Derrick Morn tasted the blood of a man he had not killed.
A guard had ground his face into the flagstones.
The adjudicator's blood seeped between his broken front teeth.
An unfamiliar memory followed the taste of iron.
A sword cutting flesh, catching for a moment between bones, then severing the last tendon.
The hand that remembered it belonged to Derrick.
The man who had moved that hand did not.
"My father didn't do it!"
His daughter clung to a guard's arm. The guard did not shake her off. Instead, he held out a bloodstained statement.
"Then write that you saw it."
"Saw what?"
"Cassian Crow entering your father's body."
The girl took the pen with a trembling hand.
The guard opened the next page.
"And write here that your father killed the adjudicator."
"You want me to write both?"
"The church takes the first page. The court takes the second."
Derrick raised his head.
"Don't write it."
The guard's boot covered his mouth.
"The people above us will decide which one is true."
The girl looked to the far side of the square.
The man who had lost his head was already gone.
Only the sin he left behind clung to her father's hands.
Cassian made it through three alleys before pressing a hand to his neck.
Blood seeped between his fingers.
Severed bone and tendon remembered where they belonged. That did not mean the place welcomed him. With every step, the black alignment seam opened and closed.
I can make them forget.
The adjudicator whispered inside his throat.
Anyone you want.
Cassian pushed his index finger into the wound. A black thread caught beneath his nail. When he snapped it, the voice went quiet.
More blood flowed.
Armor drew closer behind him.
Twelve.
Eight sets of heavy steps.
Four light.
Two men running with bowstrings drawn.
If they were imperial pursuers, they had come to confirm his severed head. If they were church hounds, they would cut it off again and take it with them.
Either kind carried keys to open the road.
Cassian left the market and headed for an abandoned orphanage.
The saint above its door had a shattered face. Boards had been nailed across every window, each stamped seven times with red wax.
Cassian did not open the door.
He drove his shoulder through it.
Rotten wood collapsed inward.
Dust rose with the smell of medicine.
Twenty small beds lined the walls.
Each was carved with a number instead of a child's name.
On the far wall, fingernails had scratched out a sentence.
I am not a bad child.
The same sentence appeared dozens of times at different heights.
Cassian read it and walked on.
Breathing came from beneath the stairs.
"Come out."
No answer.
"I'll count to three. Then I burn the stairs."
"Liar."
The voice belonged to a child.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
Cassian picked up a fallen oil lamp. He smelled the oil and lit the wick.
"One."
A child crawled out from under the stairs.
A boy of perhaps twelve. White cloth covered one eye, and dried blood had clotted black over his bare feet.
The boy recognized Cassian's neck before his face.
"You."
"You know me?"
"You're the man who killed Aaron."
Black marks moved across the boy's chest.
They did not belong to one person's sin.
Seven different traces fought around a single heart.
A thief's fingers. A rapist's tongue. The ribs of a man who had starved someone to death.
All of them had been forced inside a child's body and folded small.
Cassian brought the lamp closer.
The boy asked.
"Was Aaron like that too?"
"Yes."
"Is that why you let him die?"
"Yes."
"Because he was a monster?"
"No."
The boy's face hardened.
Cassian remembered Aaron Bale.
Thirteen years old.
One broken front tooth. He never took off his shoes, even in the cold.
One hundred thirteen people's sins lived inside his body.
Murder, betrayal, and lust discarded by nobles tore at one another's names in the boy's veins.
Aaron remained human until the end.
He cried.
He begged to be saved.
Cassian listened until he had finished.
Then he executed the boy's name instead of his neck.
The legal name Aaron Bale.
The one hundred thirteen sins and the northern surrender contract attached to it.
The blade did not pass through flesh.
It split only the letters in the register.
The boy asked.
"Could you have saved him all the way?"
"If I'd had time."
"You didn't?"
"I did."
The boy's lips parted.
"Then why?"
"Because saving him all the way would have taken too long."
Boots stopped outside the orphanage.
The fear in the boy's eye changed to hatred. Cassian did not wait for the change to finish.
"Is there a ledger underground?"
"No."
"Your left shoulder rises when you lie."
Cassian threw the lamp onto the stairs.
The boy lunged and caught it in both hands before it shattered. Oil splashed his arms, but the flame did not spread.
While the boy moved, Cassian kicked the wall he had been guarding.
Lime plaster fell away and revealed an iron door.
It had no keyhole. The empire's double-headed eagle and the church's blind sun were engraved together across its face.
A command rang out from outside.
"Cassian Crow! For the murder of an Imperial Adjudicator and the desecration of a corpse—"
Cassian caught the boy by the back of the neck.
"Do you want to live?"
The boy did not answer.
"Then move."
He pushed the boy up the stairs and behind the collapsed railing.
The door burst open. The pursuers entered behind their shields. The lead soldier saw the boy behind the railing and lowered his sword.
"A child?"
One moment's hesitation, because he did not want to cut a child, was enough.
Cassian pressed himself into the darkness beside the stairs. The soldiers passed the boy and descended into the cellar.
When their captain saw the iron door, he drew a golden key from his coat.
The imperial and church emblems shone from opposite sides.
Cassian did not smile.
The man who could open the door had arrived.
The captain inserted the key.
Children began crying on the other side of the iron door.
Two soldiers turned.
Cassian moved.
He folded the first soldier's elbow backward. Bone punched through the inside of the armor. Before the man could scream, Cassian shoved his jaw closed.
He took the second soldier's sword and drove it through the third man's thigh. The falling body caught two arrows for him.
The captain tried to pull out the key.
Cassian kicked the side of his knee.
The leg folded sideways.
"Open it."
"Kill me."
The captain clenched his teeth.
"You can't open it if you kill me."
"That's why I only broke your knee."
Cassian caught him by the hair and forced his face into the open crack.
"Wider."
The captain pushed the door.
There were no children behind it.
Only small clothes and shoes piled to the ceiling. Ledgers filled the cabinets, and black blood that had not yet dried pooled in a silver tray at the center of the room.
Cassian opened the newest ledger.
Orphans' names had been written beneath the names of nobles.
A murderer's sin into a child's heart.
A traitor's into a child's tongue.
The sin of a man who bought lust into a child's skin.
The sins had not disappeared.
They had only been moved.
Below the entries, the ledger named the places that received the children.
The imperial hospital.
Saint Martha's relief house.
Field cathedrals of the northern crusade.
Names decorated for their charity.
For every child they took, they donated a bed and bread. When that child filled with sin, they sent the child back here.
The ledger called it a cure.
Small knife marks crossed some of the children's names.
They marked the names Cassian had executed instead of the bodies.
He had never counted how many children he had smuggled out beneath the appearance of death. The ledger had counted for him. Twenty-nine.
Twelve no longer recognized him after losing their names. Seven continued confessing to murders they had not committed. Three said living without a name was still better.
Aaron had been the one who begged to be saved to the end.
The sinmark Cassian saw had not lied. It simply could not tell him who had committed the sins. It showed only who carried them now.
One hundred thirteen signatures stood beside Aaron's name.
Cassian did not tear out the page.
He did not apologize.
Even if he had known the truth then, he would still have cut Aaron's name.
Hunting down one hundred thirteen people to save one child completely was too slow.
And Cassian did not believe in slow salvation.
Fire spread upstairs.
The boy must have thrown the lamp down again and broken it. Smoke poured down the stairs. The wounded soldiers rushed toward the exit.
Someone shouted.
"Get the boy out first!"
Cassian kicked the drain in the opposite wall. One stone fell free, revealing a hole barely wide enough for a man to crawl through.
The captain caught his ankle.
"You're going to leave the child?"
"You're here."
"You tried to kill us."
"You're still alive."
Cassian stepped on the broken knee.
The hand released him.
He took one ledger and crawled into the drain. Behind him, the child's coughs mingled with the soldiers' curses.
He did not check who made it out.
The drain ended in an empty grave in the cemetery.
Cassian pushed open the coffin lid and climbed out. Rain had begun to fall. It washed the blood from his neck and carried it beneath his shirt.
The last page of the stolen ledger listed the names scheduled for execution over the next three days.
Cassian read from the top.
His hand stopped at the seventeenth name.
Aaron Bale.
Thirteen years old.
The spelling, birthday, and orphanage number all matched.
It was not another boy with the same name.
Nor was it a dead name copied by mistake.
The ink around the name had not bled, and the executioner's confirmation bore a fingerprint in blood that was still warm.
Someone had even prepared a wax cast made from Aaron's fingerprint while he was alive.
The charges were the same.
One hundred thirteen murders.
The execution was set for three days from now.
Cassian had already killed that boy's name.
Aaron had walked away from the block alive that day.
Cassian gave him one hiding place and half a day.
Then he left to stop the residue spreading toward the northern wells.
When he returned three days later, he found Aaron's body in the fire left by a Papal recovery squad.
Someone else had cut the boy's throat.
Cassian was the one who had left him behind.
Yet Aaron's name lived again in the new execution register.
Gold wax had been stamped beneath it.
A crown wrapped around a single sword.
The seal of the First Princess.
I can make them forget, the adjudicator whispered again inside his throat.
Cassian closed the ledger.
"You mean to execute a dead child's name twice?"
One corner of his mouth rose slightly in the rain.
It was not a smile for saving a child.
Someone had stolen his execution.
Cassian decided to see the thief's neck.