I wait for the guards to come and haul me away like the constable who took me to jail. And the guards do come, but they stop a pace away. They don’t want to touch a sin eater. The Willow Tree comes into the aisle too. He gets so close to Black Fingers they look like they might kiss. I swallow another miserable giggle.

They’re near enough I just catch their words. ‘Shall I do your work?’ the Willow Tree says. ‘The Queen is distressed enough.’

‘I am the Queen’s favourite,’ Black Fingers says back through his teeth. ‘I’m an earl now, and may soon be more. And you will be the first to go, you charlatan.’

‘You are a dog in lion’s garb, and your pups will never sit on the throne.’

Black Fingers tugs at his own ear. He turns to the guards. ‘Are you men?’

One guard, then the other raises his sword, but it’s only the older Sin Eater they push out of the Makerhall with the flat of their blades.

Black Fingers stays behind. ‘The sin eater will do her Makergiven duty.’ He can only mean me. ‘She will execute this Eating, and all future Recitations and Eatings, or also be charged with treason against Maker and country.’ Two more guards come up the aisle, their swords at the ready. The cutting edge of one has a small brown stain on it.

When the purgers came in the night to our home, Bethany had just been crowned queen. I was seven. She made it treason to be Eucharistian, but Da hadn’t yet destroyed our family altar. How the purgers knew it, I don’t know. Some folk must have told them.

My mother urged Da to burn the altar. ‘Bend in the wind, don’t swing in it,’ she said.

Da had shaken his head. ‘What we do shows who we are. I cannot change my faith one day to the next.’

But when Da left for work, my mother sent me to fetch her brothers. I found them in the road by the town square, idling and taunting folk who came by. They waved me away like a fly. I told them, just as my mother instructed, that Da ‘hadn’t cleaned the house proper and guests were coming’. When I said that, their ears perked up like dogs after a squirrel. They followed me home. Mother sent me to the kitchen while my uncles made a mess in the garden with hammers.

When Da came home at sunset, Mother gave him supper but no words. He had only finished his meat when there was a knock at the door. Faces were covered by hoods, but I heard the smithy’s voice and saw the dark, hairy hands of Gracie Manners’s da. I can still hear in my mind Da saying all calm-like, ‘Come in, would you like some small beer?’