Two armies wanted to kill Cassian.
One wanted him dead because it hated him.
The other because it loved him.
The Black Feather execution host moved first.
"Execute the false Cassian."
The dead Cassian's command rang from thousands of mouths.
Judith, commander of the bereaved host, swung down her hammer.
The iron once used to make bells crushed the first soldier's helmet.
Skull and steel folded together.
The soldier smiled as he fell.
"For His Majesty."
"Get in line."
Judith kicked the next soldier in the chest.
"We accuse that man first."
"And after the accusation?" Cassian asked.
"If he's guilty, we kill him."
"If he's innocent?"
"We read another crime."
Judith had not prepared for innocence.
Cassian liked that.
With the hammerhead, she drew three lines on the ground.
"There are three rules for accusation."
The first line.
"Read the name before the number."
The second.
"Read what he did before why he did it."
The third stopped at Cassian's toes.
"He speaks only when a fact is wrong."
"Who reads the justification?" Cassian asked.
"Your dead self will babble enough."
The corpse in the coffin smiled.
Judith did not look at it.
"We don't argue with that mouth. We read only whom we lost and what you did."
Ria wrote the three rules on the ledger's first page.
The bereaved host's demand was simple now.
They would not judge Cassian's heart.
Only who had died.
And what Cassian had done then.
The Black Feather Society did not retreat.
The bereaved host did not lower its crossbows.
Between the two armies, Ria opened the Master Ledger of Innocence Bonds.
"I will now read the harm left by Cassian Crow."
"Call it crime," Cassian said.
Ria looked at him.
"Is that the part you wish to correct?"
"A record must begin with the right classification."
"Very well."
Ria turned the first page.
"I will read the crimes of Cassian Crow."
* * *
The first name was Derrick.
An executioner whose body had been stolen before his daughter's eyes.
Cassian killed the adjudicator in that body.
He left Derrick the murder charge and the witnesses' memories.
One iron nameplate in the bereaved host rang.
Its bearer was not related to Derrick.
But the name belonged to someone burdened with another's crime in the same way.
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The corpse Cassian opened its mouth.
"He bore a condemned man's sin in his place."
Dona edited the last words syllable by syllable.
The crime of stealing a body became a tale of sacrifice.
The Black Feather Society pressed swords to their chests.
"He bore it in His Majesty's place."
The living Cassian looked at the corpse.
"Derrick did. Not me."
That too became praise.
"His Majesty grants the credit to his servant."
The Black Feather soldiers were moved.
Cassian punched one in the mouth.
Teeth flew.
A small mouth formed on every lost tooth.
"How humble."
"Shut up."
"He teaches through silence."
Both command and rebuttal were translated into worship.
Ria did not stop.
Second was Tobin.
A servant who lost his family's memory and became Cassian's legal body.
He received torture and confinement in Cassian's place.
Third was Martin Roe.
Innocent, but forcibly made a noble and burdened with the sins of seventeen houses.
Fourth were the fifty-three servants in the western quarters.
Cassian could have opened their door.
He did not.
Fifth was the winter grain.
He burned the poor's food to kill the Red Table.
The corpse Cassian answered each accusation.
"He endured judgment in one man's body."
"He made a commoner a noble."
"He closed a door to contain seventeen evils."
"He gave fire on a cold night."
Burned grain became warmth.
Abandoned servants became a siege.
Turning a man into a vessel for sin became liberation from class.
A woman stepped out from behind the bereaved host.
Marette Sorn.
Thirty-four.
A miller who had worked at the winter granary that year.
She took a loaf of black bread from her coat.
There was more ash in it than flour.
"It was warm," Marette said.
"Your corpse is right."
She tore the loaf in half.
Grain husks and small stones showed inside.
"The granary burned for three days."
She threw one half before Cassian.
"We ate this beside the fire."
Cassian picked it up.
"Who died?"
"My husband."
"Starvation?"
"Stealing."
After the winter grain vanished, he stole oats from a noble stable.
When caught, the sin of horse theft was branded into his wrist.
The record did not mention that he had tried to feed three children.
He died under lashes in the square.
Marette held out her husband's inherited sinmark.
A horseshoe scar marked her palm.
"He would have lived if you hadn't burned the granary."
"The Red Table would have lived too."
"So you did well?"
"Neither."
"You aren't sorry?"
"Would sorrow bring back the bread?"
Marette spat in Cassian's face.
Swords left sheaths among the Black Feathers.
Cassian stopped them with one hand.
He did not wipe his cheek.
He picked up the bread and bit into it.
A stone shattered between his teeth.
He swallowed it.
"How does it taste?"
"It would keep me alive for three days."
"And after?"
"I'd have to steal someone else's horse."
Marette laughed.
A laugh born of anger.
Also the first laugh before the black idol came into being.
The corpse in the coffin spoke.
"His Majesty ate the same bread as his people."
The Black Feather Society wept in awe.
Marette stopped laughing.
Even her insult had been stolen and remade as a saint's humility.
She threw the rest of the bread into the corpse's coffin.
Dona's tongues devoured it.
Judith hurled her hammer at the coffin.
Dona's tongues caught it.
Hundreds licked the iron.
The bereaved names engraved on the hammer began turning into a hymn.
Judith lunged and seized the haft.
She pulled until her palms tore.
"Get your mouth off my family's names."
Dona smiled.
"The living monopolize the dead for far too long."
Judith tore away one tongue.
It screamed in her husband's voice.
Her hand stopped.
Even knowing it was false, she could not make her husband suffer twice.
Dona fed on that hesitation.
* * *
Ria's reading reached the cathedral.
Three thousand iron nameplates rang at once.
"Cassian Crow abandoned the possibility that three thousand infected people might recover."
"He chose execution for every one of them."
"Their deaths stopped the infection's advance through the capital."
"Remove the last sentence," Judith said.
Ria did not.
"It is fact."
"It sounds as if he saved people."
"The record does not state whom a fact favors."
Judith recovered her hammer.
"That's why you stood beside him."
"That is why I stand here now."
Ria read the next line.
"First death. Aaron Bale."
"Bell," Cassian said.
Every eye turned to him.
"What?"
"Aaron Bell. Not Bale."
Ria checked the ledger.
Two spellings overlapped on the old record.
Bale was the surname imposed by the imperial family.
Bell was the surname he reclaimed before death.
"You remember the spelling of someone you abandoned."
"That is why I remember."
"Do you not correct his killer too?"
"The Papal recovery squad."
"Then what was your crime?"
"I didn't take him all the way."
"And abandoning his chance to recover?"
"Correct."
"And that he was a child?"
Cassian looked at the ledger for a moment.
The direct execution scene was already locked away in his memory.
The tooth key had taken the last voice too.
Only the spelling remained.
"That too."
Curses erupted from the bereaved host.
A stone flew.
Cassian did not dodge.
His forehead split.
The Black Feather Society knelt together.
"His Majesty has taken even the child's sin in his place."
Judith struck a Feather soldier's face with her hammer.
"Say 'in his place' one more time."
The soldier smiled through broken teeth.
"In his place."
The second blow caved in his face.
Black feathers grew from that blood too.
* * *
Ria read the thirty-four prisoners left in the White Prison.
People abandoned as bait for the escape.
She read the vote in the Nameless Court.
The man who promised not to change a single vote, then changed Mira's.
Last, she read Mira Crow.
`1,043 recorded murders.`
Judith looked at the black crown around Cassian's neck.
"You killed your sister too?"
"I used her name."
"To kill people?"
"One thousand forty-three."
"To save them?"
"To kill them."
Cassian did not offer the word salvation.
The corpse offered it for him.
"He saved one thousand forty-three who could not die."
Dona's tongues carried the sentence beyond the armies.
The citizens around the well heard it.
The returnees heard it.
Those who had lost family to Cassian and those who had finally died because of him heard the same sentence.
One side cried lie.
The other cried miracle.
The sounds collided above the well.
The shadows of black feathers and iron nameplates overlapped.
A human shape formed.
At first, it stood no taller than Cassian.
It had no face.
Each crime Ria read gave it another mouth.
Each salvation tale the corpse told lifted the corners of those mouths.
Hatred became teeth.
Worship became tongues.
The black idol rose between Cassian and the corpse.
The shadows of three thousand bereaved nameplates studded its chest.
Thousands of black feathers grew from its back.
Judith raised her hammer.
"Is that yours too?"
"If it were mine, I would have ordered it already."
Cassian drew his sword.
Every mouth on the idol laughed.
Before the prayer ended, the same laughter sounded inside the worshippers' throats.
The idol spoke in the living Cassian's voice.
"Continue the accusations."
One more mouth formed.
"I'm feeding."