for how things looked, she knew her mother did.
When Thorn shuffled into the light her mother pressed one pale hand to her mouth. “Gods, what did they do to you?”
Thorn waved at her face, chains rattling. “This happened in the square.”
Her mother came close to the bars, eyes rimmed with weepy pink. “They say you murdered a boy.”
“It wasn’t murder.”
“You killed a boy, though?”
Thorn swallowed, dry throat clicking. “Edwal.”
“Gods,” whispered her mother again, lip trembling. “Oh, gods, Hild, why couldn’t you …”
“Be someone else?” Thorn finished for her. Someone easy, someone normal. A daughter who wanted to wield nothing weightier than a needle, dress in southern silk instead of mail and harbor no dreams beyond wearing some rich man’s key.
“I saw this coming,” said her mother, bitterly. “Ever since you went to the square. Ever since we saw your father dead, I saw this coming.”
Thorn felt her cheek twitch. “You can take comfort in how right you were.”
“You think there’s any comfort for me in this? They say they’re going to crush my only child with stones!”
Thorn felt cold then, very cold. It was an effort to take a breath. As though they were piling the rocks on her already. “Who said?”
“Everyone says.”
“Father Yarvi?” The minister spoke the law. The minister would speak the judgment.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Not yet.”
Not yet, that was the limit of her hopes. Thorn felt so weak she could hardly grip the bars. She was used to wearing a brave face, however scared she was. But Death is a hard mistress to face bravely. The hardest.
“You’d best go.” The key-keeper started to pull Thorn’s mother away.
“I’ll pray,” she called, tears streaking her face. “I’ll pray to Father Peace for you!”
Thorn wanted to say, “Damn Father Peace,” but she could not find the breath. She had given up on the gods when they let her father die in spite of all her prayers, but a miracle was looking like her best chance.
“Sorry,” said the key-keeper, shouldering shut the door.
“Not near as sorry as me.” Thorn closed her eyes and let her forehead fall against the bars, squeezed hard at the pouch under her dirty shirt. The pouch that held her father’s fingerbones.
We don’t get much time, and time feeling sorry for yourself is time wasted. She kept every word he’d said close to her heart, but if there’d ever been a moment for feeling sorry for herself, this had to be the one. Hardly seemed like justice. Hardly seemed fair. But try telling Edwal about fair. However you shared out the blame, she’d killed him. Wasn’t his blood crusted up her sleeve?
She’d killed Edwal. Now they’d kill her.
She heard talking, faint beyond the door. Her mother’s voice—pleading, wheedling, weeping. Then a man’s, cold and level. She couldn’t quite catch the words, but they sounded like hard ones. She flinched as the door opened, jerking back into the darkness of her cell, and Father Yarvi stepped over the threshold.
He was a strange one. A man in a minister’s place was almost as rare as a woman in the training square. He was only a few years Thorn’s elder but he had an old eye. An eye that had seen things. They told strange stories of him. That he had sat in the Black Chair, but given it up. That he had sworn a deep-rooted oath of vengeance. That he had killed his Uncle Odem with the curved sword he always wore. They said he was cunning as Father Moon, a man rarely to be trusted and never to be crossed. And in his hands—or in his one good one, for the other was a crooked lump—her life now rested.
“Thorn Bathu,” he said. “You are named a murderer.”
All she could do was nod, her breath coming fast.
“Have you anything to say?”
Perhaps she should’ve spat her defiance. Laughed at Death. They said that was what her father did, when he lay bleeding his last at the feet of Grom-gil-Gorm. But all she wanted was to live.
“I didn’t mean to kill him,” she gurgled up. “Master Hunnan set three of them on me. It wasn’t murder!”
“A fine distinction to Edwal.”
True enough, she knew. She was blinking back tears, shamed at her own cowardice, but couldn’t help it. How she wished she’d never gone to the square now, and learned to smile well and count coins like her mother always wanted. But you’ll buy nothing with wishes.
“Please, Father Yarvi, give me a chance.” She looked into his calm,