Cassian drove his sword through the count's heart.
Seventeen screams answered.
The count seated in the banquet hall smiled.
In the underground laundry, a maid clutched her chest and fell.
The black blade had clearly passed through the count. Yet not a drop of blood emerged. Smooth white flesh, twenty years old, sealed itself beneath the torn tailcoat.
"Welcome, Lord Crow."
With Cassian's sword still in his chest, the count raised his glass.
"We kept your seat open."
Seventeen people sat at the Red Table.
Their faces were younger than when the sins had left them in the assessment chamber. Old men had become middle-aged. Tight, boyish cheeks replaced the faces of grown men. Their hair was black and their teeth white as new growth.
Their plates held no food.
They held human time.
A summer at seven. The tremor before a first kiss. The voice that first spoke a daughter's name.
Memories beat like small hearts inside glass bottles. The nobles speared them with silver forks and ate.
A woman swallowed a girl's laughter. The wrinkles around her eyes vanished.
Isen Bale drained his glass wearing the young face his wife remembered. He recognized Cassian and pretended not to.
"The estate is sealed from outside."
Seraphina entered the banquet hall. She had brought no imperial blockade troops. Only herself, Adel, and Cassian.
"A pity," the count said.
"We prepared a seat for Your Highness as well."
"I did not come to dine."
"You came to eat the crown."
Laughing, the count pulled the sword from his chest.
Another scream rose from below.
This time a hole opened in the chest of a young coachman.
Adel placed a hand on the floor. Red pipes like blood vessels trembled beneath the stone. One ran from each chair in the banquet hall to the lower floors.
"The wounds are moving."
"I see."
Cassian was looking at the book at the end of the table.
An invitation ledger bound in human skin.
The seventeen guests were named on the left page.
The servants were named on the right.
When the blade entered the count's chest, one name on the right turned red.
`Edda Morn. Laundry. Heart pierced.`
Smaller letters followed.
`Until the guest's reception concludes, she shall receive every unpleasantness in his place.`
"A guest cannot be harmed in this house," the count said.
"That is the host's duty."
"Were the servants invited?"
"Employed."
"A different word."
"Which is why it is useful."
The count snapped his fingers.
All seventeen nobles stood and threw their glasses to the floor.
The bottled memories spread across the banquet hall. Other people's summers, weddings, and funerals flowed beneath Cassian's feet.
The count swung.
Cassian could not use his aged left hand. The fingers bound to the scabbard were already swollen black. He raised his sword with the right arm bent backward and took the first blow.
The inside of his shoulder tore again.
Someone outside the banquet hall fell clutching the same shoulder.
Cassian's own wounds were not being sent to servants.
The count's blade opened his belly again.
Cassian's blood flowed properly.
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"You are not in the invitation ledger," the count said.
Cassian drew the red invitation from inside his coat.
Seraphina had given it to him—the seat earned by killing Minister of Justice Conrad Bern without trial.
Its writing had vanished.
`Cassian Crow's right of attendance expired upon death.`
"You are a dead guest."
The count's point scraped the alignment seam across Cassian's throat. Black blood sprang out.
"We are living hosts."
The seventeen nobles laughed.
Cassian laughed too.
"Good."
"What is?"
"It would have been unfair if I were protected too."
He rushed past the count toward the table.
His young right hand opened the ledger. The teeth beneath his nails tried to bite the paper.
Cassian struck the first name from the right page with his sword point.
`Edda Morn` disappeared.
The screaming below stopped.
The count stabbed Cassian in the back.
This time a scream came from outside the estate.
Beyond the blockade, a baker clutched his chest and collapsed.
New letters appeared in the empty space.
`Substitute host. The nearest taxpayer within three hundred paces.`
Cassian crossed out the second name.
A woman at the market entrance lost an arm.
He crossed out the third.
One blockade soldier's jaw shattered.
Adel seized Cassian's wrist.
"Stop."
"Erase the names and they live."
"Someone else dies in their place."
"That is what I was confirming."
Adel read the ledger.
Hundreds of names crowded the bottom of the page. Servants, coachmen, laundresses, storekeepers. Contract lines linked each to the guest they served and the wounds they would receive.
"If we take this, we can expose the entire transfer network."
"Can we take it?"
"I need time to break the seal."
"How long?"
"Three hundred breaths."
Cassian cut through the count's right knee.
The leg folded, but the wound closed.
A servant fell from the banquet hall ceiling. His severed leg hung from a red pipe.
Cassian rose on one knee.
"Too long."
Adel's face hardened.
She had heard the same answer before.
Ninety breaths could have opened the west quarters.
Cassian had left them shut.
"You cannot abandon it this time."
"The ledger?"
"The evidence."
Adel spoke without looking away.
"It is the only record of who received whose wounds. Destroy it, and the survivors cannot even prove why they were ruined."
"If we preserve it?"
"The count lives another three hundred breaths."
"How many die in that time?"
"I do not know."
"I do."
Cassian looked at the seventeen nobles.
"As many as they want."
The count spread his arms.
Red pipes descended from the ceiling and entered his back. The wounds of seventeen nobles gathered in one body, then flowed underground.
The count grew.
The youth he had stolen became muscle and bone and tore through his tailcoat.
Only the face remained that of a beautiful young man.
Beneath it, the limbs of old men, starving women, and beaten children layered themselves across his body.
He lifted the table and threw it.
Cassian could not evade.
The Red Table drove him into the wall.
His ribs broke.
Thirteen screams followed from below.
Seraphina picked up the fallen ledger.
"With this book, I can put all seventeen houses on the gallows."
"Without it?"
"Even those who died tonight will be legally unharmed."
"Good," Cassian said.
Seraphina's eyes narrowed.
"What is good about that?"
"Now Your Highness has something to lose too."
Cassian plunged his hand into the memories spilling across the floor.
Someone's first winter entered his palm. Hunger and firelight. A mother breaking her last loaf in half.
He turned that winter into black flame.
Fire crossed from his right hand to the ledger.
Adel reached for it.
Seraphina released it first.
The human-skin cover shriveled.
The servants' names burned.
The victims' evidence burned.
The nobles' names burned.
The protection of the guilty burned with them.
When the last page became ash, the estate lost its guests.
Golden letters appeared on every wall.
`No invitation ledger exists.`
`All living beings within the estate will be treated as intruders.`
The red pipes tore free at once.
The first sword hole Cassian had made opened in the count's chest.
The second wound split his belly.
The third shattered his knee.
The seventeen nobles collapsed across their plates.
The wounds they had sent to servants returned to their owners.
Severed fingers.
Ruined lungs.
Starved organs.
Broken hips.
Age poured like a waterfall over their young faces.
Isen Bale looked at his hand. A hundred years of wrinkles appeared at once.
"Helena."
He spoke his wife's name.
The face she remembered remained for one moment.
Then it too collapsed.
The count still stood.
Returning wounds had not killed him. Hundreds of layers of time stolen from the River of Absolution remained inside him.
Cassian pushed away the table pinning him to the wall.
Broken ribs scraped his lung. His aged left hand would not move. His right arm bent backward.
He put the sword between his teeth.
"Can you kill me with that body?" the count asked.
Cassian did not answer.
He placed Weight of Sin upon the count.
There was no human weight.
There was time.
Three hundred twelve stolen summers.
One hundred nine stolen first loves.
Forty-three children's birthdays.
One final winter belonging to a dead wife.
Cassian returned all of it at once.
The count aged.
Beneath skin twenty years old, two-hundred-year-old bones became ash. His organs withered, unable to endure the years. His limbs collapsed inside his clothes.
Only the young face remained.
Cassian approached with the sword in his teeth.
He drew it from his mouth and set the edge beneath the count's young face.
"Leave me that much," the count said.
"It is the face my wife remembers."
"That is why I will leave it."
The blade passed through his neck.
The young face fell to the floor.
Beneath it there was no old body. No blood.
Only ash poured out.
When the count died, the banquet hall floor split open.
The memory vault opened.
Thousands of glass bottles hung above an underground river. Its water was not white. The ash of burned pardons had made it darker than night.
Cassian swallowed the count's last breath.
The river's flow entered his throat.
Every tributary beneath the capital appeared like a vein.
The imperial palace.
The great cathedral.
The Immaculate Prison.
And a northern source that should not have existed on any map.
Cassian tore the original map from the wall.
It was a complete reward.
The count was dead.
The youth of the seventeen nobles had collapsed.
The memory vault was open.
Nothing had been restored.
Fire spread from the ledger to the table.
From the table to the walls.
From the walls to the granary.
The granary held the winter grain meant for the western poor district.
The nobles had diverted it in the name of charity.
With the ledger gone, no one could prove who owned it.
Adel asked.
"Can you put it out?"
"Yes."
"Will you?"
Cassian folded the original map and placed it inside his coat.
"No."
The flames swallowed the servants' quarters.
Outside the estate, the surviving children smelled burning grain.
That night was warm.
Winter would kill more people.
At the end of an alley, the young heir of the Red Table watched the estate burn.
A black feather drifted beside the child's bare feet.
It had fallen from Cassian's coat.
The child picked it up and tied it to the thin cord around his neck.
For the first time, a sinmark appeared.
Revenge was not yet a sin.
It became one when the child decided to kill another surviving child for the sake of that revenge.
A black line surfaced on the child's throat.
It resembled Cassian's alignment seam.