The truth was that the countess had no money. She hadn’t the means to pay servants or keep up the house. She certainly didn’t have the money to feed a dozen orphans. And so, occasionally, she would sell one off to a wool merchant who traded frequently with Ketterdam in both legal and illegal goods. She didn’t know where the children went and she didn’t worry too much over it. The wool merchant seemed a kindly sort, and he paid well.
Little Klava knew none of this. But she knew that loving parents did not skulk about like thieves to fetch their children under cover of darkness. And no one was ever permitted at the apricot house, so how would anybody have seen Anya or the other children and decided to claim them? She felt certain that whatever happened beyond the garden wall was not good.
Summer dragged on and the sun beat down on the grounds of the apricot house, turning the roses brown. The noblewoman’s mood grew more prickly as she sweated through her gowns. She took the orphans out to the lake less and less. “You’re boring,” she told them. “Why would my friends want to see you again?”
One morning, three new children arrived at the orphanage—two brothers and a sister, all with silvery blond hair and leaf green eyes. “How alike you are!” the countess exclaimed, happy for the first time in weeks. “Like little dolls. We must have you fitted for new clothes and take you out on the lake.”
Klava watched as the countess turned her cold gaze on the other orphans, the boring, tiresome orphans who did nothing but eat her food and disappoint her. Klava knew it was time to run.
That night, when the house was dark and quiet, Klava told the other orphans she intended to escape the noblewoman’s house.
“Where will you go?” they asked. “What will you do?”
“I’ll find work,” Klava replied. “I’ll live in the woods and eat berries, but I won’t wait for her to make me vanish. I only need to reach the other side of the forest. There’s an old farmhouse there and a widow who knew my parents. She will help me.”
Klava urged them to come with her. She warned the pretty new children that the noblewoman would one day tire of them too. In the end, they decided they would all make their escape.
Out the window the orphans went, one by one, dressed in their apricot velvet, bundled in the blankets from their beds. They went out to the lake and piled into the boat, and they rowed it across the water to the woods. But just as they were entering the trees, they heard shouts of alarm, the barking of dogs. The countess had discovered they were missing.
The children ran, deeper and deeper into the woods, the night crowding in around them as branches snagged their clothing and thorns stung their skin. Klava pushed on, her heart pounding and tears in her eyes, sure there would be no mercy if they were caught, terrified that she had led her friends to their doom—for the darkness was impenetrable now and she knew she had lost her way. They would never reach the other side of the forest. They would never find the farmhouse and salvation.
Through her panting breaths, she prayed to Sankta Alina, a defiant girl, an orphan herself, who had driven back the darkness of the Fold and united Ravka. “Alina the Bright,” she whispered, “daughter of Keramzin, slayer of monsters, save us.”
No sound came, no gentle words of guidance, no chorus of trumpets to lead them on, but through the trees, the orphans saw a gleam of light—violet and blue, red, green, and gold: a rainbow in the night.
Klava followed the arc of the rainbow through the darkness and on to the farmhouse, where the orphans pounded on the door and woke the old widow who lived there. She was startled but happy to see Klava, and she welcomed them all inside. She hid the orphans in the root cellar, and when the countess arrived with her dogs, the widow said she had seen no one the whole night and had been sleeping soundly. The countess was, of course, free to search the property.
The hounds whined and the noblewoman ranted, but the orphans were nowhere to be found. The countess was forced to return to her empty summer home, and without free labor to maintain it, the place soon fell into disrepair, the rosebushes inching closer and closer until they had consumed the house entirely. It’s said the countess was trapped inside and became more thorns than woman.
Some of the orphans journeyed from the farmhouse to seek their fortunes elsewhere, but Klava stayed to help the widow work her fields, and each night she said prayers of thanks to Sankta Alina, patron saint of orphans and those with undiscovered gifts.
THE STARLESS SAINT
A young man lived in Novokribirsk, on the very border of the Shadow Fold. His name was Yuri, and his parents had sent him to live with his uncle, where he could work on the dry docks and make some kind of living. Truth be told, they were delighted their peculiar son had found employment. Yuri had taught himself to read and seemed happiest in communion with the texts he borrowed from anyone willing to lend him a book. While his parents thought it was all well and good to talk of myths and fables and tales from the past, none of that would pay the rent, and they feared Yuri would talk his way into a monastery, leaving his parents to the mercy of time and age.
The work in Novokribirsk did not suit Yuri. He was tall enough, but narrow as a willow switch. His eyesight was poor and he had always been clumsy. The strong men who
