"Traitor."
That was what the women in the square called one another.
Those who said they loved Cassian.
Those who said they never had.
Seventeen chairs stood upon the execution platform.
Three held women.
Five stood empty.
Guards had tied women into the remaining nine.
Three had agreed to appear.
Five had not answered.
Nine had refused and been dragged there.
The crowd surrounding the square did not know the difference.
*Blood Weekly* called them all `Cassian's Seventeen Lovers.`
Women with black ropes around their necks shouted from below the platform.
"Do not deny the man who saved you!"
On the other side, victims' families raised stones.
"Women who forgot their own husbands!"
"You called him into your beds, and now you pretend to be victims!"
Even the five empty chairs drew jeers.
The crowd invented the guilt of those who had not come.
Cassian stood behind the execution platform.
Black footprints trampled his shadow.
One pair.
Seventeen pairs.
Hundreds.
Each time someone desired or feared Cassian, another footprint appeared.
The black shape clung to his back.
It was taller than Cassian.
Broader across the shoulders.
Its alignment seam curved beneath its collarbone more beautifully than the real scar.
Its face was Cassian's.
The Cassian sold in market illustrations.
The face people wanted more than the real one.
The shape whispered in Cassian's voice.
"Look. You did not call them."
It pointed at the seventeen chairs.
"They came to meet me."
Cassian did not answer.
Ria climbed onto the platform with the ledger.
"I found the rule for destroying its face."
"Tell me."
"Three things must align."
She pointed to the first woman.
"The trace left on the actual body."
The black footprints.
"Testimony spoken in her own voice."
Words.
"And her memory of what she truly wanted that night."
Desire.
Ria looked at the black shape.
"When all three point to the same person, that face collapses."
"Do we need all seventeen?"
"Probably."
"Probably is a long answer."
"If you want certainty, we must make them dream again."
"Then we do not need it."
Ria took out seventeen thin masks.
They were made of white cloth, open only at the eyes and mouth.
"I will have them testify anonymously."
"Without a name, how will that thing know who spoke?"
"If we connect the voice to the footprints—"
"Try it."
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Ria placed a mask over the first woman's face.
"Tell us what you truly wanted that night."
A voice came from beneath the mask.
"I wanted someone to tell me my daughter's death had not been meaningless."
The face of the black shape did not change.
Footprints climbed beneath the mask. The shape of Cassian's lips bled across the white cloth.
The crowd murmured.
"Whose voice is that?"
"She hid because she was ashamed she loved Cassian."
"They even gave her a mask. She must have been special."
Anonymity protected her.
It could not become testimony.
Desire without a name belonged to the crowd.
Cassian removed the mask.
Ria caught his wrist.
"Do not."
"It failed."
"I will find another way."
"How long?"
"I do not know."
"Too long."
Ria tightened her grip.
"If you read their names, those people will have nowhere to return to."
"They already do not."
"Because you took it from them."
"Which is why I will finish this."
Cassian drove his sword into the center of the platform.
The black shape laughed.
"Throne of Silence."
The square closed.
The jeering vanished.
The incitement spells of the *Blood Weekly* reporters died.
The songs of the women wearing black ropes stopped.
Lies could no longer leave anyone's mouth.
Neither could they choose to speak the truth.
Cassian took the summons ledger from Toma.
He read the first name.
The name carved itself into the stone wall of the square.
A Church guard confirmed the first woman's address and marital status. A guild recorder wrote `Witness in the Cassian Incident` in red beside her occupation.
Cassian asked, "Who did you want that night?"
The woman kept her mouth shut.
The black shape stood behind her. Wearing Cassian's face, it tried to wrap an arm around her shoulders.
"If you do not speak, that thing becomes your testimony."
The woman glared at Cassian.
"That is not a choice."
"No."
"Then why ask?"
"Because I need your mouth."
Hatred entered her eyes.
She spoke.
"I wanted my daughter."
The black shape's left eye collapsed.
It ran like ink and struck the floor.
The crowd could make no sound.
So they watched more closely.
Cassian read the second name.
The maid who had saved money to escape her husband.
"What did you want that night?"
"The key to the safe."
"Whom did you want?"
"Myself."
The shape's lips peeled away.
The third.
"I did not want to forget the face of the dead."
The fourth.
"Permission to leave the convent."
The fifth.
"One quiet night's sleep for my sick mother."
Cassian kept reading names.
The names of those who had not answered.
The names of those who had refused.
Each name was driven into the records of the square, the guilds, and the Church.
One woman's betrothed threw away his ring the moment she testified.
One woman's employer erased her from the employment ledger.
One nun was arrested immediately by Church guards.
Speaking the truth did not save them.
It only crushed the black shape's face.
At the tenth name, its nose vanished.
At the thirteenth, its alignment seam split.
The seventeenth woman remained silent to the end.
Cassian read her full name three times.
The first time, her husband lowered his head.
The second, the guild representative stamped her dismissal.
The third, the crowd's memory fixed her face as a witness.
The woman spat at Cassian.
"I wanted no one."
It was the truth.
It passed through the Throne of Silence.
The black shape's face collapsed completely.
The Cassian people had loved vanished.
Only faceless desire remained.
The shape swelled over the execution platform.
Hundreds of black arms sprouted from it. Each was a touch stolen from a different bedroom. The hands reached back toward the women.
Cassian drew his sword.
The shape screamed in his voice.
"If you kill me, they will love you forever!"
"That is why I will not kill you."
Cassian threw the sword with his young right hand.
The black shape flowed aside.
The black blade passed through its body and struck the shadow on the ground.
Shadowstep.
Cassian's body rose where the sword had landed.
He entered not behind the shape, but inside it.
Hundreds of dreams opened at once.
Strange beds.
Torn letters.
An unlit safe.
Lovers without faces.
And three underground execution grounds hanging people in Cassian's name.
The North Gate sewer.
Beneath Western Printer's Road.
Below the cathedral cemetery.
A noble seal marked the rear of each execution ground.
A list of patrons streamed across the walls of the dream.
Cassian saw all of it.
The shape forced him back out.
Cassian seized his own shadow.
He pierced both of its hands with his sword.
The first nail.
The shape's right arm was fixed to the floor.
The second nail.
Its left arm.
He drove the third into its throat.
The alignment seam on the real Cassian split open with it.
Blood ran over the black shadow.
The shape drank his blood.
It did not die.
It could not flee.
Nailed to Cassian's shadow, it could do nothing but breathe.
"You are a door now," Cassian said.
"For whom?"
The shape laughed.
"Those who stole my name."
Cassian called out the three locations and the patron seals he had seen inside the shadow. Toma wrote them down.
Three execution grounds run by the copycat killers.
Nine noble patrons.
Two salons that supplied articles to *Blood Weekly*.
A complete reward.
The black footprints stopped in all seventeen bedrooms.
The women no longer heard Cassian's voice in their dreams.
Not every forgotten face returned.
One woman remembered only her husband's eyes.
One recovered only the smiling mouth of her dead lover.
No one was as they had been.
The silence over the square lifted.
The first sound was not gratitude.
"Ria Noen!"
The woman who had lost her betrothal shouted.
"If you had not investigated us, our names would never have been exposed!"
Another woman threw a stone at Cassian.
It struck the alignment seam on his throat.
"You were no better than the monster!"
Cassian did not evade it.
A third woman spat at Ria.
"You came to record us. He used us, and you wrote it down. What makes you different?"
Ria could not answer.
The testimony she had gathered had made the attack possible.
The same testimony had broken the women's lives.
Cassian stepped down from the platform.
Ria followed.
"Give me the ledger."
"And if I refuse?"
"I will misspell the names of the people you killed."
Cassian stopped.
"Vicious."
"I learned from you."
He returned the ledger.
Ria did not hold it to her chest. She chained it to her wrist.
"I am not your recorder."
"I know."
"And I am not following you to understand you."
"That is unfortunate."
"I will prove every reason you must be executed."
Ria continued.
"So no one can destroy the truth by changing the order."
Cassian smiled.
"My dedicated witness."
"Your dedicated opposing witness."
"I like that better."
At the edge of the square, people wearing black ropes tried to chant Cassian's name again.
Cassian looked at them.
"Do not love me."
The crowd stopped.
"Love me, and you will forget what you wanted. You will believe I wanted it instead."
Some untied their ropes.
Some pulled them tighter.
Cassian saved neither.
The shape nailed beneath his feet spat out a dream.
A snowfield in the north.
A war banner of black iron cut through the wind.
A young woman general stood beneath it.
Marchesa Bell.
She held an old family register.
A girl's name occupied the first line.
A boy's name stood on the second.
`Aaron Bell.`
Bale was the surname the orphanage had given him.
Bell was the surname he had received at birth.
The child whose death Cassian had caused was Marchesa Bell's younger brother.
Marchesa raised her head within the dream.
Her eyes knew Cassian was watching.
She pulled the war banner from the earth.
Its point tore through the edge of the dream and pierced Cassian's shadow.
"Found you."
A woman's voice came from the north.
"The man who killed my brother."