Seraphina Aurelia was burning Cassian's blood.
The cottage had belonged to the cemetery keeper.
Its owner lay dead beneath the table. The First Princess sat in his chair, holding a single black thread over a candle flame.
The thread did not burn.
Instead, it cried out in a human voice.
I can make them forget.
The adjudicator's voice.
Only after the thread repeated the same words a third time did Seraphina lower it onto a silver tray.
The door opened.
Cassian entered, soaked by the rain. He carried the ledger stolen from the orphanage in one hand. The other was empty.
"You picked up my blood."
"A thread that fell from your neck, to be precise."
"Is there a difference?"
"The blood is yours. This belonged to the adjudicator."
Cassian looked beneath the table.
There were no finger marks on the keeper's throat. No blade wound. His mouth was packed with earth, and scraps of his own tongue were lodged beneath his fingernails.
"Did Your Highness kill him?"
"No."
"Can you prove it?"
"Do I need to?"
Seraphina pushed the chair opposite her out with one foot.
"You are going to sit either way."
Cassian remained standing.
The princess was alone. No carriage. No ladies-in-waiting. No guard holding his breath outside. Instead, imperial seals had been pasted across all four windows.
The moment he killed Seraphina, the seals would turn red. Every gate in the capital would display the face of the princess's murderer.
She had brought a witness worth more than ten guards.
The law.
Cassian sat.
The princess spoke first.
"Derrick Morn will be charged with the adjudicator's murder at noon tomorrow."
"The church will claim he was a victim possessed by an evil spirit. The imperial court will call it the treason of a drunken executioner."
"His daughter?"
"She will sign two pages."
"Contradictory statements."
"The first will save her father's soul. The second will kill his body."
Cassian did not answer.
"Do you have no intention of saving him?"
"No."
"One word from you could at least delay the hanging."
"And get me caught."
"Yes."
Seraphina was not disappointed. She pressed a fingernail once against the inside of her glove, as though confirming that the expected move had been played.
"The girl will sign both in the end. Once her father is dead, both courts will charge her with perjury."
"You calculated that too?"
"And everything you failed to calculate when you chose that man's body."
Cassian threw the ledger onto the table.
It fell open to the page bearing Aaron Bale's name.
"Where is the wax cast of the boy's fingerprint?"
"I thought you might begin with a greeting."
"My manners must have leaked out while my throat was open."
She answered.
"Seraphina Aurelia."
"The eldest daughter of the emperor who had you killed."
"The emperor killed me. Your Highness watched."
"I was the one who put your execution before the imperial council."
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For a moment, only the rain grew louder inside the cottage.
Cassian removed his right glove.
Seraphina's gaze lowered to his bare hand.
She showed neither fear nor ignorance.
She knew the Imperial Executioner removed his glove only after deciding to carry out a sentence.
Cassian spoke.
"Good."
"You have saved me the trouble of finding you."
He placed his hand on the table.
The sin he had consumed from the adjudicator flowed beneath his palm. The invisible sinmark gained weight.
The sin-gift the adjudicator had left behind.
Weight of Sin.
The table groaned.
Seraphina's shoulders did not sink.
Instead, the golden crown she had removed pressed down upon the table.
The boards split.
The plate beneath the crown flattened. The floor sagged, and rotten shrub roots thrust up through the earth.
Seraphina remained seated upright.
Cassian pressed harder.
The table broke in two where the crown had sunk into it.
The princess's chair did not move.
Seraphina asked.
"Did you think my sin would be inside my body?"
Papers spilled between the two broken halves of the table.
Conscription orders.
Lists from sealed plague villages.
Estates seized without trial.
Ration chits canceled in the middle of winter.
Seraphina's signature stood beneath every document. A record of a hand that had never stabbed a person, yet strangled cities.
Her sin was distributed through signatures and crown rather than flesh and bone.
Cassian lifted his hand.
The weight vanished.
The broken table did not return.
Seraphina righted the tilted teacup. The tea had already spilled across the documents and soaked hundreds of names.
"You took that power from the adjudicator."
"The adjudicator is dead."
"The power remains."
"That is all Your Highness gets to confirm."
"It is enough."
Seraphina turned Aaron's register back toward him with one fingertip.
"The boy did not come back to life."
"I know."
"His body is in its grave as well."
"The wax cast was made while he was alive."
"From his right index finger."
Cassian's eyes narrowed.
Seraphina did not look like a woman who had delayed the answer to savor his reaction. She looked like a woman who had prepared every necessary answer in the correct order.
"What happens if they place new sins in a dead child's name and execute it again?"
"The dead cannot receive sin."
"Not through the body record."
The princess opened the wet ledger.
"But Aaron is alive in the courts. The relief house still receives a loaf of bread for him every day. The hospital bills for his treatment. The church records a confession from him every month. All they need now is a public execution."
"How do they put a body that does not exist on the block?"
"Put a mask on a child with the same number."
Cassian remembered Nev's white cloth.
A child bearing the same brand as Aaron.
He had not checked whether the boy escaped the burning orphanage.
Seraphina read the answer in his silence.
"You left a surviving child behind."
"I left soldiers too."
"After crippling them."
"They still had hands."
"Whenever you calculate mercy, you count someone else's hands."
"Your Highness counts someone else's necks."
Seraphina laughed.
It was brief. Not the laugh of someone amused, but of someone who had finally met a person who understood her language.
She drew a red envelope from beneath the broken table.
Its wax seal resembled the mark of a pair of lips. Up close, it was seventeen rats sitting in a circle, each biting the next one's tail.
Seraphina spoke.
"The Red Table."
"A social club for seventeen nobles whose sins the adjudicator erased. Aaron's second execution is one course in their feast."
"A feast?"
"One confesses a sin. The other sixteen name its price. They move the most expensive sin into a child and feed the cheapest memory to a servant."
She pushed the red envelope toward Cassian.
"An invitation for three days from now."
Cassian did not take it.
"Your price?"
"Conrad Bern, Minister of Justice."
"The charge?"
"He opposed my accession."
"Is that all?"
"Is it not enough?"
For the first time, Cassian looked at Seraphina's face for a long while.
She could have invented a crime as the adjudicator had.
She might have said Conrad abandoned a child to death, sold the memories of the poor, or spread a plague. She would have expected those things to interest Cassian.
Seraphina did not.
She asked him to kill an enemy because he was an enemy.
Honesty that did not dress evil as justice was rare.
It smelled worse for it.
"A trial?"
"None."
"Evidence?"
"Unnecessary."
"And if I refuse?"
"Aaron Bale suffers his second death as scheduled. Derrick Morn hangs tomorrow. Your throat opens again at the next gate, and you die."
"One of those three is already my concern. That makes for a poor threat."
"That is why it is an offer."
Seraphina drew a dagger from her waist.
Cassian drew his knife.
The two points met above the broken table.
The princess's dagger aimed at Cassian's heart. Cassian's knife stopped beneath her throat.
One step would kill either of them.
Without releasing her dagger, Seraphina unfolded a contract.
"Let us write what happens to the first one who betrays the other."
"Leave out any plea to be spared."
"Of course."
She took up a pen in her left hand.
Cassian dictated with his right hand still aiming the knife.
If Seraphina lied about the location of the Red Table, Cassian would execute her in public.
If Cassian killed Conrad and shifted the sin to Seraphina, she would make Derrick's daughter his accomplice.
If either publicly declared love for the other, the contract would be void at once.
Cassian stopped the pen at the last clause.
"Why include this?"
"Politics enjoys pretending that love is the reason it breaks."
"And us?"
"Even when we break, we should record the exact reason."
Seraphina removed her glove.
Shallow grooves marked every nail. A tally of the votes cast against her in the legislature.
She laid her hand over Cassian's on the hilt of his knife.
If he pushed, he would cut the princess's throat.
If he pulled, her dagger would enter his heart.
Neither moved away.
Seraphina's warmth crossed the hilt. Too exact to call intimacy. Too lingering to call only a threat.
"Sign."
"Is that an order?"
"Did it sound like a request?"
Cassian wrote a name on the contract.
Conrad Bern.
No trial.
No stay of execution.
Seraphina placed the invitation before him.
When Cassian picked it up, she withdrew her dagger first.
It was not the movement of a woman yielding her throat. She had decided the contract bound him before the blade could.
"The wax cast of Aaron's fingerprint is at the Red Table."
"Nev?"
"If he is alive, they will move him there before tonight ends."
"You did not check if he survived."
"Neither did you."
Seraphina picked up her crown.
The gold rim, crushed by the weight, shone sharp between her fingers. She put it on without trying to repair it.
At the door, Cassian asked.
"Why execute Aaron under your seal?"
"That was not my seal."
"The emblem was the same."
"Someone else has the right to use my emblem."
Seraphina tossed him another list.
Seventeen pages.
The members of the Red Table.
The first line of the first page bore the name Seraphina Aurelia.
Cassian turned to the last page.
White wax had been stamped over a golden crown.
A slender sword thrust through a blind sun.
The seal of the Third Princess, Elodie.
Seraphina spoke.
"My sister means to execute me as a heretic."
"And I mean to execute you as a traitor."
"Who goes first?"
"Ask the one who will die first."
Cassian pressed a finger to the first name on the list.
Seraphina did not smile.
Cassian stopped again at the seventeenth page.
Isen Bale.
Time of death: last night.
A dead man held an invitation to the Red Table.
This time, both of them knew the contract would not last.