They told me the bells of Saint Vale were a gift. I believed them at first. The bells rang before sunrise and drew a thin line through the silence, the kind of sound that makes air feel clean. Later, when I was old enough to dress myself and carry a bucket, I stopped calling them a gift. Bells are gentle when you choose to hear them. They are heavy when they choose you.
The mornings were the same for years. We woke in the dim blue of the dormitory. The cold floor touched my feet. We folded our blankets along a rule we all knew by heart. If the blanket did not make a straight edge, Brother Hale would fix it with a quiet smile and a second look that meant try again tomorrow. I liked him. He never raised his voice. He hummed old hymns while he worked and smelled like soap and wool.
We ate bread and a thin porridge in the refectory. Sometimes a bowl of dried fruit appeared at the end of the table. It came like weather. No one asked how or why. After breakfast we swept and scrubbed and carried. The little ones chased sun patches across the floor when the clouds moved. The older boys tried to act like they did not see the sun at all. I watched the light creep along the stones and tried not to stare. It made my chest feel strange, not warm, not cold, something in between.
People say an orphanage is loud. Saint Vale was not. We learned to speak in short sentences and keep our footsteps soft. The walls held a kind of quiet that wanted to be kept. When we were noisy, we were noisy outside, where the grass could swallow laughter.
I did not laugh much. I was not sad. I just felt apart, like a chair someone pulled a little away from the table and forgot to push back. I did the work I was given. I prayed when they told us to pray. I learned the stories in our small library. I could recite them if asked. But almost every day the same thought crossed my mind and left a mark I could not clean away: the Light sees me in a way I do not understand.
The chapel was my favorite place. It had a high ceiling and narrow windows made of colored glass. The glass did not show saints or kings. It showed shapes that looked like flames, or leaves, or droplets, depending on who you asked. The colors moved across the floor in the late morning, slow and calm, as if the day itself was taking a breath. I liked to stand where the colors met and look at my hands. Red and blue and green climbed across my skin. If I stood still enough I could pretend I was like everyone else, painted by a color I could name.
In the chapel there was an old mirror near the side door. It was tall and framed with dark wood set with small pieces of a pale stone. Someone told me the stone came from a holy place very far away. No one touched the mirror except to dust it. We used it for a ceremony once a year, when the older children lined up and pressed their palms to the surface, and the priests watched the way the glass caught their image. They said the mirror showed how the Light knew you. I saw the older children step away with tears or with pride or with relief. None of it made sense to me. I was too young then.
I turned nine in the spring when the first violets pushed through the grass near the wall. No one knew the day I was born, so Sister Maren gave me a birthday that matched the first flowers. She put a small violet on my plate at breakfast and told me I was taller. I did not feel taller, but I liked the violet. I pressed it between two pages of a book that no one read much and never told anyone where I put it.
Two things happened that year that I could not explain.
The first was the mark.
It started as nothing. After chores one morning, we had a short time to wash in the bath room behind the dormitory. The water was cold. The boys talked and shoved and made faces in the foggy metal of the water basin. When I took off my shirt, Jonah frowned and pointed at my chest.
"Why do you draw that spiral every day?" he said. His voice was not mean. It was simple curiosity.
"I do not draw anything," I said. I looked down.
There was a shape at the center of my chest, just below the collarbone. It was not ink. It was not a bruise. It was a faint white spiral as thin as a hair, hard to see unless light touched it. When I rubbed it with my thumb, it did not smudge. When I scrubbed it with the rough cloth, it did not fade. The more I tried, the more it seemed to settle under the skin, like it had always been there and I had only now learned to look.
Jonah shrugged and ran to steal someone else's towel. I stood very still until the room emptied, then crouched near the small window where a narrow bar of sun lay across the floor. The spiral brightened when the sun touched it. It was not brighter like a lamp, not hot, not cold. It was a clean line that pulsed once, very softly, as if it had its own slow breath. I covered it with my palm and held my breath. The line was still there when I removed my hand.
I wore my shirt and did not tell anyone. I did not want Sister Maren to worry. She worried enough about scraped knees and wet shoes and lost buttons. I told myself the spiral was not important. I was wrong, but that is what I told myself.
The second thing was the candle.
It happened over weeks, small at first, then not small at all. Every night before bed, Sister Maren walked the dormitory with a brass snuffer and put out the candles one by one. She would smile and nod as she passed each bed, touch a shoulder here, a forehead there, reminding us that we were safe. When she reached the candle near my bed, the flame shrank and went to sleep like all the others. But later, after the room fell quiet and the slow breathing of a dozen boys filled the space, I would open my eyes and see a thin light near the wall. My candle was lit again.
At first I thought someone was playing a joke. The first two nights I got up and blew the candle out myself, and the third night I moved it to the floor beside my bed. The fourth night it was back in the holder, steady and small. I stopped telling myself it was a joke. I watched it for a long time with the blanket up to my chin. The flame was white at the center, not yellow like the others. It did not flicker. It just burned in a quiet way, as if it did not want to bother anyone.
On a cold night when the wind pressed a hand against the windows, I climbed out of bed and cupped my hands around the flame. I told it to go out in my head. I whispered. I tried to pinch it. It warmed my fingers and did not move. I felt a flush of anger I could not explain. I took the candle out of the holder and broke it against the wall. Wax fell in a small soft pile. The wick bent and curled. The flame died.
I felt sorry the moment I did it. I picked up the pieces and hid them in the small box where I kept every small thing that seemed like it might matter later. I lay back down. I fell asleep. When I woke some time before dawn, a thin line of light lay on the floor beside my bed. It was not a flame. It looked like powder of light, a trail of tiny white points like dry salt. The points rose and shimmered when I brought my face close. They drifted away like smoke and were gone. My heart beat hard without a reason I could name.
I told no one.
-- End of Chapter 1 --