Sin Eater: A Novel Read online

  The only decorations left in the town’s Makerhall are the stone carvings of Hagi Saul and Hagi Gabriel cut into the very walls beside its doors and the coloured glass windows. During services, I would sit in a pew where the sun cast coloured light, so I could lift my hand and see my skin blue, green, gold. It seemed as true a mystery as the Maker’s miracles.

  Corliss’s Eating takes place in the Queen’s private Makerhall at the castle. Lots of folk come to witness, their heads sitting above their ruffs like roast meat on platters. Among them I find the Country Mouse, looking ill at ease in his pew. His eyes pass my direction, and I’m sure he sees me. Before I can help it, I smile, but his eyes have been pulled by the folk beside him, whispering and pointing to the coffin. I look around at the rest of the folk. A fair number are murmuring and pointing towards the coffin too. Must be the pomegranate for witchcraft. A frightful sin, to be sure.

  Suddenly there’s squeaks and scrapes of pews moving as folk stand. Then the Queen comes in. The gnarled Willow Tree doctor walks behind her, and she has a dog at her side. Not a real dog, a man-dog. He wears a neat beard and a thick gold chain around his neck. His fingers are stained black with ink. The chain and ink are because he’s the Queen’s secretary. He’s the one folk say is her favourite.

  Once the Queen takes her seat in the front, it’s our turn. The Sin Eater and I walk up the aisle towards the coffin at the front. The pews to each side are so polished that the wood looks like water. I brush them as I go by with my fingers, sliding callus to callus along the cool and smooth of it. I’m so intent on the feeling that I bump full into the Sin Eater’s rump when she stops a step from the coffin. I peek around to see why she’s halted.

  The deer heart is dressed in truffles and oil. It must have been a huge animal. It sits like a centrepiece between the roast peacock and the pomegranate. I go over the list of foods in my head, but Corliss never recited a deer heart. And it isn’t a sin to forget. This is why all the folk were whispering and pointing.

  The Sin Eater gets still. Not like an ass that won’t go, digging in its feet and eyeing you from the side, but wood-still like the pews, cool and smooth.

  The folk sitting are a different matter. At first none notice the Sin Eater’s stopped, for a little pause here and there is usual. But then time stretches out and becomes something to note. It stretches further and becomes something to unsettle. That’s when all the motion no longer in the Sin Eater seems to jump to the other folk. The longer she stays still, the more they need to move about, shifting and looking and peering and whispering.

  The Queen herself sits not four paces from us. ‘The sin eater stopped. Is it a portent?’ she asks the Willow Tree.

  The Willow Tree talks louder than he should, but more like because he’s unaware than that he means to be loud. ‘I saw no such signs. Perhaps she trembles at the gravity of the sin.’

  The Queen signals her black-fingered secretary. He goes to the front of the Makerhall. The Willow Tree hastily follows after as if he doesn’t want to be left out. They talk a bit as if they’re arguing. The secretary’s hands move as he speaks, and his black fingertips look like charred tinder. I swallow away the giggle that comes into my throat.

  Black Fingers addresses the hall. ‘The sin eater will proceed with the Eating of Corliss Ashton as is the sin eater’s duty, conferred by the Maker and his agent on earth, Her Majesty, Queen Bethany.’

  The Sin Eater doesn’t move.

  I know it’s the deer heart. She vowed to eat the sins Corliss recited. The deer heart is a lie. She won’t break her vow. I feel like a squirrel seeing the shadow of a hawk. I dread what’s coming for us.

  Black Fingers waits one more breath and then speaks. ‘If the sin eater refuses to eat, she disobeys a direct order from the Maker as it is written in the Maker’s Book.’ Every breath in every body stills. As if following my thoughts, he goes on. ‘To disobey a direct order from the Maker and his agent Queen Bethany’ – his own voice quiets – ‘is treason.’

  Treason is death. And under Queen Bethany that’s not by a noose and the gallows but by gutting or burning or worse. I wait for the Sin Eater to move. When she doesn’t, I do something plain foolish. I take my hand and place it on hers. I expect it to be cool and hard like the wood of the pews, but heat pulses off it. I squeeze. I don’t know what I mean by it. Only that something must be done. Something other than stillness and treason and death.

  ‘Guards!’ Black Fingers’s voice echoes in the hall.

  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?’

  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.

  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.

  An awful twitching seizes my guts, like my bowels might empty right here in the road. What does it mean that I’d consider breaking a sin eater’s rule of silence? It’s like breaking a vow. Da said if you break a vow, it cracks your soul. I’d never escape Eve then.

  I think of my da. What it was like to be known and seen and heard by him. And how each year since he’s been gone I’ve lost more of my place in this world until I don’t know who I am or where I belong. But I could sort things out, I think. I could mend things. I could get the other Sin Eater back. I could be us again. And mayhap, Maker help me, if I make things right, I’ll be forgiven for eating the unrecited heart, and when I die I can go to the Maker. I turn on my toes back towards the castle. Mayhap we can both be saved.

  The castle guards don’t know what to do with me. They look at their parchment list, then at one another. Never at me, except a first, startled half look. I wait, and they wait. But in my chest I remember the cold dark of a cellar and wonder how much worse the dungeon must be for the Sin Eater. And then I just go on and slip between the guards through the castle gate into the courtyard. I expect a cry behind me, but it’s quiet as I cross the stones.

  The Makerhall is still. The folk’ve all gone. I walk up the centre aisle, the padding of my steps disappearing into the large emptiness. Near the front is a small, carved door, but it only goes to a vestment room, hung with Makermen robes. Where now? The only other place I know in the castle is the Queen’s rooms, where we heard Corliss’s Recitation.

  Back in the courtyard I find the door with the stone scroll above it. There’s a guard, but he seems as confused as the gatekeepers at my approach. I take a gamble and walk with purpose. Just before my toe strikes the door, the guard pushes it open, sliding to the side to avoid my touch.

  There’s plenty of folk to be found in the passageways of the Queen’s quarters, maids and grooms and guards, guards everywhere, but they look away when I pass. If only my uncles knew what a thief a sin eater could make, they would fashion a brass S, don skirts, and forgo their other games.

  I climb the castle stairs as quick as I dare, keeping my hand against the wall to be sure I don’t fall. Somewhere near, Maker help me, is the Queen. I will tell her that Corliss recited no killing. I will make it all right.

  As I turn the next corner, I see a maid, head bowed, coming out of a smallish door. A store closet, mayhap. But it’s not a maid. It’s one of the young ladies from the Queen’s chamber, the pretty Fair Hair, wearing a butter-yellow dress and straightening the coif on her head.

  A voice calls to her. ‘I wondered where you had disappeared to.’ It’s Mush Face, coming from around a turn.

  ‘I told you I needed candles,’ Fair Hair answers. ‘I was looking for a maid to fetch some.’

  ‘In the herb dispensary?’ Mush Face eyes Fair Hair. ‘Did you hear about the Eating? The Queen’s dearest Corliss was a witch.’

  Fair Hair’s mouth works like a newly caught fish. ‘There was pomegranate on the coffin?’

  ‘And a deer heart as big as a rabbit,’ Mush Face says.

  ‘Witches kill for their magic, I’ve heard tell,’ says Fair Hair. ‘We should return to the presence chamber.’

  ‘Where are your candles?’ Mush Face asks without moving her eyes.

  ‘My what?’

  It’s then Fair Hair sees me, still as a bird in a bush, at the passageway’s turn. She starts twice when she sees me, first to find folk there and again when she sees my brass S. Her eyes drop, and both ladies make the Maker’s sign across their shoulders and hips.

  ‘She’s the one who ate the deer heart,’ Mush Face says. ‘It’s poor luck to see her after the Eating.’

  ‘Why, that’s old-faith mummery,’ says Fair Hair. She puts her hand on Mush Face’s arm and leads her towards the Queen’s sitting room.

  Just as they disappear down the way, the door to the herb dispensary opens again and out comes Black Fingers, the Queen’s secretary. It’s odd that two folk came from the same, small closet, but mayhap the oddness’s a sign from the Maker. Black Fingers has the Queen’s ear.

  I summon my breath. ‘Sir!’ I call to him. Even though I haven’t been a sin eater long, my voice sounds wrong and at the same time welcome like warm water. Black Fingers hardly takes me in before he’s begun the Maker’s Prayer. I try to raise my voice over his. ‘There was a misdeed committed, Sir! It must be set right.’ But he only speaks louder, drowning out my words, turning to go on his way.

  I run after him, my collar bumping hard at my neck. I need something t
o catch his attention. I call louder still. ‘A killing’s been blamed on the wrong folk. The Queen must be told.’

  His change is so sudden I think he must have tripped until I see the blade in his hand. Then he comes at me at a run. I stumble back, but in moments his neat beard is right over me, and the knife is digging into the flesh below my left ear. My hands catch his, fighting against the blade’s tug as it tries to carve its way across my throat.

  A burble of laughter comes out of the Queen’s sitting room as the door opens. Nimble like a Northside cut-throat, Black Fingers slides his blade out of my neck and into his sleeve. He’s walking coolly away, bowing to three ladies coming from the sitting room when I fall against the wall. My heart thumps in my ears. I grab at my shawl to staunch the warm stream at my throat.

  The laughing women have nearly reached me, but so accustomed are they to servants hugging the walls at their approach, it’s not until they are within arm’s reach that they see who I am or what’s happened.

  The nearest lady gives a mighty shriek and steps backwards, treading on the woman behind her. They fall together, cries joining the snapping of wicker skirt hoops. The third woman furiously speaks the Maker’s Prayer, an echo of Black Fingers:

  Maker mine, forever of the sun’s light

  Miracles be wrought from your name

  Protect us sinners,

  Now and at the hour of our death.

  I saw a pig man at work once. He held the sow in one arm and with the other he cut across its throat. You’d never guess how much blood was in the one animal. It bled and bled in bulging pulses and then in a steady stream. I remember it took longer than I could stand and watch for it to drain. I grew tired of the sight and went on about my day. Mayhap I will die in the same fashion. Mayhap I’m doing so now. This is what comes of a sin eater speaking.