra Mirna said. New lines of fury
carved paths across her wrinkled face. With her emotion escalating inside me, it was all I could do not to strike out at her. I’d never seen her so unraveled. She wasn’t quick to anger, but tending to the sick night and day over the past weeks had pushed her to extremes. “Latch your mind onto someone else’s aura and forget the peasants!” Her nostrils flared. “Your unrestrained empathy will be the ruin of us all!”

Before she could see the tears spring to my eyes, she slammed the door. I clenched my hands. It was no matter that she didn’t know how she hurt me. My unshed tears weren’t for her. They belonged to the freezing swarm of people pressed against the convent’s gates.

As Basil haltingly led me to the east wing, I dug my hands through my hair and clawed at my arms, fighting not to lose myself to the aura of the mob. Their relentless desperation pulsed through my body. They weren’t just hungry. This famine would destroy them, body and soul. It was a pain worse than death if I didn’t feed my children, my village. No,
their
children,
their
village.

I flinched and whimpered as Basil dragged my weight through corridor after corridor. The peasants’ single purpose throbbed through my skull until there was no difference between us. Until I was one with them. Until everything became as clear as polished glass.

I formed the only barrier between them and their need.

I was more than the mob. I was the convent gate.

My bones were its welded iron.

I could open my doors. Let them in.

I alone could help them.

With a sidelong glance at Basil, I sized him up, as if seeing him with new eyes. He startled at every shadow, every noise. A mouse could overtake him. He wouldn’t stand in my way.

I scanned the dark alcoves for something with which to incapacitate him. A candlestick for a blow to the head. A length of rope or a sturdy chair.

The entrance to the east wing loomed nearer. Six or seven girls near my age huddled together around the light of a candle—Nadia’s candle. The senior Auraseer was only nineteen and already a master of controlling her ability. Every measure of her ink-stained skin proved her skill. She marked herself when she needed release, and the sharp cut of her quill made the etches permanent. In the last weeks, when the ague had claimed the lives of her elder Auraseers, Nadia did not weep with the rest of us. Instead, she accused me of bringing the disease from the “filthy gypsy camps.” Even if that were true, which it wasn’t, it only gave her cause to rejoice. With her elders now dead, she was next in line to serve the emperor, and that pride showed in the stiff elegance of her neck and the precise way she balanced her head upon it.