The sword came down toward Cassian Crow's neck.
It had not touched him yet.
The blade still rested on the executioner's shoulder.
A drop of water fell from its tip and traced the back of Cassian's neck first.
It was not rain. It was holy water.
An expensive thing to waste on a man about to die.
"Imperial Executioner Cassian Crow."
The adjudicator read out the charges.
"For abandoning a thirteen-year-old to his death, burning a saint alive, and erasing the name of the Kingdom of Agnes and one hundred twenty thousand of its people from the map."
The crowd filling the square cheered at different parts.
Mothers cheered at the first charge.
The clergy at the second.
Refugees who had lost their kingdom at the last.
Some did not cheer.
Women with gallows ropes dyed black around their necks pressed fingers to their lips.
They were the ones Cassian had saved when he sealed the gates of a plague village.
Beside them, women who had lost family in that same village cried out for mercy.
Some called Cassian's death salvation.
Others called it an execution long overdue.
Cassian looked at neither side.
He told no one he was innocent.
He had saved the boy and failed to protect him to the end.
He had burned the saint.
He had erased a kingdom.
The adjudicator had selected only facts. He had merely rearranged them so they would not become the truth.
That did not mean Cassian's crimes were false.
What he had actually done would have needed ten execution blocks.
Below the scaffold, a young woman with an ink bottle held against her chest was copying the judgment.
While the other archivists counted the cheering crowd, she watched Cassian's neck.
Beneath the place that would be cut today was an old scar shaped like a knot.
Her pen stopped for a moment.
The adjudicator spoke.
"I will give you one last chance to plead your innocence."
"Save it for someone innocent."
The crowd's next cheer came a beat late.
The smile vanished from the adjudicator's face first.
Only then did Cassian look at him.
Robes embroidered with gold thread. A different noble house's ring on every fat finger. Beneath his clean-shaven chin, black filaments pulsed with his heartbeat.
A sinmark.
The kind left on a man who turned other people's memories into money.
It was ripe.
"The sentence will be carried out on the third bell."
The first bell rang.
A low toll rolled out.
The sound rolled across the flagstones. The nobles in the front row covered their noses with handkerchiefs, though there was no smell of blood yet.
The executioner behind Cassian adjusted his grip.
Derrick Morn.
Forty-five.
A bad right knee and an old burn across his palm.
The executioner's daughter watched her father from behind a pillar on the western side of the square.
Cassian knew without turning his head.
Derrick's breathing faltered only in her direction.
The second bell.
Derrick spoke quietly.
Stolen novel; please report.
"I'll finish it in one stroke."
"Do that."
"Aren't you afraid?"
Cassian smiled against the block.
"That you'll miss?"
Derrick's hands tightened.
The third bell rang.
The sword fell.
The cold was brief.
The pain came later.
Cassian watched his own kneeling body shudder once.
His vision rolled across the flagstones.
Sky, crowd, and scaffold turned upside down.
Someone cheered. Someone else vomited.
The last face he saw belonged to the woman holding the ink bottle.
She did not cheer.
Cassian's last breath escaped through his severed neck.
It climbed the blade.
Then sank into the burn scar on Derrick's hand.
Derrick's body held four chronic pains.
His right knee.
His left shoulder.
A little finger broken twice.
And the heart that tightened whenever he looked at his daughter.
Cassian found the last one the most inconvenient.
He opened his eyes.
Through Derrick's.
The sword that had just taken his head was still in his hand. Deep inside the body, Derrick's consciousness fought madly to close those fingers.
They did not move.
When Cassian stepped forward with the right foot, Derrick tried to buckle the knee.
Cassian caught the body with the left foot before it fell.
Two men tried to walk one body in opposite directions. The joints screamed.
Derrick was not weak. He was a man who cut off heads, remembered every face at night, and still kept his hands steady before his daughter.
So Cassian took harder.
One finger at a time. Knee and shoulder. The length of each breath. Even the place where his tongue touched his teeth.
The more the body's owner screamed within, the faster the borrowed flesh became Cassian's.
"Father?"
The girl called from behind the western pillar.
Cassian did not answer.
The first funeral bell rang.
It marked the completion of the beheading. If he failed to align himself before the third bell fell silent, the body record and the night record would close together.
Then he would truly die.
Cassian studied his escape route.
The eastern stairs. Six guards. An open market alley behind them. With Derrick's face and uniform, no one would stop him.
It was enough.
So he did not go.
He took the sword and walked toward the adjudicator.
The man was still gazing down at Cassian's severed head, admiring how beautifully his judgment had been completed.
"Clear him away."
The adjudicator flicked a hand.
"Hang the body from the city wall for three days. Send the head to the Papal Court—"
Cassian climbed the steps.
One of the guards laughed.
"Derrick, didn't you hear him?"
The sword moved once.
Cassian did not cut the guard. He drove the shaft of the man's spear into the flagstones. Both hands were crushed between wood and stone.
The scream tore through the cheering.
The adjudicator stepped back.
"What are you doing?"
The second funeral bell.
There was no time.
Cassian studied the adjudicator's sinmark. Black filaments circled the man's throat beneath his chin, then ran to his heart, his rings, and the document chest beneath the scaffold.
He had killed few people himself.
Instead, he tore memories from the living and sold them to nobles.
Whenever a mother forgot her child, a wife forgot her husband, or a soldier forgot the village he had defended, another black coin entered the adjudicator's vault.
That sin was very heavy.
The adjudicator hid behind the guards and shouted, "Kill him!"
The guards hesitated.
They saw an Imperial Adjudicator and an Imperial Executioner. The convict who had just died lay below the scaffold, divided into head and body.
The law could command only what they had seen.
Cassian opened his mouth.
Derrick's voice emerged.
"The judgment is over."
He reversed his grip on the sword.
"Only the execution remains."
The blood drained from the adjudicator's face.
"Wait. What do you want? Money? A pardon?"
"Breath."
Cassian lowered his voice.
"Your last breath."
The adjudicator fell to his knees.
At that moment, the weight of his sin crashed through his body. His fat knees split the flagstones and sank into them. The rings on his fingers bit into his flesh.
Screams broke out among the nobles.
Cassian raised the sword.
The adjudicator looked up.
Beneath his fear was outrage. The outrage of a man who could not understand, even at the end, why he had to die.
Cassian did not explain it to him.
The sword passed through his neck.
One stroke.
The adjudicator's last breath escaped before his blood. Black and sweet. Cassian swallowed it through Derrick's mouth.
The dead man's desire laughed on his tongue.
I can make them forget.
Anyone you want.
Cassian chewed the laughter and swallowed it.
The third funeral bell began to ring.
The guards looked from the adjudicator's head to Derrick's face and back.
No one moved first.
Cassian passed through the gap and descended below the scaffold.
His head lay with its left cheek against the ground, eyes closed.
His body had collapsed before the block.
Blood from his severed neck had soaked the bottom of the judgment.
The bell kept ringing.
With Derrick's hands, Cassian lifted his own head.
Warm blood ran through the hair and down his wrist.
Derrick thrashed inside the body.
No.
The soundless voice scraped against bone.
My daughter is watching.
Cassian looked toward the western pillar for the first time.
The girl stood with both hands over her mouth. Her father's body was holding a severed head. The adjudicator's blood stained her father's lips.
Cassian looked away.
"Let her watch."
He spoke with Derrick's mouth.
He set his head on top of the severed body.
The adjudicator's last breath rose from his lungs into his throat.
The breath narrowed into black threads and pierced the cut surfaces dozens of times.
Bone remembered bone.
Tendons writhed back into place.
Blood flowed backward.
The bell passed its midpoint.
Cassian was driven out of Derrick's body.
Darkness closed once.
Then he opened his own eyes.
His neck was whole.
A black alignment seam crossed the old knotted scar. When he inhaled, the adjudicator's sweet desire came with the breath.
I can make them forget.
Cassian stood.
The third funeral bell ended.
The square was silent.
A dead man had reattached his own head and risen.
Still, no one called upon a god.
If a god had been watching, it could never have allowed this.
A short distance away, Derrick knelt and retched.
He stared at his own hands.
The adjudicator's blood pooled in the lines of his palms.
"No."
Derrick muttered.
"That wasn't me."
But the guards had seen Derrick.
The nobles had seen Derrick.
His daughter had seen her father.
The guards fell on him. Derrick could not resist. His hands still remembered the feel of cutting through the adjudicator's neck.
His daughter shoved through the crowd toward him.
"My father didn't do it!"
Cassian stopped on his way down the scaffold steps.
The girl glared at him.
Hatred had just been born on her face.
"Get out of my father's body."
"I'm already out."
"Then give it back."
Cassian looked at Derrick. The body had been returned. So had the memory, the blood, and the witnesses.
Along with things he had never promised to take away.
Cassian spoke.
"I returned his body."
"What that body did belongs to your father."
The girl lunged, but a guard caught her. Cassian neither pushed her away nor comforted her.
The young archivist below the scaffold wrote down his words.
At the top of the page, she copied Cassian's charges again.
Child abandonment.
Burning a saint.
Erasing a kingdom.
Then she added one more line.
Murdering an adjudicator through an innocent executioner's body and refusing to take back the sin.
Cassian heard her pen moving.
He did not turn around.
Beyond the square, a single black feather was already riding the wind.