Shay prickled. This must be one of those Sainted crows. And they’ve what—put it in charge of me?

“I have a spiritual guide, a mentor, and now a keeper, too? A talking bird?”

The crow ruffled his feathers indifferently.

“Let me out!” she shrieked at it. “I’m starving!”

“I cannot,” said Xavir. “And you are not starving. You are merely overcome by the intensity of your transformation. It will pass. Yes, I am your keeper, and I can speak. All corvid hosts can, and rather better than our human counterparts, at that. You shall have oathsworn servants and valeguards as well, once you return to public life. A Silver must have their retinue.”

Hackles raising, Shay lunged forward and snatched at the bird—but it, too, was preternaturally fast. It squawked, flapping backwards, and her claws closed around thin air. Perching precariously atop the lantern on the wall opposite her door, it glared at her beadily.

“You are very rude,” it said.

“What do you mean once I return to public life? How long am I going to be in here? And why? Let me out now,” at the command, Shay intensified her voice’s resonance in the way she had before, the way that had forced even Nicos and Aster, momentarily, to obey her. The crow ruffled its feathers again.

“You will be here as long as you need to adjust, because you are particularly volatile and ravenous. And you should know that I am highly resistant to the Resonance,” it said. “It is why I was assigned to you.”

Shay made a sound between a long growl and a shriek, hands flying up to lodge in her curls as she turned away from the useless creature, pacing to the other side of the room and back again. And again. And again.

The crow fluttered back to its perch in the upper opening of the door.

“If there is anything you require—aside from human flesh, of which you’ve had enough, and ghoul flesh, which you cannot have? Water? Wine? Tea?”

”If you’re Sainted, why don’t you glow?”

”That is a quality of human hosts in particular. So then, there is nothing you require?”

“Bring me a key to open this door,” Shay answered sweetly.

”No.”

“Then bring me a noose to wring your scrawny, useless neck!” Shay lunged for Xavir again, but again he was too fast for her.

“I will not be doing that,” it said primly as it struggled to steady itself atop the lantern. “If there is nothing you require at the moment, we shall now commence with our lessons.”

“Lessons?”

“Yes, lessons.” The feathers about the crow’s neck rose, and it twisted its head momentary around to pick between them. “You have much to learn if you are to live and behave yourself among the Sainted. Regardless of your origin, the family of your future spouse will expect—”

“My future what?” She pressed herself to the door, beating it with a fist as she glared through the opening in its upper half. “My future what now?”

“Spouse, of course,” said the crow, indifferently. “You must be married into the gentry and made one yourself in order to be worthy of your Sainthood. Such things are of great importance to human hosts, there is no dissuading them of it. And as the queen chose you, you must of course have children. There will be a higher chance of their descendants being chosen—descendants with some noble blood, at least—when the day comes that another Silver is needed.”

Shay stumbled back, laughing uproariously.

“I will not be doing that,” she quoted the crow, wiping at her watery eyes as she regained the composure to speak. “I’d eat a noble sooner than I’d marry them.” Her eyes widened as a thought occurred to her, and she looked back up and through the door to Xavir. “Actually, what happens if I eat another Saint? Or a ghoul?”

”You will get sick and die,” said the crow, his beak clipping together between words in a way which leant a dire finality to them.

“I didn’t feel sick when I got that taste of ghoul,” said Shay, who knew better now than to take a Saint at his word. Any Saint. Even a bird one. “I felt powerful.” Unfortunately, that feeling had entirely fled. “I felt amazing.”

“Humans become delirious and giddy in the final throws of the green plague, too,” snipped Xavir. “That does not mean they aren’t still dying. And as to the matter of your marriage—it is very likely that you will be doing that, regardless of what you say here and now.”

“I promise you it’ll be the last thing I ever do,” Shay insisted.

“Then you shall be in this room for a very long time,” said Xavir. “Until your compliance is oathsworn, you may not leave.”

Shay’s face went cold as the blood drained from it. Oathsworn. Could she do it? Take a Saint’s oath and gamble that everything she’d heard about them was a lie, like so much else she used to know? She turned from him to drop back onto the bed, bit down on the duvet, and did a thing that was both groaning and screaming, at once, for a very long time.

“Ahem.” There was an artificial clearing of an inhuman throat from nearby. She’d registered the bird’s entering the room, of course, but her mind was so far away and her emotions so tumultuous that it gave her a start anyway. She hissed through her teeth like a frightened cat, bolting into an upright position to scowl furiously over at the bird where it now perched atop the bedside table. Is it worth it to try to kill it? No, probably not. It didn’t even smell appetizing.

”If you are finished with your tantrum for the moment, we will commence your education.”

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“I’m not finished,” said Shay, flopping back down onto her side. “I’m just doing it quietly, now.”

“Good, then you will hear my teachings,” said the crow.

“Hear, perhaps. Listen, no,” said Shay, her back turned to it.

But as the bird began to speak, she found to her annoyance that she couldn’t not listen. In her transformation, her mind had seemingly both sharpened and expanded, so that she could imagine and scheme all she wanted…all while committing to memory everything Xavir said to her. What was worse, she somehow even found the information interesting. All new information was, now.

Forcing herself up in the midst of the bird’s recitation of what seemed a highly sanitized history of Sainthood, both like but unlike the teachings of scripture, Shay began to pound and beat at the door and yank at the latch, all to no avail. The crow droned on.

Shay circled the room after that for what felt like hours, humming and singing to herself as she examined everything there was to examine, but her hearing was too good. Still she heard and remembered every word of Xavir’s lesson. How the first Saints had seen that the spread of the Mists down below could not be stopped. How they had used their considerable power and wealth to build castles in the sky. To colonize the mysterious, barren floating isles of heaven and bring as many humans there as possible, thereby saving them from the touch of the Mists. Rehashing and yet expanding on all the old dreck she’d been taught before, but now with new significance.

Saints were praised as the saviors of humanity, and in some ways, they were. Now Shay knew that the act had been necessary for their own survival, but Xavir told her—rather flatly—that that alone was not why the Saints had done it. No, not at all. Their highest calling, he said, was to preserve humanity in its original, unmarked state. To steward it. And if they had to cull a percentage as a shepherd might his flock, it was all for the greater good. But they treated their charges well. They could cage them, if they wanted to. Let them live in fear and darkness and eat of them whenever and however they wished. But no, they’d maintained a civilized society. One in which even ordinary humans could live well, or at least well enough, for however long they were fated to live.

The whole of the lesson had one message, and that message was clear: Saints were exalted, noble, divine, just as she’d always been taught, no matter the mechanism of their creation. And that truth must be evident in the baring and behavior of each and every one of them, but most especially her.

After an exceedingly long time—there was no way to tell how long, as the cell had neither clocks nor windows—Shay tired at last. She lay down, tore off her robe, and burrowed bare-skinned between the silky sheets. The crow finally shut up and flapped off, and she fell asleep moments later.

~*~

Shay had not spoken to another human, Sainted or otherwise, in what she was pretty certain had been over a week. The meat her captors sent her was served dead and cold and cut away from its source by a silent, hooded Saint who disappeared as quickly as they arrived, and she was surprised at how quickly she seemed to be going mad. Xavir’s lessons had become the highlight of her day—or at least, the time between sleeps—despite the horrible banality and insincerity of it all.

Hating herself for it more by the moment, Shay drank in the crow’s every word as she chewed her cold meat. As she learned of how nobles were expected to behave, and noble women in particular. The expectations—the many, many, many expectations—that were held of noble wives and mothers, and of Silvers in particular. Those were loftier still, and even more restrictive.

She would have to speak well, in their dialect. To hold herself upright, to entirely obey her spouse and their family, yet still command the respect of the Saints she created. To always eat meat which had been cut away from the body it came from, and at a table with a fork, knife and napkin—though at least it would be served hot. To have oathsworn servants, and to allow them to bind her up in bone-lined corsets, but to bear children, too—as many as she could. And to never, ever, ever interact directly with another living human who wasn’t a Saint. To never attempt escape, to always be grateful. To be a shining, perfect example. A mother to all.

And this, all of it, was what she had to agree to if she ever wanted to be free. To ever again leave the cell or see another person. It was what she had to swear herself to.

Every time she slept, Shay dreamt of fighting ghouls, of feasting on their flesh. Every morning, she awoke drooling, stomach clenched. And on her ninth waking, she felt them—small points of pressure over each of her shoulder blades. Not a painful sensation, but strange. She reached back and to her right to feel a soft bump jutting from one of the spots, about as wide as her thumb was long.

Xavir was there already, perched beside her bed.

“What are these?” she asked, reaching over to prod a matching bump over her left shoulder blade. She’d have gone to the mirror, if there was one. She supposed the Saints didn’t trust her with glass, and she couldn’t blame them. ”What’s happening to me now?”

“They are the buds of your whips. Tentacle or vine-like appendages which will grow in length to roughly one and a half times your height. They are opposable, and at times, spore-baring.”

“Spores?” Shay froze. “The spores which turn people into Saints, right? How do I make them do that?”

“I cannot tell you,” said the crow. “Until you are oathsworn.”

Shay cursed.

“If I could catch you I’d eat you, no matter how bad you smell.”

The crow made a strange chuffing sound which she’d quickly come to know as a scoff.

“It is a good thing you cannot catch me, then. I’m too fine a one to waste, vomited up upon the floor. You cannot digest any flesh but that of humans. And Mistmarked, though they will not nourish you.”

“Mistmarked?” Shay’s interest peaked at once, and she straightened where she sat, still in a twisted nest of sheets, pillows and duvet. “I can eat Mistmarked?”

“You can,” said the crow, almost cagily. “But as I said, you will gain no nourishment from it. Only—” Xavir stopped, chittering his beak. Shay felt that she’d come to know him quite quickly. It was part of why she now thought of him as a him, though the bird had never explicitly declared his sex and it was impossible to tell. If she was right, his unquenchable desire to impart new information was at war with his orders. He had a list, she was sure, of information he was meant to obscure or else avoid sharing entirely.

“Only you will not be harmed, either,” concluded the crow. She couldn’t tell by his scent if he was being deceptive—her heightened sensual understanding of others’ emotions seemed so far to begin and end with humans and human hosts—but she guessed that he was hiding something.

Shay’s scalp tingled with excitement. The bird had said on their first meeting that she would have oathsworn servants and guards. And the only people afforded the honor of serving Saints so closely were Mistmarked. People from down below, born or raised among the Mists. People who’d been changed by them. Was there some secret reason why only they were used? Some reason which might serve her, in turn, once she only had some in her retinue?

More time passed, and she thought of it often. Three more sleeps, three more periods of waking and living in relative isolation and confinement. Three days of weighing equally horrible options. Three days of boiling in her own mounting rage. On the fourth Shay woke as usual, reeling from dreams of feasting on ghoul flesh, stomach knotted with pain, nerves buzzing with frantic, feral energy.

She leapt from the bed and circled the room for what felt like two or three hours until breakfast arrived. Inhaling the cold hunk of human thigh in record time, she tossed the plate through the opening in her door and took some pleasure in the crash it made against the opposite wall. Circling the room some more, she began again to scheme.

By the time Xavir showed his beady-eyed face, she’d made up her mind. She was going to take a calculated risk. And if it didn’t pay off, well—at least she might have the chance to take a few Saints down with her in the process.

“Good morning, crow,” she said. “I’m ready to take the oath.”