A set of eyes met hers. Dark blue eyes, so dark they looked like the Tillen Sea under angry storm clouds. Black lashes blinked once, twice. It was a boy, her age, about fifteen. Like all Silendars, his hair was some version of honey-colored—old honey, new honey, tilberry honey. This boy’s was medium, like a good clover honey. But unlike most Silendars, his skin was marred with scars everywhere. He was likely a victim of the poxplague that had run through the village when she was a child. Most children who’d contracted the virus died, and those who lived were scarred for life.

“Are you all right?” the boy’s voice issued through the tiny passage.

Yuna said nothing. Father always told her to keep to herself. The less she said, the less trouble would find her. Father himself was quiet for days, surrounded by expanses of silence that made Yuna feel adrift, even within their enclosed home.

“I’ve seen you in town,” he said.

It almost sounded like an accusation. Yuna thought, Yes, I have seen you too. She remembered him behind the smithy’s booth in the market where knives were brought to be sharpened, twisted gates fixed. Only yesterday, he’d watched as several town children had thrown clods of earth studded with rocks. Like her, he stayed quiet. His own cloak had been stained too, from the town children’s wrath.

“Kiss the Poison Girl!” the town boys had teased their friends, once they’d run out of dirt projectiles. She had tripped, and her basket of vegetables had tumbled to the street. “You’ll die if you do! Don’t touch her skin, or yours will peel off like a snake!”

People whispered, not nearly quietly enough, that the poisons Father brewed into bitter, tenacious concentrates had been fed to Yuna since she was a babe. They said venoms seeped into her very flesh until she was dangerous to even touch. She bled from the stones that hit her, just the same. And Himil had always stayed quiet.

People like Yuna and Himil traded turns on receiving the angry ugliness of others. A siblinghood of oppression. Tomorrow, it would be Himil’s turn. Another day, the girl with one leg. Yet another, the children of the Gira family, whose skin and hair were lily white, eyes reddish, like their ancestors from the island of Korrs who shunned daylight. And yet Himil never spoke to Yuna. Yuna’s own father had told her to stay far from the victims of the poxplague: “You don’t need to become sick by associating with them. Stay away.”

“Are you all right?” the boy asked again.

“I saw you at the market too,” Yuna blurted out.

Silence. And then, “Yes. The Master Smith forbids me from speaking to anyone while I’m working in town. He thinks I’ll do more harm than good, because I know nothing yet about tempering iron.”