But why didn’t she eat the heart if refusing meant torture and death? I ask back. Queen Bethany’s command to eat was the Maker’s command, that’s what Black Fingers said. So obeying and eating the heart was the Maker’s will. When I became a sin eater, the Makerman said the only way I’d escape an eternity by Eve’s side was to obey the Maker’s will. Surely the other Sin Eater knew that too.

But the heart wasn’t recited, the road says. It was a lie. How can a lie be the Maker’s will?

Was it the Maker’s will for us to refuse? Is that why the other Sin Eater wouldn’t eat the heart? Did she trade a fearsome death for an eternity of peace? Did I forfeit my own salvation by eating the heart?

Did I obey, or didn’t I?! I scream in silence.

I have no notion of the right answer, but all my thoughts are coated with a sticky shame. It feels like the oil on the deer heart.

I look down at the wheel ruts. Traitors must confess before they are killed, I tell them. It’s law. The other Sin Eater’ll say there was no heart recited.

The bony grooves arch into the bottoms of my feet through my leather soles, up through the bones of my legs. Will she break the sacred rule and speak? the ruts ask. She swore to carry the contents of Corliss’s Recitation in silence to her grave.

I daren’t think on what will happen to her if she doesn’t confess. I look at the sparse clouds at the top of the sky, so far away they won’t bother to tell me. But it comes into my head anyway. They use stones, some as wide around as cartwheels to make traitors speak if they refuse to confess. They lay the man or woman on a bed of wood, then pile stones onto their chest, stopping only if a confession is made. Speak or die. It can take hours to crush an able body. The newsboys have performed it in pantos before. Lee and I shrieked with the rest of the folk watching as a bladder of pig’s blood sprayed us when the traitor was crushed in the show. That will be her end. There’s no way through I can see.

But mayhap I could speak, the thought comes. If folk knew the deer heart wasn’t recited, the Sin Eater might be let go. And surely saving a life is a goodly act. I could tell somefolk – Black Fingers, the Queen, the Willow Tree.