The first witness was Paula Mercer, and she arrived at the town hall in full armor.
This was not, I should clarify, court armor. This was Paula's actual field plate — dented, scarred, smelling faintly of oil and the forge, with her sword at her hip and her helm under her arm. She had decided, apparently, that if the Temple wanted to question her, it would question a knight, and she would give it no less than the full terrible weight of her profession.
I was not present for the questioning. Maren had barred me from the hall. But I was there an hour later, when Paula came storming into the tavern with the look of a woman who had won an argument so completely that the victory tasted like ash.
"Well?" Diane said. "What did she ask?"
"She asked me," Paula said, dropping her helm onto the bar with a crash that made two mugs jump, "whether Mr. Parker had taken advantage of my disgrace."
"And what did you say?" I asked.
"I told her the truth." Paula drew herself up. "I told her that you did not take advantage of my disgrace. I told her that you challenged the town's mockery of me in the square. I told her that when I demanded proof of your honor, you gave it — in combat, as is proper."
Diane closed her eyes. "Paula. When you say 'in combat' —"
"I dueled him. As is proper."
"You dueled Ethan."
"It was a test of his character."
"Paula," I said, "you beat me so badly I couldn't sit down for two days."
"I showed mercy," Paula said, with enormous dignity. "That is the point. I showed him mercy, and he showed me honor, and then he swore his oath."
There was a silence. Diane was very still behind the bar.
"What," Diane said carefully, "exactly did you tell the inquisitor about the oath?"
Paula frowned. "I told her that he swore an oath of devotion to me. A knight's oath. That he knelt —"
"You told a Temple inquisitor that Ethan knelt to you?" Diane's voice had risen half an octave.
"It was an oath of honor!"
"Paula, in the Temple's eyes, a man kneeling to a graceless woman is not an oath. It is a symptom."
Paula stared at her. "But it was honorable."
"I know it was honorable, dear. The question is whether Sister Maren knows."
"She wrote it down," Paula said, quieter now. "She wrote a great deal down. She asked whether the oath was —" Paula paused. "Whether the oath was 'sealed.' I said yes. She asked how it was sealed. I said —"
"What did you say?" I said.
"I said that is between a knight and her oath-sworn, and a matter of honor, and I would not sully it with Temple prying." Paula looked at me. "Was that wrong?"
I put my head in my hands.
"It was honest," Diane said quickly, because Diane was kind even when she was horrified. "It was honest, Paula. It was also, possibly, the single most suspicious sentence ever spoken in that hall."
"It was not suspicious. It was private."
Willa, who had been lying across two chairs with her boots on a third, lifted her head. "You should have bitten her."
"That is not a solution to every problem," Paula said.
"It is a solution to most problems," Willa said. "The others are food, sleep, and biting later."
"You are up next, you know," Diane said.
Willa's ears flattened. "I am not going."
"You have to go."
"I will bite her."
"You can't bite the inquisitor."
Diane was next, and if Paula had gone to the hall as a fortress, Diane went as a hearth.
She put on her good apron — the blue one, with the embroidery. She baked a tray of honey cakes and carried them to the town hall in a basket, because Diane Foster had never in her life attended any event, confrontation, or legal proceeding without bringing food, and she was not about to start with an inquisitor.
She came back two hours later, the basket empty, looking thoughtful.
"Well?" Paula said.
"She ate three of the honey cakes," Diane said.
"That's good, right?"
"I believe it confused her. She asked me about Ethan, and I told her he was a good boy who works hard and eats his meals and helped me fix the tavern's back door." Diane sat down heavily. "She asked whether he had shown me 'improper attention.' I said he had shown me the attention of a son, and then I gave her another cake."
"A son," Paula repeated.
"He is young," Diane said. "To me, he is young. He is twenty-four and I am thirty-eight, and when he first came to my tavern he was half-starved and wearing someone else's trousers, and I fed him, and he —" She stopped. "She asked whether he had been in my chambers after hours. I said that a tavern keeper's chambers are where she keeps her accounts, and I showed her my ledger. She looked at the ledger for twenty minutes."
"Did she find anything?" I asked.
"She found that I charge too little for the stew." Diane smiled faintly. "She said it indicated 'poor business judgment.' I gave her another cake."
Willa sat up. "You fed the enemy."
"She was hungry, dear. Inquisitors are people too."
"She is not people. She is a desk with legs."
Paula was pacing. "So she knows nothing."
"She knows," Diane said, "that you dueled him and sealed an oath you refuse to describe, and that I treat him like a son and feed him stew, and that my accounts are honest." She looked at me. "Ethan, dear — she is very good at her job. Every question she asked me, she already knew half the answer to. She was checking whether my half matched."
"And did it?"
"The halves matched." Diane's smile faded. "That is what worries me."
Willa went last, and Willa went the way Willa went everywhere: like a natural disaster with opinions.
I tried to stop her. I stood in the tavern doorway and said, "Willa, please. Just answer her questions. Don't growl. Don't bare your teeth. Don't —"
"Do not tell a wolf how to be in a room," Willa said, and walked past me, and I followed at a distance because I am an idiot who has learned nothing.
She did not knock. She pushed open the town hall door, walked into the chamber, looked at Sister Maren sitting behind her desk, and said, "You are the woman who wants my mate."
The acolytes froze. Maren looked up from her ledger.
"I beg your pardon?" Maren said.
"He is mine," Willa said. She said it the way other people said "the sky is blue" — a fact, not an argument. "I claimed him. The bite is on his wrist. You can look. Everyone in this town has looked."
Maren's gaze flicked, involuntarily, to my wrist — I had followed Willa in, because of course I had — and I held up my hand to show the small scarred mark there. The claim-bite. Willa's teeth, healed into a pale crescent.
"I see," Maren said. She made a note. "And you are — Willa. The wolfkin."
"I am Willa. I am the huntress of the Greywood. I am twenty-five years old and I have killed three boars with a knife and one tax collector with paperwork." She bared her teeth in what was technically a smile. "Ask your questions."
Maren asked her questions. I know this because afterward, Maren's senior acolyte — a young man named Brother Fenwick, who had the haunted look of someone whose faith was being tested by proximity to chaos — came to the tavern for a drink and told us everything, in a low voice, like a man confessing.
"She asked," Fenwick said, "whether Mr. Parker had coerced the claiming."
"And Willa said?" Diane asked.
"She said, 'He tried to refuse. I bit him anyway. He is slow. I am patient.' Then she said, 'Do you want to see the bite again? I can show you the bite. I can give you a bite.' Sister Maren said that would not be necessary."
"Then Sister Maren asked whether Mr. Parker had shown preference among the three women — whether he favored one over the others."
The tavern went quiet. Fenwick looked at his mug.
"Willa said," Fenwick continued, "'He does not favor. He is a fool with a big heart and no sense. The knight makes him brave. The mother makes him fed. I make him fast. He needs all three. This is obvious. Why are you asking?'"
I stared at him. "She said that?"
"Word for word. I wrote it down. Sister Maren told me to write it down." Fenwick looked up, and his expression was genuinely troubled. "She has been an inquisitor for eleven years. She has never — she has never encountered this. Three women. Three completely different accounts. The knight speaks of oaths and honor. The tavern keeper speaks of feeding him and treating him as a son. The wolfkin speaks of claiming him as a mate. And Mr. Parker sits in that chair and says it is all true, and it is all —" Fenwick searched for the word. "Genuine."
"Because it is," Paula said.
"That's the problem," Fenwick said quietly. "Sister Maren said — she said, 'If it were lust, I would know what to do with it. Lust is simple. Lust confesses. This is something else. This is —' and then she stopped, and she looked at the ledger for a long time, and she said, 'This is devotion. In three different shapes. And I don't have a form for that.'"
Nobody spoke. Diane refilled Fenwick's mug without being asked.
"There's something else," Fenwick said. "She's called for the grace-measuring ritual. Tomorrow. At dawn. In the square. Public."
My stomach dropped. "The ritual — what does it do?"
"It measures grace. It — it's the Temple's oldest rite. A blessed mirror, anointed oils, the Litany of the Delicate. It shows the Temple — and the subject — the true state of their soul's perception." Fenwick looked at me with something like pity. "In two hundred and fourteen cases, Mr. Parker, the ritual has never failed. The mirror always shows the corruption. The subject always sees it. And then —"
"And then what?"
"And then they weep," Fenwick said. "Every one of them. They see what their taste has become, and they weep, and they beg for the blessing, and Sister Maren cures them."
Paula's hand was on her sword. Willa's ears were flat. Diane had gone very still.
"She thinks it will work on me," I said.
"She knows it will work on you," Fenwick said. "That is what frightens her. She told me — she said, 'I have never been wrong about the ritual. If I am wrong about him, then I have been wrong about —' and she didn't finish." He stood, bowed awkwardly, and left, and the bell over the door rang in the silence like a struck match.
We sat there, the four of us, in the warm lamplight of the tavern, and I thought about what tomorrow would bring: the square, the mirror, the litany, the whole town watching. Two hundred and fourteen cures. A perfect record.
Paula broke the silence. "If the mirror lies about you, I will break the mirror."
"You can't break a Temple mirror, Paula."
"Watch me."
Willa stood, came around the table, and sat on my lap without ceremony, her arms around my neck, her chin on my head. "If the mirror shows you lies," she said, "I will bite the mirror."
"You can't bite a mirror, Willa."
"I can bite anything. I am very committed."
Diane reached across the table and took my hand. "And I," she said, "will bring honey cakes. Because whatever happens tomorrow, people think better on a full stomach."
I looked at the three of them — the knight, the mother, the wolf — and I felt the loud thing in my chest, the thing Maren couldn't put in her ledger, the thing no ritual could measure.
"Tomorrow at dawn," I said. "The whole town. A magic mirror that shows the state of my soul."
"Yes," Paula said.
"I'm going to be honest," I said. "I'm terrified."
"Good," Willa said, settling more comfortably onto my lap. "Fear makes the blood taste better. The mirror will taste your fear and be confused, because your fear is delicious and your soul is mine."
"That's not how mirrors work."
"That is exactly how mirrors work. You have never been a mirror."
And outside, in the dark square, the Temple's workmen were already raising the scaffold for the dawn ritual — hammering in the cold, by lamplight, building the stage where Sister Maren would prove, once and for all, that my taste was a disease.
Two hundred and fourteen cures. A perfect record.
Tomorrow, the mirror would look at me — and I had a terrible, wonderful feeling that the mirror was about to meet something it had never seen before.