Cassian cut the shadow of a living man.
The memory vault had neither light nor exit.
Yet a shadow trembled at the bottom of one glass bottle.
Inside was a man's supper.
His wife dipped hard bread into soup. His two young sons fought over one potato.
The man split his portion in half and gave it to them.
A label on the wall bore his name.
Tobin Rell.
Carriage attendant of the Isen Bale estate.
Twenty-seven years remaining.
Pending recovery.
The memory was still warm. Its owner was alive.
Tobin's shadow remained connected to him. If Cassian seized that passage, he could reach the ballroom where Isen had fled.
Cassian touched the bottle with his knife.
Both children inside looked up.
They looked at the man about to kill their father.
Cassian spoke.
"Not yet."
The knife split the glass.
The supper table shattered. The smell of soup and the children's laughter spilled across the floor like black water.
Tobin's shadow lay exposed beneath it.
It tried to climb the wall and flee.
Cassian pinned its wrist beneath his boot.
He cut once.
The shadow did not bleed.
Faces escaped instead.
His wife.
His first son.
His second.
The three faces watched Cassian for a moment from the cut edge, then scattered into the dark.
No family remained for the shadow to return to.
A shadow makes its strongest memory a home. Cassian had cut that home away.
Only one path remained for the homeless shadow: back to its living owner, Tobin Rell.
Cassian stepped onto it.
"Shadowstep."
The black floor opened.
Tobin Rell was carrying a silver tray.
The Red Table's preliminary ball.
As he collected empty glasses, a blade rose from the shadow beneath his feet.
It cut his ankle shallowly.
Before Tobin could scream, a black hand emerged from the shadow and covered his mouth.
Cassian tore his way up through the floor.
The shadow returning to Tobin had dragged Cassian into the ballroom with it.
Tobin fell. The tray and glasses shattered loudly across the marble.
The music did not stop.
Here, a servant bleeding mattered less than a mistake in the performance.
Cassian released him.
Tobin stared up at him, gasping.
"Who..."
"Your name?"
"Tobin Rell."
"Your wife?"
Tobin opened his mouth.
No answer came.
"Your children?"
The man pressed a hand to his temple.
"Do I have children?"
Cassian had his answer.
"You did."
He did not help Tobin stand. He only soaked a handkerchief in the blood from his ankle.
"Why do you know my family?"
"Because you forgot them."
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Cassian kept the bloodstained cloth.
Tobin caught his trouser leg.
"Then tell me."
"Their names, at least."
Cassian removed his hand.
"I discarded those too."
The music moved to the next piece.
Tobin remained on the bloodstained floor.
The ballroom resembled the inside of a vast clock.
Golden gears turned across the ceiling. Clock faces without hands covered the walls. Nobles danced behind masks as young as the years they had stolen.
The formal Red Table rite was three days away.
Tonight was a preliminary ball where members admired one another's new faces and stolen memories.
Cassian took a black servant's coat and put it on. He left the alignment seam at his throat exposed.
It was the most common ornament in the room.
Black thread circled every woman's neck.
Some wore simple ribbons. Others had copied alignment seams onto their skin in ink.
One pair of earrings held tiny jeweled nooses.
A woman had painted a severed head being reattached across her fan.
"It was darker in person."
Someone beside Cassian was studying his throat.
A noblewoman in a violet dress.
"You were in the square?"
"Front row."
She closed her fan and brought it close to the seam.
"How did it feel to kill the adjudicator through the executioner's body?"
"Ask your husband."
"My husband is not the adjudicator."
"Tomorrow, that is how you will remember him."
Her smile froze.
Cassian moved on.
People did not clear a path. They pressed closer. Those who had missed his death wanted to test whether the scar was real.
It was not that they felt no fear.
They believed fear was something money could buy.
Three women wearing black ropes stood beside a pillar.
The ropes were not noble ornaments.
They were necklaces cut from actual gallows nooses.
One recognized Cassian.
She whispered.
"The black gate."
Cassian remembered her too.
On the day he sealed the north gate of the plague village, she had thrust an arm through the gap and wept for medicine for her child.
Cassian had given her none.
He burned the two hundred infected outside and saved the three thousand within.
The woman had only two fingers on her right hand.
"You lived."
"Because you closed the gate."
It sounded like gratitude.
It also sounded like blame.
She did not kneel or take his hand.
"My daughter was outside."
"I know."
"I still came to thank you."
"Why?"
"My son inside survived."
Her voice shook.
"Does that make me a bad mother?"
"Do not ask me."
"You chose."
"Then you already know my answer."
She asked nothing more.
The noblewoman with jeweled nooses had been listening nearby.
She spoke.
"What a wonderful story."
The two-fingered woman's face went white.
"You should have invited your son. The one Sir Cassian saved—"
Cassian caught the noblewoman's fan.
One rib slipped between her fingers.
He folded the fan.
Her fingers folded with it.
Three bones broke.
The scream vanished beneath a high note from the strings.
Cassian released the fan.
"Do not turn another person's funeral into a love story."
The two-fingered woman looked at him.
She did not thank him.
She did not mistake his anger for anger on her behalf. Cassian simply disliked the way someone else had stolen his story and tried to sell it.
A single clap came from the far side of the ballroom.
The crowd parted.
A woman in a white mask stood there.
About twenty-two.
Her hair looked silver in the light and pale gold in shadow.
Her white dress bore no ornament.
No knot or black line marked her throat.
Third Princess Elodie Aurelia.
She offered Cassian her hand.
"May I have this dance?"
"If I refuse?"
"Everyone here will try to kill you before the music ends."
"It must be a good song."
Cassian took her hand.
They began to dance.
Elodie's hand was warm.
Her pulse was even.
Cassian looked beneath her chin.
Nothing.
No golden filaments of greed.
No split tongue of a liar.
No black knot belonging to a vessel burdened with another's sin.
There was no sinmark.
Cassian turned her once. He examined her back, wrists, eyes, and even her shadow.
Empty.
There were no sinless people.
Even the forgiven retained a trace. Even a one-day-old child carried the tiny mark left by accepting another person's desire.
Elodie had not even that.
"Do you always dissect people while dancing?"
"I did not use a knife."
"That makes it worse."
Elodie did not withdraw her hand.
She moved closer. Only one folded sheet of paper could have fit between them.
One did.
Elodie drew a document from her sleeve and held it between their chests.
White wax.
A narrow sword within a blind sun.
A tribunal summons.
"Cassian Crow."
Elodie pronounced his name clearly.
The music changed.
A notice-of-trial piece with three turns remaining.
"The White Curia summons you as a living defendant."
"I refuse."
"If you do not sign before the music ends, it will count as refusal."
Elodie turned him for the first time.
The ballroom doors locked.
"And if I refuse?"
"Your execution has already been completed."
The second turn.
Funeral tailors along the walls opened black cloths. The guards carried hooks for moving corpses instead of swords.
"By refusing to become a living defendant, you become a corpse in law."
Elodie's breath touched his alignment seam.
"The funeral guild will collect that body."
The final turn began.
Cassian did not release Elodie's waist.
The summons required only a drop of blood and a name.
The name would receive protection during the trial. The blood used to sign determined which body received the punishment.
If Cassian used his own blood, the church tribunal would register his body as the living defendant.
He would be protected inside the ballroom. The moment he entered church territory, every door would become a prison.
If he did not sign, he became a corpse now.
Cassian chose neither.
He drew the handkerchief from his pocket.
Tobin Rell's blood had not dried.
Cassian used it to write his own name.
Cassian Crow.
The final note ended.
The document shone red.
The undertakers' hooks stopped.
The guards tried to draw their swords, but their scabbards would not open.
The law recognized Cassian Crow as a living defendant.
But the body bound to that name was not Cassian's.
Tobin screamed from the ballroom floor.
White letters appeared around his ankle.
Body of the defendant.
Until the church trial, Tobin had become Cassian's legal body.
Cassian took only the protection of the name.
He left the restraint, torture, and judgment meant for the body to the servant.
Cassian did not discard the bloodstained handkerchief.
If Tobin died, the defendant's body would vanish too.
He had to remain alive until the tribunal ended.
As the body carrying Cassian's name.
Elodie released Cassian's hand for the first time.
"That man just forgot his family."
"Then he has less to lose."
"Even though the sin is not his?"
"Much of what clings to me is not mine either."
"That does not mean you may give it back."
"I already did."
Elodie looked at Tobin.
Her expression held no pity. It was the gaze of a physician calculating treatment order.
"Hospitaller Order."
At her call, two figures in white armor ran to Tobin.
"Stop the bleeding at his ankle first. Confirm his name three times. Do not ask about his family. If you force open a missing memory, you will tear what remains of his name."
Her orders were fast and exact.
Elodie had decided to save him.
Without forgiving Cassian.
The music resumed.
No one could attack Cassian. Anyone who killed a living defendant before trial would be guilty of stealing the church's judgment.
Cassian crossed the ballroom under the protection of law.
Only one wildflower remained where Isen Bale had stood.
The target had escaped.
But the door descending to the Red Table stood open.
Elodie blocked his path.
"I confirmed one thing."
"What?"
She exposed her throat.
The easiest possible angle for a blade.
"You see nothing in me."
Cassian did not deny it.
Elodie stepped closer.
"You will gain no power from killing me."
Only permission remained between her throat and Cassian's hand.
Elodie said.
"That is why you want to kill me even more."