The screaming began at Compline. Sister Ava's wails tore through the dormitory, a serrated sound that sent rats skittering into walls. The children stumbled into the chapel, nightshirts fluttering like moth wings, to find the Virgin Mary weeping resin tears from hollow sockets. Her shattered eyes—cobalt glass shards—lay trampled underfoot.
"She mourns your wickedness!" Sister Ava clutched her rosary as if it were a lifeline thrown to drowning flesh. "Repent! Repent before her sorrow smothers us all!"
The children knelt, pressing foreheads to cold flagstones. Lila mimed their murmurs—Forgive us, Holy Mother—while studying the damage through tangled hair. Her handiwork was pristine: the left eye fractured cleanly, the right clawed out in a mimicry of divine wrath. I gave you tears, she thought, so weep for the girls he's ground to dust.
The Headmaster materialized at dawn, his Bible clutched like a butcher's cleaver. "Sacrilege," he intoned, the word a funeral bell. "Mary's gaze shielded this house. Now? We bleed darkness."
His sermon slithered through the Psalms—the lamp of the body is the eye—as he announced the new austerity: gruel thinned to gray water, stockings unmended, bath slops reused. "Fasting purifies," he said, though his waistcoat strained over stolen feasts. "Our sisters in Toulon suffered worse during the Visigoths' heresy."
Lila's belly growled. She bit her tongue until copper silenced it.
He erected the confessional at noon—a cupboard reeking of black mold and mouse carcasses. One by one, children were herded inside.
The Headmaster's shadow loomed behind the confessional lattice, malformed by the warped wood. Incense choked the air, a cheap mask for the stench of mildew and sacramental wine gone sour. One by one, the children knelt on splintered kneelers, their whispers dissected through the grate.
"Speak your transgressions," came the command, silk-soft. "Let the Lamb's blood dilute your filth."
The Confessions:
Child 823 (pockmarked, left ear half-gone from a rat's feast):
"I… I dreamt of stealing cheese. A whole wheel, Father. Gouda."
Silence. Then: "Penance: Seven Hail Marys. In Gaelic."
Child 11 (waxen, coughing into a fistful of her own hair):
"I disturbed Vespers. My lungs—they're full of thorns, I think."
A ledger snapped shut. "Penance: No broth until Sunday. God prefers silence."
Child 86 (snow-pale, pupils blown wide from night terrors):
"I saw a demon, Father. After the nightmare. It crawled from the coal chute—petite, no face, just… hands. Like spades. And its feet—"
The grate rattled. "What else?"
"It took Rosary beads from Trinh's bunk. Slid them into its mouth. I hid in my crate until matins."
A pause. The sound of a match struck. "Penance: Forty lashes. Demons feast on cowards."
Lila pressed her scarred palms to the lattice, still tacky with blood from the glass shard's bite. The Headmaster's breath fogged the screen, sour as butchered meat.
"Forgive me, Father." Her voice a threadbare hymn. "I neglected prayers. Balked at scrubbing latrines. Fostered… disobedience."
A rustle of broadcloth. "Is that all?"
"Yes, Father."
"Not tempted by the tunnel again?" The word tunnel slithered out, a venomous eel. "You've a pilgrim's itch, Child 47. A wanderlust."
Lila flexed her ruined hands, the ache a catechism. "Sin's poultice is punishment, Father. You taught me that." A beat. "The welts still sing."
He leaned closer. She glimpsed the glint of his cane's silver wolf-head pommel. Elise's initials—E.V.—scratched beneath its jaw.
"Go," he hissed. "But mark me—Mary's eyes weep for the wicked. Even in the dark."
Two weeks later, workmen arrived. Their hammers sang as they poured concrete down the chapel grate—a thick, stinking slurry that filled Elise's tunnel. The Headmaster watched, a gaunt sentinel, as the last inch vanished.
"Rats' nest," he told Sister Ava, flicking a speck of gray from his cuff. "Sealed."
Lila, scrubbing psalms into the refectory floor, hummed Au Clair de la Lune.
The Feast of Hollow Kings.
Three died first. Child 93, (wracked with malaria) Child 38, (mute, gaunt as a twig-carcass). Child 26, (who'd once recited Dante in his sleep). Their bones pressed sharp against chapel mattresses, their gruel redistributed to the still-breathing. Fate, the Headmaster called it—that extra spoonful of weevil-specked oats rationed to those who licked his boots clean after Compline. But when the fast stretched into its fourth week, even sycophants began to fold.
Child 09 watched them wither. He perched on the dormitory's lone intact stool, golden hair catching gray light like a tarnished crown. Seventeen, untouched by hunger, he split his rations between Child 13—a blunt-faced brute with knuckles mapped by old fractures—and Child 15, whose wire-framed spectacles balanced on a scholar's nose. They flanked him like twisted heraldry, gnawing crusts with animal haste.
"Crown Prince of Maggots," the others hissed. Jealousy curdled to reverence overnight. Some claimed his mother was a baroness, her carriage lost in a bog. Others whispered the Headmaster kept him plump for darker trade—unblemished goods fetch higher tithes at the Osnabrück market.
Lila starved honestly.
While the infirmary swelled—Child 30's fevered moans, Child 71's rattle-breath—she knelt on stone, eyes fixed on the Virgin's hollow sockets. Blessed Mother, fill my belly with faith. She counted her ribs like prayer beads. Thirty days. Thirty-one. By the fortieth dawn, the ache had crystallized into something holy. When Child 47 (herself) did not die, even Sister Ava crossed herself.
The fast broke only when the infirmary's pallets overflowed. Twelve gaunt forms were hauled upright, force-fed tinctures of stale rye and gunpowder.
"Providence," the Headmaster announced, as though God's hand had restocked the larder. His own waistcoat buttons strained, waxed with goose fat.
Three months passed.
Then: hooves.
The carriage clattered through St. Agatha's gates at dusk, crimson lacquer peeling to reveal rotted wood. A driver with a walrus mustache whipped the horses raw, their froth flecking the cobbles. The children pressed to the grime-caked windows.
"The badge," breathed Child 11, her cracked lips splitting. "Look—wheat and honey."
Murmurs rippled. Farmers' Association. A guild flush enough to pay the Headmaster's "sponsorship dues." Their last visitor wore magistrate robes and left with Elise.
Lila lingered at the stairwell, watching Child 09 smooth his shirt. His collar, she noticed, was freshly darned.
"Saviors," he muttered. The word soured on his tongue.
Child 15 adjusted his spectacles. "Better than ploughmen. At least these ones bathe."
But Lila caught the stench wafting from the carriage—not earth and seed, but ammonia and burnt sugar. The kind that clung to surgeons' aprons in quarantine wards.
As the Headmaster strode forth, she peeled a rusted key from her palm (stolen during corpse-washing duty) and slipped it into her shoe.
Faith fed none of them.
Wheat and honey, after all, were the first lies of Eden.