Chapter 48: The Weeping Saint

The Church of the Weeping Saint wasn’t much of a church at all. It was an old granary at the very bottom of the lower district, only two streets away from the tannery, and above its door hung a hand-painted sign of a woman in a black veil with a single blue tear rolling down her face.

By the time Kai and the rest of the group got there in the dim light of early morning, a line already wrapped around the corner of the building and stretched halfway down the block. It was made up mostly of women in tattered black dresses, along with a few elderly men leaning on canes and a handful of small, barefooted children, and every single person in it was holding an empty bowl.

"It’s a soup line," Mira said.

"It’s a really long soup line," Kai said.

[There are 83 people in this line. Many of them are hungry. Some of them are very hungry]

Kai had brought everyone with him this time, because after what the Keeper had told him, nobody was willing to leave his side. Garrick and Sunny flanked him on either side like a pair of giant bookends, Elowen walked right behind him with her sword on her hip, and Mira had held onto his arm the entire walk from Hale’s house. Princess Seris already had her notebook out by the time they reached the end of the line.

"I was expecting something more evil," Princess Seris said, sounding a little let down. "A hidden passage, perhaps, or a dungeon."

"We’ll see," Kai said.

The group was halfway down the line when a loud voice called out from somewhere near the front, and every single person in line turned to look for the source of the noise.

"Sweetheart!" the voice shouted.

Kai’s stomach sank, because he recognized that voice immediately, and when he turned around, he saw the fish woman coming down the line towards him with her big arms spread wide and a huge smile showing off every one of her missing teeth.

"I knew you would come back for me!" the fish woman yelled.

"I didn’t come back for you," Kai said. "I mean, I’m glad to see you, but I didn’t..."

The fish woman scooped him up into a hug that lifted him clean off the ground, and over her shoulder, Kai could see Mira pressing her lips together and Garrick staring up at the sky.

[She is at 9%. She has followed you longer than almost anyone, and she wants everyone in this line to know it]

"What are you doing here?" Kai asked, panting, once she had finally set him back down.

"Same as everyone else," the fish woman said, holding up her empty bowl. "The fish aren’t selling, and the Saint gives food to anyone who’s hungry. She doesn’t ask questions, and she doesn’t make you pray." She leaned in close and lowered her voice to a whisper. "Nobody’s ever seen her face. She stays upstairs behind a black curtain, and if you listen on clear nights, you can hear her crying through the walls."

Kai looked up at the granary and saw that one of the windows on the top floor had been covered over with a heavy black cloth.

"Did you ever hear her say anything?" Kai asked.

"Yes, once," the fish woman said, and her smile dropped a little. "I heard her through the curtain, years ago. She just kept repeating the same thing over and over. I’m sorry, Mother. I’m sorry."

Kai felt a chill run all the way up his spine, and behind him, he heard Sunny draw in a sharp breath.

Elowen stepped up beside Kai and turned her blindfolded face towards the top floor of the building, and she stood there without moving for so long that the fish woman began to look nervous.

"There are two lights up there," Elowen said in a low voice. "Both of them are golden, and both of them are as bright as a fireplace. I have only ever seen one light that bright in my entire life."

"The High Priestess," Kai said.

"Yes," Elowen said. "But there are two of them."

Kai looked over at Mira, and Mira looked at Sunny, and none of them said anything at all, because not one of them had expected to find two High Priestesses inside a soup kitchen.

[Kai, I do not like this]

"Neither do I," Kai whispered. "We have to get up there."

"They will not let us simply walk up there," Sunny said, pointing at the two large men in plain brown robes standing on either side of the door. "Those men are not serving soup. They are guards."

Kai looked at the guards, and then at the line of women in black dresses filing past them, and an idea came to him that was so awful he almost didn’t say it out loud.

"Nobody looks twice at a widow," Kai said slowly.

"No," Mira said immediately.

"I have Lesser Glamour," Kai said. "I can make myself look like one of them for an hour. I’ll walk in, get some soup, and find the stairs."

"The last time you used it on yourself, you turned into a nun," Garrick said.

"That was one time," Kai said.

"It was three times," Garrick said.

Kai ignored him and slipped into the narrow alley beside the granary where no one could see him. He closed his eyes and pictured an old widow in a faded black dress, focusing as hard as he could on gray hair and a hunched back and a wrinkled face, and absolutely nothing else.

"Lesser Glamour," Kai whispered.

Warmth flowed over his whole body, and when Kai opened his eyes, he was wearing a long black dress, which was the good part. The not-so-good part was that it was a nun’s habit, and when he looked down into a puddle at the bottom of the alley, Sister Kaia was smiling back up at him, with long black hair, a white veil, and a face that was almost embarrassingly pretty.

[The spell remembers]

"I hate this spell," Kai whispered.

[It does not hate you. It appears to enjoy you very much]

When Kai stepped back out of the alley, Garrick took one look at him and had to turn around and face the wall, his huge shoulders shaking. Princess Seris’s mouth fell open, and she jotted something down in her notebook and underlined it twice, while Mira just stood there staring at him with a look on her face that Kai couldn’t read at all.

"Why is she so pretty?" Mira asked.

"It’s not something I can control," Kai said, in Sister Kaia’s soft, sweet voice, which only made Garrick shake harder.

"Nobody looks twice at a widow," Mira said flatly. "Everyone looks twice at that."

There wasn’t any time to argue, so Kai grabbed an empty bowl from a pile next to the door and joined the very end of the line, keeping his head down and trying his best to walk like a nun. He heard Mira mutter something under her breath behind him, and then she grabbed a bowl of her own and got in line right behind him, with her hood pulled low over her face.

"I’m not letting you go up there by yourself," Mira whispered.

"You’re not a widow," Kai whispered back.

"Neither are you," Mira whispered.

The guards at the door didn’t give Mira a second glance, but both of them stared at Kai for a very long time, and one of them even smiled at him and took off his hat. Kai smiled back and kept walking, and he could feel Syraphim judging him from the back of his head the entire way.

The inside of the granary was warm and smelled of onions and fresh bread, with long wooden tables lined with people eating, and at the back of the room, a narrow set of stairs climbed up into the darkness. Kai and Mira waited until the man ladling out the soup turned his back, and then they slipped past the tables and up the stairs as quietly as they could.

The top floor was one long room split in half by a heavy black curtain, and from somewhere behind it, Kai could hear someone crying softly. He took a deep breath, grabbed the edge of the curtain, and pulled it aside.

An old woman sat in a wooden chair beside the covered window, wearing a black dress and a black veil that hung down over her face. She was tiny and frail, with thin hands covered in spots folded in her lap, and she was crying quietly, her shoulders shaking with every breath.

"High Priestess Celestine," Kai said, in Sister Kaia’s voice, which kind of ruined the moment.

The old woman stopped crying and slowly lifted her veil. She had to be at least eighty years old, with deep wrinkles across her face and pale blue eyes that were swollen from crying, and she didn’t look the least bit surprised to see him.

"You are the thief," Celestine said quietly. "The one with her voice inside you. I could feel you coming up the stairs."

[Kai. She can feel me]

"Why did you do it?" Kai asked. "Why did you silence them? The Mother, the Moon, the Sea, all of them."

Celestine stared down at her hands for a long moment before she finally answered.

"Because the Mother told me something I could not bear to hear," Celestine whispered. "And so I made certain she could never tell it to anyone else."

Before Kai could ask her what she meant, the door at the far end of the room swung open, and the High Priestess walked in with four guards in brown robes behind her. Her hand was still wrapped in a white bandage, and her eyes hardened the moment she saw Kai standing beside the old woman’s chair.

"Lord Draven told me everything about Sister Kaia," the High Priestess said. "I did not believe a word of it until now."

Then she looked past Kai, at the frail old woman in the chair, and her voice changed completely.

"Mother," the High Priestess said. "Move away from him."