Without a collar to mark me, I could run away. Is that what free means? To brave the roads to another town where no folk know me? I still wouldn’t be able to speak. I’d need to hide my marked tongue. But I could find the other unseen, whores and lepers. Beg them to take me in. Hide in the dark corners of the town, stealing food, shivering through winter, praying the constables don’t whip me and burn my ear through as a vagrant. It sounds worse and worse the more I think on it. Is this what free means?

Mayhap I could go elsewhere. Farther away. Slip onto a barge headed downriver, and then onto a bigger boat. One going to a stranger land, like where the Instrument Maker comes from. A land where they don’t believe in sin eaters. I could just be a girl again. A girl with no kin. Unable to understand the land’s tongue. Among heretics and heathens. Is that free?

I hear Jane down the ladder scolding her children. They’re playing hide-your-head with the ewer. I get a twist of sad, right in my heart, thinking about running away to another place. I grouse about Brida and Paul, Jane and Frederick, but they’ve come to be solidly on the side of company. They’re my folk.

The twist turns to an ache. This town is home. Da’s buried here. All my memories are stuck here, in these roads and houses, these folk. This earth and sky. I feel like a wherry that’s come untied in heavy rains, spinning off in swift, dark water.

Is this what free feels like? I ask the collar. But it doesn’t know what free means either.

A rapping sounds at the front door.

My heart seizes up. Not now. I tell the collar. Not before I’ve sorted this out.

But the rapping comes again, hard. Must be a Recitation. A soul that can’t wait.

You are the only one who can unburden it, says the collar.

They could make another sin eater, I say back.

Would you have the recorder do that? the collar asks. Curse another girl like you? Would you be free then?

And in this moment I know that running away will never make me free. My soul carries the sins of this town. I’ll carry them with me until I die. I can’t shed them any more than I can shed the memories of my da or my Daffrey blood.

I look at the collar softly gleaming in the afternoon light. It seems to take up as much space as me.