Chapter 1

Vienna’s sword flew into the arms of the prickly lavender bush, leaving her defenseless to her mom’s next swing. The setting sun peeked behind her mom’s frame and tampered with Vienna’s vision. She had no choice but to stumble back. 

A sharp pain shot up Vienna’s leg. She let out a shocked cry as she fell face forward onto the ground. The dry grass tickled her nose before a blade sliced the back of her neck.  

“Mom!” Vienna cried. “Did you cut me?” 

She wasn’t proud of the next couple of moments—the way she floundered on the mountaintop, like a fish out of water, desperately trying to reach for her wound. 

“Relax, it’s a little scratch,” Thora sighed. “The sword’s dulled.” 

Vienna rolled over to face her mom.

“You cut me. You never cut me. Now, Brother Moss is going to be angry! He just washed this,” Vienna said as she tugged at the brown fabric held by a rope she wore every day. Same as her mom. “He’ll be so mad that I got my clothes dirty that he’ll never let me do a wash again. Then I’ll stink, and no one will let me in the hall to eat, and then I'll starve, and then I'll die.”

“You're so dramatic.” 

“I’m serious!” Vienna replied. 

“Well, if that happens, I’ll throw food out the window.”

“What if the birds get it first?” 

Thora stood up. Vienna also tried standing, but Thora’s stare pinned her to the ground. Honestly, the cut didn’t hurt, and Vienna wasn’t scared of Brother Moss. She’d done far worse to her clothes than get a little blood on them. It was Thora who made her upset. Maybe Vienna was misremembering, but she swore that in the last year her mom’s swings had become stronger, the blades sharper, and her words…crueler. 

“But fine, let’s say I beat the birds to the scraps,” Vienna pried. “What if, because I eat alone, I become so lonely I die anyway?” 

Now Vienna only wanted to annoy her mom, but if she had wanted to make her furious, she could’ve said, “Do you realize you make me so lonely that I feel like dying?” 

Vienna felt closer to saying it than she cared to admit. 

Instead of answering her question, Thora said, “What mistake did you make today?” 

Ever since Vienna was old enough to walk, she trained with Thora twice a day, at daybreak and sunset. After every session, Thora asked her that same question, but Vienna still gave new answers.

“I tripped.”

“On what?”

Vienna looked toward the sun as it disappeared behind a mountain peak, leaving only pink brushstrokes. Vienna sometimes wanted to scream at the sun that it was just a part of this exhausting cycle, as she was, if not the instigator. However, her history teacher, Brother Moss told her not to yell at people because it was unkind and not to yell at things that couldn’t yell back, because then people would think she was crazy. Brother Moss always taught her the most important lessons. 

Vienna once told him she compared her life to the sun. Like the sun, she was stuck, and not told why she was put in this sedentary place. Well, she knew why—she just didn’t like having to remain hidden in Tamar Monastery, tucked between the mountain ranges, only seen by the Brothers and Thora. After Vienna told Brother Moss all this, he rubbed his patchy head and replied, “To compare oneself to the sun is to admit to being the center of the universe, and there is not a person on this Earth who is.” 

“Well?” Thora nudged, snapping Vienna’s attention back to her. “Don’t make me bang it over your head. I promise, it’ll hurt.” 

Thora’s voice was not impatient but bored. It made Vienna want to scream. She was bored with this, too, and angry. She'd been so since she woke up in the hospital bed after the roof incident over a year ago. Brother Moss said that the mind can become layered with many different thoughts and emotions, some of which aren’t good. They stack on top of one another until they become one, and you can’t distinguish which one’s which. The more the layers stack together, the harder it is to peel them apart. Vienna feared that contempt had seeped into every layer of her mind because that’s all she felt lately—blazing, hot, insatiable rage. Brother Moss said the younger you are, the more amiable the layers, but with Vienna just turning fourteen, the thoughts grew stronger every day.