The smith stood over me smelling like vinegar and fear. ‘We’re going to all the houses,’ he said.

Da was quiet as the hooded men walked past him into our home. I don’t remember where Mother was, but I remember she was weeping.

When they left, the smith said, ‘Barely in time.’ It was like a storm that passes without a drop even though the clouds were dark and low.

‘Where is it?’ Da asked Mother when they’d gone. ‘Where is our altar?’

Mother just said, ‘Dust to dust.’

‘What have you done?’ Da whispered. He wasn’t angry exactly, but there was none of the soft that was always in his voice.

Mother looked him in the eye then. ‘You say it shows who you are. You’re nothing if you’re dead.’

Black Fingers, the Queen’s secretary, is weary of waiting. The guards feel it and raise their sword flats to my shoulders. In the end it’s this: the metal pushing through my shift, pushing pictures into my head of the brown stain on the blade digging into my guts, spilling my insides onto a block. The blade sawing at my hips until the bones give way and my legs are dragged off for dogs. My head stuck on a spike and posted on the castle gate so crows eat my eyes and lips.

I can’t help the Sin Eater if I’m dead, I tell the deer heart as my teeth tear into its flesh.

I’m a goodly girl, I whisper to the coffin.

I look up just once, to see the Country Mouse at his pew. His face is dropped, but on it is a plain look of disgust. Is it for me? For eating a lie? I hear a sort of choked sigh. My eyes skip without thinking to its maker. The Queen. I don’t know what it signifies, only that it seems to be made of both grief and relief all at once. And that a heart on a coffin is for killing.

6. CAKE BREAD

I CAN TASTE THE deer’s heart in my mouth as I walk home alone.

How could this happen? Why would an unrecited heart be placed on a coffin? It takes a moment for the answer to come up from the road.

To put blame for a killing on Corliss.

Somefolk placed the heart there to make us all believe Corliss had done a murder. But she never did. And I partook in the lie.

My steps come harder against the road, but words I don’t want to hear rise up. The Sin Eater’s in Queen Bethany’s dungeon. And you’re free because of a lie.