All twenty-three doors of the estate were sealed at once.
Imperial wax filled the cracks like flesh.
Only one door remained open.
The eastern door where the child servants slept.
Cassian had come to guard that door.
So the others would remain shut.
The Red Table estate stood in the heart of the capital's noble quarter, a gray building without windows. Red smoke rose from seventeen chimneys on its roof.
Seraphina stood before the main entrance, wearing a crumpled crown.
Imperial blockade troops pressed wax seals into place with long iron tongs. Each time fists hammered from inside, the double-headed eagle stamped on the seal warped a little more.
"The main, west, kitchen, and underground carriage doors are sealed," Seraphina said.
"You left only the east open."
"Do not mistake it for mercy toward the children."
"I do not make that mistake."
"It is the door used by the cheapest lives in the estate. Nobles know how to hide behind cheap lives."
Children ran out through the open door.
They were barefoot. Some wore red aprons over their nightclothes. None cried. Their faces had been taught to hold tears in.
The blockade troops arranged them in three lines.
Cassian did not watch the lines.
He watched the threshold.
Imperial wax was not a substance that blocked doors.
It was a contract binding the names and sins of those trapped inside to their exits.
With twenty-three exits, the sins scattered twenty-three ways.
With one, everything converged there.
People.
And sin.
"There are servants in the west quarters," Adel said behind him.
Her right index finger was held straight, bound to the next finger. It was the hand injured in the assessment chamber. The black line spreading beneath her throat could not be hidden by her collar.
"Fifty-three. The drain connects to their infirmary. If I send my blood through it, I can soften the seal from inside."
"How long?"
"Ninety breaths."
"Too long."
"I said we can save them."
"I heard you."
A bell rang behind the western wall.
The servants' fire alarm. Three short, one long. The plea for help repeated twice.
Cassian did not look west.
His right hand gripped the hilt.
It was twenty-two years old—too fast and too hot. His left was sixty-seven. Its joints swelled before it could even hold the scabbard.
Teeth beneath his nails pressed at the flesh. The skin of his back clung to his ribs like a starving beast. Uneaten meat rotted inside his belly.
Eight different sins fought to move first within one body.
The right hand broke a finger on the left.
Bone snapped.
Cassian did not blink. He bound the broken hand to the scabbard.
Adel seized his wrist.
"I am not asking about treatment."
"I know."
"Will you open the west door?"
"No."
The answer came so quickly that her grip loosened.
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"It is not because there is no time."
"There is time."
"And still?"
"Open the west and the seventeen inside scatter along twenty-three roads. A hunt we can finish tonight becomes seventeen wars."
"So you burn fifty-three people?"
"I use fifty-three to put seventeen at one door."
The western bell rang again.
This time it did not finish.
Footsteps came from inside the open door.
Twelve children emerged at once, alike in height and dress. All wore red aprons, their faces smeared with oven ash.
Three adults crawled on their knees among them. Leather straps folded their arms and legs to make them child-sized. Masks made from the likenesses of young servants covered their faces.
One carried a child on his back, wrapping the child's arms around his neck to hide a nobleman's collar.
A blockade soldier raised his spear.
"I will separate the children first."
"Leave them and you die," Cassian said.
"Who dies?"
"You."
The soldier stopped.
The first child to touch the threshold doubled over.
Black letters rose across the small back: the day a granary was locked, tenant farmers drowned, years stolen. Sins the child had never committed.
The nobleman in the child's mask was light.
He had dressed the child in his sins.
The noble crossed the threshold.
The imperial wax flashed red.
The pressure of twenty-two sealed exits converged upon the one open door. The sins placed on the child turned back once to identify their owner.
One heartbeat.
Enough.
Cassian drew.
His young right hand moved too fast, tearing the shoulder first. His starved back could not follow the stroke. The point scraped the ground.
The noble laughed.
Cassian did not release the sword.
He struck his own right arm with the scabbard bound to his broken left hand. The elbow bent backward. The overfast hand lost its course and fell.
He put the sword's weight into that fall.
The flat of the blade shattered the nobleman's collarbone.
The man crashed back inside the threshold.
"Weight of Sin."
The returning sins became heavy inside him all at once.
His knees punched through the stone floor.
The child on his back rolled free. Adel lunged and caught the child.
A second noble rose among the children, tore away his mask, and drew a thin sword.
Cassian did not evade.
The blade pierced his belly.
The uneaten banquet food inside caught it. Rotten meat and wine spilled from the wound.
The smile left the nobleman's face.
Cassian twisted the embedded sword with his body.
The other man's wrist turned with it. Bone broke through flesh.
Cassian's young right hand seized his jaw. The teeth under his nails bit into bone.
He did not kill the man.
He held the jaw and threw him back inside.
The third noble turned and fled deeper into the estate. The first dragged his ruined knees after him.
Cassian did not pursue them. He stood outside the door and raised his sword.
Now the nobles had nowhere to run but deeper inside.
Where the Red Table had been set.
The windows in the western wall turned red.
Palms appeared against the glass. Servants beat upon it. Their memories flowed backward before the flames reached them.
One woman forgot her name.
Another man called the burning room his childhood kitchen and laughed.
Mara Henn pressed her face to the window.
She sang her lost daughter's lullaby. She could no longer remember the girl's face, but her arms still formed the shape of holding a child.
Adel set the rescued child down and stood.
"Ninety breaths have not passed."
"I know."
"We can still open it."
Cassian drew a line across the eastern threshold with his sword.
Outside the line was survival.
Inside was the Red Table.
"Do not open it."
"And if I do?"
"I cut off your hand first."
Adel looked into his eyes for a long time.
She did not fear the threat.
Nor the fact that he truly would cut it off.
She feared that afterward he would demand she stop the bleeding with that same hand.
Adel looked toward the western wall.
Opening it could save fifty-three.
Opening it would also let the sins the estate had vomited out—and the seventeen owners—survive and scatter.
The calculation was not wrong.
What horrified her most was understanding that.
Adel unwound the bandage binding her second finger.
She opened the wound before it could close.
One drop of blood fell into the drain beneath the western wall.
Not enough saintblood flowed to melt the seal. Instead, a hair-thin red thread slipped through the wall.
"What are you doing?" Cassien asked.
"This treatment will not open the door."
Adel closed her eyes.
Beyond the thread, fifty-three pulses struck her finger in turn. Rapid ones. Failing ones. Ones already beating with someone else's memories.
She spoke the names she could hear.
"Mara Henn."
Ria wrote it down.
"Orban Tis."
A second name remained.
"Selma Lowe."
The red thread burned the moment she spoke the third.
The other fifty never managed to send their names.
Adel bound her bloody finger again.
"What did you save?"
"Three people's names."
"Not the people."
"Write that down with them."
Beneath the three names, Ria wrote:
`The door remained closed despite known possibility of rescue.`
Cassien's choice no longer remained merely a tactic.
The dead hung from that sentence.
Adel did not go west.
Instead, she counted the children outside one by one.
Twenty-nine children alive.
Fifty-three hands behind the western windows.
Flames swallowed the glass.
The bell stopped.
Seraphina approached Cassian.
Even amid smoke and blood, fragrance clung to her glove. It smelled of funeral flowers burning.
She placed a hand on Cassian's throat.
Her fingertips counted the openings along the alignment seam.
One.
Two.
Eight.
Cassian did not remove her hand.
Her fingers reached a place from which they could close around his throat.
"I calculated that abandoning the west door would make the eight sins open your throat once each."
"There were fifty-three victims."
"That number was correct too."
"You must be pleased."
"No."
Seraphina pressed a nail into the final split.
Blood seeped inside her glove.
"I am only relieved that I was accurate."
The last child walked through the open door.
A small child in the same red apron. Blood stained bare feet. The child neither cried nor ran.
Cassian applied Weight of Sin.
There was nothing.
Not one stolen loaf.
Not one hated name.
Not even one lie told to survive.
No sin.
The same absence as Elodie.
The child crossed the line.
The blockade troops sent him into the line of survivors.
Adel bent to treat his feet.
He did not offer his hand.
"I do not consent," he said.
His voice was too calm.
Adel looked up.
In that moment, he disappeared among the survivors.
Seraphina removed her hand from Cassian's throat.
"That child tied his apron backward."
The inside of the red apron turned in the wind.
A small crest embroidered in gold appeared.
The mark of the heir to the head seat of the Red Table.
Cassian did not pursue the child.
Seventeen bells rang together inside the estate.
The formal rite had begun.
What he had released through the open door was not a child.
It was the next master of the Red Table.