The Ashford ford was shallow and wide and the color of weak tea, and on the morning of the handover, both banks were crowded with soldiers.
On the south bank, the Empire. Three hundred of the Ember Guard in black and red, drawn up in perfect lines. The Empress's banner. And in front of them, on foot, Seo Hana with her huge sword on her back, holding a silver chain.
On the other end of the chain was Ren.
The shackles were heavy. Etched silver, the same kind they'd put on him in the Church cells in Solenne, covered with tiny lines of script that glowed faintly when he moved. He could feel them leaning on his chest again. That soft, patient pressure.
The little steel pick sat between his back teeth and his cheek. He'd stopped noticing it sometime around midnight.
On the north bank, Varenhal. Thirty Radiant Knights on white horses. A black iron prison wagon with bars instead of walls, pulled by four oxen. Mori Daiki in his white envoy robes, sitting very straight on a gray horse. And in front of them all, alone, a man in a long black coat with a gold sunburst sewn over the heart.
Kanzaki Shuhei · Inquisitor (Epic) · Level 34
Hana walked Ren out into the middle of the ford. The water came up to their knees. It was cold. Kanzaki walked out to meet them from the other side, and they stopped a few feet apart, in the middle of the river, with a thousand people watching.
"Inquisitor," said Hana.
"Headsman," said Kanzaki.
Hana held out the chain. Kanzaki took it.
For one second, Hana didn't let go. She looked at Ren. Her face didn't change at all, but her hand stayed on the chain a moment longer than it needed to.
Then she let go, turned around, and walked back to the south bank without a word.
Kanzaki looked at Ren. His face was thin and tired, and there were deep lines around his mouth that hadn't been there in the courtroom in Tokyo. His eyes were the same, though. Steady and careful. Reading everything.
"Kuroda," he said.
"Kanzaki."
"I'm going to place the Writ on you again. It's procedure." He said it the way he said everything. Like a man reading from a rulebook. "If you run, I'll know."
"I'm not going to run."
Kanzaki looked at him for a long moment. Then he raised one hand and laid two fingers on Ren's forehead.
Status effect: Writ of Pursuit.
Source: Kanzaki Shuhei.
"Come on," said Kanzaki, and led him across the river by the chain.
***
The prison wagon was a cage of black iron bars, eight feet long and five wide, with a wooden floor covered in old straw. They pushed him in and locked the door and chained his shackles to a ring in the floor.
Then they searched him.
They took his boots off and shook them. They felt through every seam of his clothes. They ran their fingers through his hair. One of the knights made him open his mouth, and Ren opened it, and the knight took one look at his teeth and wrinkled his nose and stepped back.
Sable had been right. Nobody looked between the back teeth and the cheek.
The wagon lurched forward. The oxen leaned into their yokes. Behind him, on the south bank of the Ashford, the Imperial lines were already turning away.
He didn't look back.
***
It took six days to reach Solenne.
They went the long way, by the main road, through every town and village on the way. Ren understood why on the first afternoon. It wasn't a journey. It was a parade.
The news had gone ahead of them. In every town, people were waiting by the road. Hundreds, sometimes thousands. Farmers and shopkeepers and children on their fathers' shoulders, all of them lining the road to see the Demon Hero in his cage.
The first village, they just stared.
The second one, someone threw a rotten apple. It hit the bars and burst, and the crowd laughed.
By the third day, they were throwing stones.
Ren sat in the middle of the cage with his back against the bars and let them. Most of the stones hit the iron. A few didn't. One opened a cut over his eye, and the blood ran down into his eyelashes, and he didn't wipe it away.
A little girl ran alongside the wagon for a while in one town, screaming *demon, demon, demon* at the top of her voice, until her mother caught her and dragged her back.
The author's official story page contains this chapter, but the copy here was made without consent.
He'd been through this before. A year of it. Strangers on the train. Messages on his phone. It was easier here, somehow. These people had never met him. They'd been told a story, and they believed it, because nobody had ever told them a different one. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
He thought about Marta, with her son's boots. He wondered if she'd been in any of those crowds. He hoped not.
***
Kanzaki rode beside the cage most of the way.
He didn't talk much, the first few days. He rode his gray mare at the side of the wagon with his back very straight, and every so often, when a stone came close, he looked up at whoever had thrown it, and the crowd near that spot got quieter.
On the third evening, they camped in a field outside a town called Marrowfield. The knights lit fires. Daiki sat at one of them, alone, staring into the flames. The oxen grazed. The cage sat in the middle of it all, with Ren inside.
Kanzaki came and sat down on the grass beside the bars.
"I've been in the archives," he said.
Ren waited.
"Under the Hall. The old Church records. I went down there after the river." Kanzaki looked at the fire, not at him. "I needed to know that the man I'd lied to deserved it. So I started reading. From the beginning. The Calling."
"And?"
"And the Calling costs a life for every hero. It always has. They write the names down. Very neatly. The priests say the lives are holy sacrifices, freely given." His voice didn't change. "They're prisoners. Beggars. Enemy soldiers. I found the ledger for this spring. Twenty names."
Ren said nothing.
"I knew some of them," said Kanzaki. "Not personally. But I'd seen them. In the city jail under the Hall, the first week, when they gave us the tour. There was an old man with no teeth who sang hymns all day. His name was on the list." He folded his hands. "We stood in the circle that day. You and I and the rest. I remember the stone was warm."
"Yes."
"I didn't think about why."
They sat there in silence for a while. One of the oxen lowed somewhere in the dark.
"Was Saionji driving?" Kanzaki asked.
He said it very quietly. Like a man asking a question he was afraid to hear answered.
"Yes," said Ren.
Kanzaki closed his eyes.
"I built that case," he said. "Piece by piece. Every statement. Every piece of evidence. It was clean. I was proud of how clean it was." He opened his eyes again. "I never once asked myself why it was so clean."
"Because you wanted it to be."
"Because I wanted it to be." Kanzaki nodded slowly. "Yes."
"Why are you telling me this?"
The Inquisitor stood up. He brushed the grass off his black coat.
"Because in two days," he said, "the High Seraph is going to ask me to put a noose around your neck. And I wanted to know, before she did, whether I was hanging a guilty man."
He walked back toward the fires.
***
On the fifth night, Daiki came.
He came late, after the knights had gone to sleep by their fires, with a cup of water in his hands. He stood outside the bars of the cage for a long time without saying anything. Then he held the cup out through the bars.
Ren looked at it.
"It's just water," Daiki said. "I drank some first. Look." He took a sip, and swallowed, and held it out again.
Ren took it. He drank it. It was cold, from the stream at the edge of the field.
Daiki didn't leave. He stood there with his hands at his sides, in his white robes, looking at the straw on the floor of the cage.
"Do you remember the melon bread?" he said. "In middle school. The last one at the store, every day. We used to race for it."
"I remember."
"You always let me win. I knew you did. I never said anything." Daiki's voice was very quiet. "I used to think that meant you were weak."
Ren handed the empty cup back through the bars.
"Go to sleep, Daiki," he said.
Daiki took the cup. He looked like he wanted to say something else. Then he turned and walked back to his fire, and sat down beside it alone, and didn't lie down. The source of this chapter is novelping dot com.
***
That night, Ren tried something.
He'd been thinking about Edict since Corran's Field. *Speak, and every sworn soul will hear you, wherever they are.* He'd used it once, in the meadow, without meaning to. A single word, shouted into every candle at once.
He didn't want every candle tonight. He wanted one.
He sat in the cage with his eyes closed and looked inside himself at the city of lights. There were more than eleven hundred now. Most of them were south, a big warm cluster around Fort Calder, like a town seen from a hill at night. But a few were moving. Separate. Off to the west, a long way from him, moving north through dark country.
One of them burned quick and bright and restless.
He reached for it. Not all of them. Just that one.
"Sable," he said, inside it. "Still with me?"
For a moment, nothing.
Then, faint, far away, like a feeling more than a sound, he felt the candle jump. Startled. Then something that felt like a laugh, and a rush of warmth, and the candle burned steadier.
She'd heard him. She couldn't answer. But she'd heard him.
He opened his eyes in the dark cage and let out a long breath. He hadn't known he was holding it.
***
They reached Solenne on the sixth evening, the day before the Festival of Light.
The city was already celebrating. Ren heard it from a mile away. Music. Bells. Thousands of voices singing hymns. As the wagon rolled through the great white gates, the streets were hung with gold banners, and every window had a candle in it, and the air smelled of incense and honey cakes and roasting meat.
The crowds were bigger here. They lined both sides of the Street of Saints all the way up the hill. They didn't throw stones in Solenne. They just stood there, silent, and watched the cage go by. Children hid behind their mothers' skirts. Old women made the sign of the sunburst on their chests.
Then the street opened out, and Ren saw the Square of Saints.
It was huge. White stone, paved in a great spiral pattern, ringed by tall buildings with gold roofs. At the far end, the steps of the Hall of Radiance climbed up to the great doors. And halfway up the steps, on a wide landing, stood the Great Lamp. A bowl of gold as tall as a man, on a pillar of white marble, empty and waiting.
And in front of the lamp, at the edge of the landing, so the whole square could see it, stood the scaffold.
Fresh wood. A platform, a crossbeam, and a ladder.
Three ropes hung from the beam.
The wagon stopped at the foot of the steps. Ren sat in the cage and looked at the three ropes for a long time.
***
They put him in the same cell as before.
The white stone walls. The cot with the real blanket. The torch in its bronze holder shaped like an open hand. Someone had even left a cup of water and a bowl of bread by the door, just like last time.
They chained him to the wall by his shackles and left.
He sat on the cot and listened to the city singing far above him.
It was nearly midnight when he heard footsteps in the corridor. Not a guard's. Careful. Measured. They stopped outside his bars.
Kanzaki stood there in the torchlight in his black coat. He was alone.
He looked at Ren for a long time without saying anything. Then he glanced up the corridor, both ways, and stepped closer to the bars.
"I know what this is, Kuroda," he said quietly.
Ren didn't move.
"The Empire doesn't give up its best captain for land it's already winning. The Headsman held the chain too long at the ford. And you haven't once asked me what happens tomorrow." Kanzaki's voice was very low. "Because you already know. Because you're not planning to be on that scaffold when the lamp is lit."
The torch hissed in its bronze hand.
"I've known since the ford," said Kanzaki.
Ren looked at him through the bars.
"Who have you told?" he asked.
The Inquisitor was quiet for a long moment.
"No one," he said. "Yet."