Cassian's neck was for sale in the market.
Two coppers for a rope knot.
Three for makeup that imitated the scar around his throat.
One silver coin also bought an illustration of Cassian stepping on the adjudicator's head.
"A genuine hanging knot!" a merchant shouted.
"The very knot Cassian Crow tied upon the scaffold! Hang it from your bedpost and a bad husband grows docile, while a good one lasts longer!"
The women laughed.
One bought a knot. One drew a black line around her throat. Another spat upon the adjudicator's face in the illustration.
Not one of them had bought the same Cassian.
It was the day after the Red Table estate burned.
The central market felt more like a festival than a funeral. News that the winter granary had burned with the estate had reached only the western poor district. The market bought only the story that nobles who ate youth had aged overnight.
At the entrance, a woman from the western distribution house held up a handful of charred barley.
"Next month's bread is gone! Even the children's share burned!"
Her voice drowned beneath the bargaining over Cassian hanging knots.
No one took the burned barley from her.
Cassian stopped before a stall displaying his face.
The merchant did not recognize him.
The illustrated Cassian had a sharper jaw and broader shoulders. His alignment seam wound around his throat like a black rose vine.
"Want one, friend?"
"It does not resemble me."
"It would not sell if it did."
The merchant sounded serious.
"The real face looks too tired."
Cassian looked from the illustration to his own face.
"How much?"
"Free for the man himself."
The merchant's smile froze.
Cassian had removed his glove.
Human teeth gleamed beneath the nails of his young right hand.
A woman cried out from one end of the market.
"That is him."
A black rope circled her throat.
She was the first witness.
A survivor of the plague village whose gate Cassian had closed years ago. She had been outside. Her daughter had been inside.
She stepped before the crowd.
"Lord Cassian saved us."
Someone asked.
"Did he not kill your daughter?"
"That is how he saved us."
She did not hesitate.
"If he had opened the gate, the whole city would have died."
"But she was your daughter."
"Yours is still alive."
The woman who received the answer fell silent.
The survivor looked at Cassian. It was neither gratitude nor love. It was the face of someone who needed proof that her choice had not been wrong.
"That man kills the people who need killing."
The crowd nodded.
One of Cassian's sinmarks grew lighter.
Not because anyone had forgiven him.
Because a hundred people believed the same sentence.
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A second woman descended from a carriage.
She wore violet gloves and owned a noble salon. Her maids had painted alignment seams around their throats, and black feathers decorated the carriage door.
"Only those who need killing?"
She laughed behind her fan.
"What a tedious interpretation."
"Then whom does he kill?" the survivor asked.
"The people he wants to possess."
The salon mistress unfolded an illustration of Cassian.
The adjudicator knelt while Cassian lifted his chin with a sword point. The scene had never happened.
"Execution is the most complete form of possession. It makes certain they can never belong to anyone else."
Low laughter spread around her.
"The adjudicator, the count, even the princess's minister of justice—they must all have looked only at him in the end."
She was not looking at Cassian.
She was looking at the Cassian she had made.
"He kills the people he desires."
The crowd nodded at that sentence too.
Cassian's alignment seam grew hot.
Other people's desires painted a thin layer over his night record.
The third woman approached between two church guards.
She was Derrick Morn's daughter.
A white witness cord bound her wrist. She had been dragged here to testify against the man who used her father's body to kill the adjudicator, and had not yet been released.
She took an illustration from the stall and tore it in half.
Cassian's face split in two.
"That man saved no one."
The market went quiet.
"Your father is alive," the salon mistress said.
"He wore my father's body to kill someone."
"And gave it back."
"He gave back the hand that killed too."
The girl looked straight at Cassian.
"With the adjudicator's blood dried into the lines of its palm."
Her voice did not tremble.
"Every night my father dreams he is swinging the sword. When he wakes, he cannot look at me. He is afraid he will touch me with that body."
No one in the crowd nodded.
Nor could they deny her.
"That man gives what he has done back to someone else."
Cassian's right hand twitched.
Derrick's daughter saw it and did not retreat a step.
A woman climbed onto the empty scaffold at the center of the square.
She held an ink bottle against her chest.
Cassian remembered her.
The archivist who had not cheered even when his head rolled across the stones. The woman who recorded that the old rope scar did not match the place newly cut.
She opened her mouth.
"My name is Ria Noen."
People looked at one another. Almost none knew the name.
Ria did not care.
"I was an imperial execution archivist. Now I am an exiled archivist."
"Why were you exiled?" Cassian asked.
"For recording that your neck had been cut twice."
Ria answered evenly.
"The empire cannot execute one man twice."
"The second neck was put back."
"They disliked that even more."
Ria opened a thick ledger.
It was an ordinary paper book, not bound in human skin like the Red Table's invitation ledger. Rain had swollen the cover and fire had scorched the corners.
"This book contains the people Cassian Crow killed."
Jeers and cheers erupted together.
Ria raised the first section.
"Those he killed directly."
The second.
"Those who died by his orders."
The third.
"Those he could have saved, but chose to let die."
The fourth was the thickest.
"Those he killed to save someone else."
The survivor shouted.
"We lived because of them!"
"That is why I separated them," Ria said.
"I did not erase them."
The salon mistress closed her fan.
"Using the names of the dead to insult a hero is a vulgar hobby."
"You decorated a murderer with the desires of the living."
The crowd murmured.
Derrick's daughter approached the scaffold.
"Is my father's name in there?"
"He is still alive."
"Then it is not."
"It is in the ledger of living victims."
The jeering grew louder.
Women wearing black ropes threw stones at Ria. Noble maids repeated Cassian's name like a song. Church guards recited spells to hold back the crowd.
Hundreds of mouths spoke Cassian's name with different meanings.
Savior.
Murderer.
Lover.
Calamity.
The more they repeated the same name, the more the market's social record changed.
The adjudicator's face in the stall illustration became someone else's.
In the survivor's memory, the moment her daughter entered the gate blurred. In its place appeared Cassian carrying the girl into the flames himself.
Finger marks the salon mistress had never painted surfaced upon her throat.
For a moment, Derrick's daughter remembered Cassian, not her father, raising her.
The girl screamed.
One of the eight sins inside Cassian opened its eyes.
The sin of an inquisitor who killed through false confessions.
That sin believed every lie should exist only by its permission.
Cassian drove his sword into the stones.
"Throne of Silence."
Sound died.
Jeers stopped inside open mouths.
Songs were severed upon tongues.
The church guards' spells lost their light and fell to the ground.
Lies and spells closed throughout the market.
Only truth could be spoken.
So no one could speak.
In the silence, people heard their own memories.
The survivor remembered her daughter's final face.
The girl had not been in Cassian's arms. She had been inside the closed gate, scratching the wood with her nails.
The salon mistress touched the marks on her throat.
They were not Cassian's. They had been left by a maid she had sent to her death long ago.
Derrick's daughter recovered her father's face.
Cassian's eyes lay over it.
For the first time, the crowd understood.
The more they spoke of Cassian, the more someone else disappeared from their memories.
Only Ria continued reading the ledger.
Her voice could not be heard either.
But her lips shaped each name, letter by letter.
No lie could be spoken within the Throne of Silence.
Her lips never stopped.
Cassian climbed the scaffold.
The crowd thought he would kill Ria.
Ria thought so too.
She did not close the ledger.
Cassian stood before her.
His young right hand held down one side of the book. The teeth beneath his nails scratched the paper.
He pointed to one name Ria had been reading.
An old baker who died in the plague village.
Cassian lifted the silence.
The market's noise did not return.
Everyone waited for his first words.
"The spelling is wrong."
Ria examined the name.
"Where?"
"It ends with a t, not a d."
"How do you know?"
"Because I killed him."
Ria took out her pen.
She scraped away the wrong letter and wrote the correct spelling.
At that moment, the ledger's weight changed.
Cassian's acknowledgment of his own victim record became testimony before the crowd.
Ria's paper grew heavier than an imperial judgment.
Cassian did not kill her.
He did not contradict her.
So the people waited for her next name.
Ria opened the final page.
Three lines of ink were still wet.
`North Gate guild copyist. This dawn. Hanged.`
`Southern well keeper. This dawn. Beheaded.`
`Seventh Relief House accountant. One hour ago. Burned.`
The same executioner's name ended all three lines.
Cassian Crow.
Ria asked.
"Did you kill these three?"
The Throne of Silence still covered the square.
Cassian could not lie.
"No."
The ink hardened black.
Three people he had not killed had already become his sins.