Notes on the Chapter

Harylas - Macedon's capital city
Ecclesia - the part of Macedon's democracy that handles noble and military concerns.
Monokeros - Eden's version of a unicorn—it is carnivorous, and the army wants one because its blood is able to cure wounds.
‘hilts - slang for "sword-hilts," Macedon’s currency; has a raised sword-hilt shape on it.
Kada - POV character; a seven or eight year-old girl living in Harylas. She is a helper in the hospitals, as there is a plague in the city, caused by the infected body of one of Keihyn’s friends who died when he was bitten by a monokeros.

The air was cold outside, and I had no coat. I weighed the risk of theft in my head and decided to take a chance. There was a mullhall leaking warmth onto the street close by me, nearly empty since it was early morning—once the plagued bodies had been dumped in the river, people would venture our in greater numbers. I peeked in and saw a man buying his breakfast—luck! In and out—quick as a tomcat—and I had a thick, pretty cloak safely stowed in my hands before anyone noticed it was gone. I swung it over my shoulders, and my blood warmed. It was soft and black, made out of sheep’s wool. Even my thick tunic didn’t keep out the cold breeze. I ducked into an alley, lightly hopping over a woman lying in the alleyway with milk-coloured skin and wet, rank breath. Her black, rotten tongue lolled out of her mouth, maybe trying to ask me for water. The man whose cloak I’d stolen ran yelling out of the mullhall. He looked in and saw me, but once he saw the sick woman in front of me, he fell silent and only cursed at me before hurrying on without it. Even though Keihyn and Kiar were trying to heal the city, I liked plague. If you knew what you were doing, there were all kinds of luck. When people get scared, they get careless. Jumping back over the sick woman, I hugged my cloak closer and skipped out of the alley. If I was going to be a spy, I needed to be smart, and that meant I needed to know how to survive. Keeping an eye on the streets around me, I sat down on the curb to think. Who got sick first? Old people and babies—people who didn’t have strong bodies. Fine then, I would steal whatever food I needed to stay strong. The people who were poor and dirty and couldn’t afford clean water always died. I could fix that. The river water was freezing cold and full of bodies, but if I bathed upstream where they pumped out drinking water, I could at least get clean. I thought harder. Who never got sick? And immediately, I knew the answer. I flicked the hood of the cloak onto my head and wrapped it tight around me. Then I followed the empty road that led to the hospitals. The White Cloaks was an order of nurses that ran the hospitals. They were wore only white—sheets and sheets of white that they wrapped around themselves, as if they’d put on three or four overdresses over their tunics. The cloth even draped over their heads and necks, like a hooded cloak that didn’t have a hole for the face. The only parts of them that wasn’t completely white were their faces—they all had steel faces—but even under the metal there was a wall of cloth. Their white veils peeked through the eyeholes and mouth-holes of the steel masks. I thought they must be very brave or very good at not getting itchy. Each lady looked just like the dead body of a noble ready to be burned on the pyre, or maybe like a sesame cake slathered in icing. Every one of them looked the same, but if you stared long enough you could see little differences to tell them apart. These White Cloaks were the people who never got sick. I needed to talk to them. * * * Hordes of people with plague were smashing their fists against the door of the hospital, begging to be let in, but the sickness had weakened them all, and none of them could force the door open. I avoided the crowds and climbed onto the roof of the next house over and hopped onto the roof of the hospital. The building was very old and very big, and made of stone. It had a flat roof, like nearly all the buildings in the city, so that they could use the rooftop as an extra room. No one was using it now, since it was so cold. I walked around the roof, looking for a door that would take me inside the building, which was almost twice as big as all the other buildings around it. When I found the door, my hands were too cold and stiff to break the lock, so I used the pin that fastened my cloak to pick the lock. At the bottom of the steps was a supply closet that had used to be a bedroom. No one was around. I walked out and looked for a White Cloak, and I found one in the next bedroom, snoring. I sniffed her—she didn’t smell sick. I pricked her arm with the cloak pin. “Uunhh,” she said. I thought she sounded like a stabbed pig. She sat up and fixed her veil, then put on her mask. The steel face looked at me curiously. “My name is Kada. I want to stay here,” I said. She didn’t say anything at first, trying to get her bearings. I slid out of reach when she tried to touch me. She sat back, defeated, and picked at the sleeve of one of her white glove. Black and reddish stains were all over her veiled hands. She peered at me. “Are you a noble’s child? Are you sick?” I shook my head to both. She sighed and looked around helplessly. I took that as a yes, and before she could say no, I pulled open the door to the closet and invaded it. Most of the robes were for fatter, taller women. I slipped one over my head, and the hem pooled out around me on the floor. The White Cloak wobbled sleepily to the closet. “Well, I suppose we can find you quarters if you work with us at the hospital. We can always use more help.” She lumbered away, still mumbling. “I’ll piece together a set of robes and a mask, for you. Come with me.” I crept along beside her. There were three hospitals in Harylas, and this one was the smallest. But the hallways seemed to go on forever, since the building was so huge. “How old are you, Kada?” asked the White Cloak after a while. “Don’t know,” I said. “Young.” “Let’s see then…” She looked at my teeth and the size of my hands and counted on her fingers. “Seven?” she said, doubtfully. I shrugged and kept walking. Downstairs, we hit the sick rooms. I’d never seen so many sick people, not even in the leper pits. The White Cloaks had organized them in neat rows of bunks—bunks that were four cots high and made the place look like a butcher shop full of rotten black meat piled to the ceiling. It was quiet, too. No one was making any noise at all. The plague ate the softest organs first—like their tongues and vocal cords—but somehow there was no pain right up until the very end, and only then did they scream. I guessed I would start hearing the sickest ones crying while they started to die in the last hours of the night, when the plague got inside their spines. For now, the only sound was people nervously shifting in their beds. The White Cloaks had tied blindfolds on the people who had completely lost their eyes. Some of the others turned their heads to try to look at me. Through the fine, translucent mesh of my veil, I saw that their eyes had all melted together or gone completely black. “Keep walking,” said the White Cloak kindly, but I wasn’t afraid at all. She tried to shield my eyes, but I pushed her hand away. None of the sick people moved much. The plague had made the sickest people’s skin go soft and black (I know, because I touched one of them gingerly with one gloved finger). Everyone else was pale, cold, and wet looking. Some had spots that were a very pretty, violent shade of purple, and if they moved too much, thick scraps and chunks of skin would slide right off them. Black oozed from their lips. It looked like someone had drawn streaks and drips on their mouths with a lead pencil, or like they had been eating ink powder. They couldn’t see me, but their faces searched for me anyway, full of questions and stinking of sickness. I walked ahead of the White Cloak, passing rows and rows and rows of the sick people, and I looked at them carefully. The air hurt my nose, but I breathed deep through my veil and burned the smell into my brain, so that I would be able to tell it from far away when I was in the streets. The White Cloak hurried me on. We walked through four massive rooms of sick people and finally into a room that was clean, even though the smell followed us in. White Cloaks were stretched out on couches and beds, resting and sleeping. There was a makeshift fire-pit and chimney set up near the window, and a bright orange fire was feasting on a pile of black-stained gloves. Every so often, the flames flickered into tongues of strange colours. The White Cloak who had brought me put her hands on my shoulders and stood behind me. “Sisters, this is Kada, a little street-girl. She will be helping us care for the sick from now on.” The women flocked around me like fat white hens and began to talk all at once. I ignored them all, except for the one who had found a needle to hem my oversized cloak. Someone put a steel mask into my hands, and I triumphantly hooked it onto my veil. I was safe from the plague now, or as safe as I could be. All I needed was a plan, an ally or two, and a chance to prove myself. And outside, the scrak-scrak-scrak of the magpies bounced shrilly off the roads, and the plagued city beat on the doors of the crowded hospital.

* * *

Chapter 5, Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5