‘I’d choose my da back,’ I say before I can stop myself. I have to remind myself my da wasn’t really my da.

‘I’d trade places with my younger brother,’ he says, and the finger with the gold ring twitches. ‘But there’s no use in wishing is there?’

‘We can make little choices,’ I think aloud to him. ‘Like how we go about the day. And who we want to be like.’

‘I suppose we can.’ He gives a shuddering sigh, and his breathing gets rougher. The poppy oil must be waning. Behind me the apothecary gives a small cough.

I want to talk a little more, even just to prove the moment isn’t paste. Instead, I place the kitten on the stool and say the words, ‘When the food is et, your sins will be mine.’ My hand is a little bird, my fingers like feathers, as I touch him shoulder to hip and shoulder to hip again. ‘I will bear your sins in silence to my grave.’ Then I whisper so low and quick he’ll never hear it, ‘I’d choose you.’

‘May it be,’ he says back. My heart catches, wondering if he heard me.

Even if he didn’t, it’s a good ending. Me touching him. Him saying my name. I know how he would say it, if I could choose for myself. I take the empty bottle of poppy oil and put it in my sleeve for my sin eater box. A token of him.

20. DRIED RAISINS

OUTSIDE IN THE passage, grooms carry away burnt wood and cloth. Maids kneel with brushes, scrubbing at the ashes.

‘Her lock was stuck with pitch so the door wouldn’t open,’ a skinny maid with a few hairs on her lip tells a plumper one. ‘Took four guards.’

‘Another poppet was found,’ is what the plump one says back.

The skinny one gets pale. ‘It made the fire in the lady’s room?’

The plump one shrugs. ‘Poppet was found in the Queen’s bedchamber. Made of beeswax and dressed like the Queen herself.’

‘The castle’s full of witches!’ hisses the skinny one.

An old body who looks like a steward steps over, and the maids drop their shoulders into cleaning the blackened stones. ‘I’ll have no more mouth-running from you two,’ the steward says. ‘A heretic traitor’s trying to frighten the Queen and her suitors is what’s about. The fire, the poppet, the blood – the Queen’s secretary told us himself, and he isn’t a man to be wrong.’ The steward steps in front of me, and moves his arm like I should follow.

He leads me down a set of stairs and along a corridor. Just as he turns a corner, he stops short. He looks to the wall and clears his throat. Beyond him I see a man and woman pulling out of an embrace in an alcove. The man is Black Fingers.