“Esthió.”

  Spitting out the husk of a dried berry, Yiorgos tossed a leaf-wrapped bundle to Marcus and made a gesture of chewing. “Eat. Tell your friend to eat too.”

  “Look here, young man,” Landrad started, riding up to his side with a scowl. “Just because you are protected by the Church does not mean you can show discourtesy and expect to get away with it. I’ll have you know that insolent soldiers like you in the royal guard would have been immediately thrown in—”

  “Landrad,” Marcus interrupted, handing him the bundle of dried berries after taking one for himself. “You know that the boy is not familiar with our ranks. Leave this matter aside and follow his instructions.”

  “…understood, Captain,” Landrad muttered, crushing a dried berry between his teeth while he fell back to the rear of the group.

  “You,” he continued, regarding the Tempr with a calm, steady gaze. “Your name is Yiorgos, is it not? How old are you?”

  Yiorgos took up his nce and raised it high, allowing the Tempr’s gonfalon to unfurl in the wind.

  “When Herma?os comes, I turn seventeen.”

  Marcus raised a brow. “I didn’t know the Temprs hired sixteen-year-olds as their squires.”

  “Sfalerós. I joined the Order when I was fifteen,” Yiorgos corrected, “after I defeated my master in a joust.”

  “You must be an exceptional cavalier, then,” he said. “But why join the Temprs at your young age? The Crusade had already ended before you were able to pick up a sword, and you don’t strike me as an ardent believer in our Goddess.”

  “To atone for my mother’s sins.”

  “Sorry?”

  Yiorgos offered a slight smile. “Do you know what this isnd used to be called, Mr. Captain?”

  Marcus paused, turning to look at the crescent-shaped bay beneath the cliffs. “Macarius—or in your nguage, Makários. Why do you ask?”

  “Makários, yes. The Blessed Isle.” He pointed at the sea glistening in the distance. “My mother told me the legend of Makários once. That this isnd is reserved for those who had lived thrice, and proved themselves pure in all three lives before the elysian gods. That every human who is born here is created with a clean heart, and if they sin, they must throw themselves into the sea three times to repent. If not, their souls are condemned and can never be reborn as a human again.”

  “You speak of a dangerous thing, boy,” Marcus murmured, gncing over his shoulder to make sure Landrad was out of earshot. “I’m aware that the natives here believed in the cycle of birth and death…but you, of all people, ought to know that this is bsphemy. Everyone knows that if reincarnation truly exists, there is no need for a Goddess to purify our sins.”

  Yiorgos shot him a sideways gnce. “As I told you, Mr. Captain, this is simply the legend of an isnd that no longer is. Besides, I’m too young to know life before the Crusade came to our shores.”

  He popped another berry into his mouth and chewed cautiously.

  “…but my mother wasn’t. She disrelished the Temprs and the religion they preached. Hypocrites, she called them, who taught about the Goddess but did not love Her. Who professed themselves as righteous servants of Lumina, but took the lives of innocents like my father without a hint of remorse.”

  “And one day, she finally decided to avenge my father’s death,” Yiorgos continued in a low voice. “She took up a dagger, walked into the middle of a congregation, and murdered the prete in front of his believers. Then, she stabbed herself in the throat and desecrated the Goddess’ portrait with her blood.”

  Marcus swallowed the bile rising in his throat. “How…are you so calm talking about this, boy?”

  “In your religion’s eyes, my mother committed a great sin, did she not?” The boy gave him a bnk stare. “Why should I concern myself with the death of a sinner?”

  “B-but, still—”

  “And you’re forgetting something important, Mr. Captain,” Yiorgos interrupted, shaking his head. “My mother did not believe that a Goddess in the skies could grant us ‘salvation’. She believed that we atone for the sins of our past life in the next reincarnation.”

  Before Marcus could muster a reply, the Tempr turned to the mountains and pointed to a column of smoke rising from the crest of a nearby hill.

  “That’s the vilge of the kataraménos,” he said, guiding his steed up the incline. “Earlier, I told you that kataraménos means ‘the damned’. That is the literal meaning, of course, but it carries a slightly different meaning in our legends.”

  Marcus spurred his horse forward to catch up. “What is it?”

  “They are not cursed by the Goddess, Mr. Captain,” he expined. “They are cursed by the memories of their past lives.”

  Landrad, riding behind them, let out a scoff. “Sounds like superstition.”

  Yiorgos didn’t turn. “Their memories torment their minds every night, reminding them of the sins they have committed in their past lives over and over again. The more past lives they remember, the more cursed they become.”

  “And this girl you seek, Seraphina—” he fshed a tense, almost grim smile “—she was the most accursed of them all.”

  The horses descended the hill at a careful trot, hooves crunching over brush and dry grass. Down below, the vilge came into full view: a cluster of aging stone houses with thatched roofs, fnked by wilted orchards and half-dead fields. No children pyed in the streets. No farmers tilled the nd. An eerie stillness hung over it all—heavy and suffocating.

  Landrad sniffed the wind, which carried a peculiar smell of ash and charred wood. “Are you sure this is the pce?”

  “Where are the vilgers?” Marcus asked, hands clutching the reins tightly to keep them from trembling.

  “Most only come out after dusk,” Yiorgos said cryptically. “For in the daylight, they cannot bear to witness what they have become.”

  The two royal guards exchanged an uneasy look as they reached the edge of the vilge. Yiorgos dismounted first and strode towards the nearest house, knocking on its crooked wooden door three times.

  A pause followed. Then, the door creaked open an inch, revealing the wary eyes of an old woman behind a bck veil. Yiorgos leaned in slightly, speaking in a low, pcating voice that was too soft for Marcus and Landrad to catch. After a brief exchange, the woman’s eyes darted to them before she handed Yiorgos a key and closed the door firmly shut.

  He returned and nodded towards a narrow path leading deeper into the vilge, fnked by crumbling walls and overgrown hedges.

  “Viasyni.”

  As they followed Yiorgos, Marcus couldn’t help but notice how unnatural the silence felt—as though the very air they breathed in had been drained of life. Ahead, the sun hung low, casting long shadows that spilled down the hillside like bck mud.

  Yiorgos reached the final house—a squat stone cottage with ivy choking its sides and a bckened, crumbling chimney—and came to a stop.

  “That’s the one.” He passed the key to Marcus. “Five minutes. Or else trouble will come.”

  Marcus gave him a short nod, then stepped forward, followed closely by Landrad. The wooden gate let out a low whine when Marcus unlocked it and pushed it open. The air grew colder the moment they crossed the threshold of the yard, as if the house itself exhaled a chill.

  The front door was already ajar, revealing a dim and musty interior. The scent of old ash and dust hung thick in the air. Shards of broken crockery littered the floor, and a once-elegant tapestry hung torn on the far wall.

  “May Lumina bless us,” Landrad muttered, hand resting near the hilt of his sword. “To think that the future Queen hailed from such a wicked pce.”

  Marcus didn’t find it in himself to rebuke his lieutenant. His eyes scanned the room—taking in every sign of absence, of loss, of something left unfinished.

  “Landrad, what do you think?”

  “What do I think?” The man cursed under his breath. “I think it is a terrible mistake to come here, Captain. There’s nothing left to investigate.”

  “Precisely.” He pointed at the mountain of ash in the firepce. “Seraphina must have taken everything she needed and burnt the rest before she departed. But it looks like she had to do it in a great haste, don’t you think?”

  “I guess so…” Landrad scratched his head. “Even though a little ash is beneficial for keeping a fire going, too much will kill it prematurely.”

  “Which means there’s a possibility she didn’t manage to burn everything,” Marcus concluded, bending down over the hearth and sifting through the ash. “Grab something to dig, Landrad.”

  “Yes, Captain!”

  Landrad brought over the broken leg of a chair and quickly got to work, sweeping piles of spent ash and coal away from the hearth while Marcus felt around for something left unburnt.

  “Hm?”

  He pulled out a scrap of what felt like parchment from the ash and stood up, shaking the dust off to examine it.

  “Landrad, do you know what this is?”

  Landrad tossed the chair leg aside and peered at the scrap. “What nguage is this written in? I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

  He pointed at the tiny lines of text scrawled all over the paper. “But if I had to hazard a guess, Captain, it looks like a page from some kind of scripture. There is no reason to write this many words on a single page otherwise.”

  Narrowing his eyes, Marcus carefully pocketed the scrap and turned to leave. “Do you know anyone who can transte this?”

  “I’d say the Church, but they will most certainly refuse to transte anything that resembles apocrypha.” Landrad shrugged as he followed him out of the house. “You can try asking a witch for help, but that is also a problem in and of itself…”

  Marcus curled his lips into a tight smirk.

  “A witch, you say?”