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Chapter 1
BryndisKenneallyhadjustslipped between the cool sheets of her bed as night relinquished its hold on the small desert town. The sun was just beginning its trek across the sky as it broke over the horizon, but the familiarity of another day ended when the warning horns rang instead of the typical church bells that announced the beginning of morning service.
The only reason for the city guards to sound the horns was one that made her heart pound as her skin grew clammy. Running to her window, she tripped over her bed sheet, catching herself on the sill and earning a splinter in her palm for it. Her concern was not about the small pain, but about what was happening on a much larger scale down on the street below. Something that rarely happened in their small town, and the last time it had, she’d lost her entire world.
The stifling heat radiating from her window did nothing to stop the chills moving along her skin as she took in what the horns meant.
The gate was opening.
Looking through the dirty window, sand having accumulated along the panes, she watched as the last true member of her family, her cousin Jace, stepped out of the church doors.
Just as her father had done ten years ago.
Her mind moving back and forth between two very different times in her life, she watched Jace, the town doctor, donning the same gear her father had to make the same trek.
The exact same type of mask her father had worn ten years ago on his final journey past the gate slipped over a different face. In a tribute to their god, the leather bull mask was adorned with brass horns that glinted in the sun and one glass eye blacked out in tribute.
That same mask now covered the face of the man who was the last of her family.
Her throat tightened as the same brown hood went up over his blond hair, taking all that identified Jace from the rest away as he became a symbol of the end of Bryn’s world.
Identical to what her father had once worn and died in.
The town scrios, the leader of the Church of Baleros, stepped up next to her cousin and nodded as he affixed his own mask, before pulling the hood of his brown cloak up to cover his salt-and-pepper hair.
The two vastly different-looking men were now indistinguishable from each other after having donned the religious regalia.
Uniformity was the town’s unofficial motto.
The town religion forbade anyone or anything to stand out, which was why their entire world was painted in the dullness of brown and gray. To be different in their community could very well get someone killed should the town decide a person was acting or standing out at the behest of a demon or witch.
Bryn pressed her fingertips against the glass, tracing the path her cousin walked as she prayed. Not to the god that the town would have her worship, but to some unknown higher power. There had to be something, some deity, who was more than what this town indoctrinated their youth to worship.
Someone who welcomed everyone, not just their chosen few.
She watched as the two men, her cousin and the scrios, turned as one and began to walk down the main road of the town. Saints’ Road.
A road she’d walked herself only hours ago.
A road that had a duality to it just as the town itself.
During the day, it was the road the pious walked upon.
A place where families walked the streets for twice-daily church services as their children danced around their parents’ legs. The livestock were moved by ranchers from one side of their town to the other all while shopkeepers pushed their wares.
People like Bryn were forgotten about during these times since there was no place for her and her ilk in the town of religious perfection.
At night was when the sinful, as named by the righteous, roamed Saints’ Road, and Bryn was one of them through no fault of her own.
It was her “fits” as her father referred to them that earned her the title of witch and made her life in Ifreann dangerous, the possibility of them choosing to burn her at the stake always there. Her safety precarious in such a mercurial town.
The day her father made a promise that she would take over his role as doctor when she hit maturity was the day her fate was cemented.
With the first sickness came the fact that it was all too obvious she wasn’t a born healer.
Not when she touched a patient and went into a seizure. At least that was what the town saw and what her father had led them to believe.
No, when she touched a sick patient, she saw andfelttheir death if their demise was imminent.
