One
Cinder Szule Reinholz had not been pious, and he had certainly not been good. He twisted his knife deeper into the back of his victim, feeling the man’s heart split and tear with each struggling beat. Aldous Earhart tried to thrash free of the attack, but he was too late, the motion only gouging open a deeper wound in his flesh. He would have had a better chance had Cin not come up behind him, silent as the night as he’d plunged the blade deep between Aldous’s shoulder blades, one gloved hand clamped to the man’s gasping mouth. But there was no fair fight in which someone of Cin’s small, slim build could have taken down a person as large as Aldous.
Besides, the justice Cin enacted was hardly ever fair, even if it was, regrettably, necessary.
Aldous gave a final cry against Cin’s palm and then slowly, gracelessly, his body went limp. Cin could see little more than silhouettes in the darkness of the side street, the moon already set and the stars covering their faces with heavy clouds, asthough even they could not bear to look upon the sins committed that night, but he could smell the moment Aldous’ spirit left him: a sharp stink amidst the salty metallic stench of blood. The useless red liquid was already pooling around Cin’s blade.
A stream of it spilled free as Cin withdrew his knife. He let Aldous’s body lower, quickly stepping aside from the fresh corpse. It slumped onto the packed dirt. His hood swayed against his forehead as he shrugged back the edge of his cloak to wipe his bloody blade on its inner folds. No matter how much he scrubbed away his stains, though, Cin knew from experience that he’d feel no more clean in the end. No more like the person his birth mother had dreamed for him.
A pious child would have stayed home.
A good child would not have brought the blade.
Then, perhaps, his mother’s spirit would have been there to whisper a better future into his ears and wrap the warmth of her love around his lean shoulders. If there was a heaven, Cin was certain he had no place in it. Not any longer.
As he stood over Aldous’s body, two small birds swooped down on him from the darkness, angelic shadows hovering over Cin’s kill. The pigeons landed one after the other on Cin’s arm, their tiny talons digging into his cloak. The smaller of the two, Lacey, fluffed her gray feathers majestically, the two darker stripes along her wings invisible in the low light. Beside her, muddy-brown Ragimund nibbled at a stray string on Cin’s cloak. They were two of his favorites, part of the trio of unwavering companions who’d found Cin soon after his mother’s death. Other pigeons from around the town would often join them for a time, called in by the ferocity of their bizarre love for him, but these three were always with him: Cin’s precious trio.
For a moment, Cin worried that perhaps their leader wasn’t among them, but he glanced toward the sky in time to spot Perdition as she spiraled toward his head, her pure-white glorycreating a ghostly figure against the dark night sky. She pulled up short at the last moment, dropping onto Cin’s shoulder as gracefully as an owl on the hunt. The deep coo she gave sounded almost proud.
Cin scratched the side of her small face before holding out a hand.
One by one, all three of the birds spread a wing, stripping out a feather or two each and offering it over to Cin. It was a ritual he knew well by then, having done it more and more often over the last seven years, but every time his birds gave him this small gift, it felt like a taste of forgiveness. Though never enough to satisfy the guilt that roiled ever-present inside him. That kind of absolution was for God to give, he was pretty sure. And Cin had been to their town’s little cathedral just enough since his mother died to know that however much their God spoke of justice and forgiveness, he was not any more inclined to provide them than the monarchs seemed these days.
So there Cin was, with a blade and a body, its bleeding coming to a sluggish stop beneath him.
Careful not to step into its pool of red in the darkness, Cin crouched down with his feathers. He slipped them, gentle and dramatic, into the gash he’d torn through Aldous’s back. His calling card’s first occurrence had been as accidental as the kill that started it all, Cin’s birds crowding around him as the tried frantically to stop the woman’s bleeding. His impulsive swing had never been meant to end her life, only to stop the violence she’d been inflicting on her young nephew.
Cin had been barely fifteen then, his hands smaller around the weapon—not yet a blade, but a rake the woman had set aside in favor of a more intimate assault. Her nephew hadn’t survived either, and that had felt like Cin’s fault, too. If only he’d stepped in sooner, paid more attention on his way into their town onthe far side of the capital city, not been so preoccupied by the responsibility of retrieving Louise’s new dish set.
Three days later, the feathers were just as much the talk of the kingdom as the killing. They became a delicious mystery that turned the scene into more than simple brutality, and the next time, Cin made the choice to hold out a hand toward his little flock. They had answered him without hesitation.
The feathers sticking from the backs of his victims always felt a bit like mockery: as though the bastards’ souls had tried to birth wings, to fly themselves to the mythical pearly gates, and failed from the start.
As Cin stood, his birds took off, vanishing into the shadow. But he could still feel their sharp eyes peering into his soul as though asking: had he done right today? Not good, not pious, but right. And he hoped he had. If not, what was the use of risking himself in this, week after week, year after year?
With the blood of twenty-two lives on his hands, it had to mean something.
Twenty-three now, Cin reminded himself. Twenty-three, and, somehow, no one the wiser, despite the all the crown’s searching. It felt, sometimes, that if they’d put the same effort into protecting those whose lives were being brutally stolen, little by little, day by day, then Cin’s work might have been irrelevant.
Sound echoed from up the street: the creak of a door, then the sleepy stumble of feet. Aldous’s body was deep into the shadows, Cin hidden even deeper, but he still began creeping his way back along the street in the other direction. It was slow work, each step deliberate and calculated to conserve his breath beneath the tight binding around his chest. Once, he would have left it off for this—been scampering across the rooftops like a bird himself—but over the last few years his breasts had developed to a placewhere even the bounce of them as he climbed made his body feel wrong, stretched and skewed into something that wasn’t him.
Once he could reach the street over though, there was a wall Cin could scale with enough ease to be over it and into the farmlands that came right up to the edge of this side of town. From there, he’d skirt to the east, and be home by sunrise, feet sore and ribs aching, but safe, and done. For now. Unless he found someone else to stalk. Someone else to slide his blade into three months later in the dead of night. Someone else’s blood to stain his hands for eternity.
Cin rounded the corner onto the dark, empty cobbled road that connected the homes at the edge of his town, and from out of the shadows, someone reached for him. He wrenched away, his knife already in hand. Cin’s body reacted on honed instincts, but still his heart beat in his ears, his lungs catching beneath their binding. How had—where had—who—
His attacker stepped back. Cin moved with them, sliding in close. Though they were nearly even in height, he could barely make an impact against the other person’s bulk, and he leveraged his knife instead, slamming the hilt into the person’s shoulder before wrenching the tip up under their chin, finding just the right angle to be ready to slide the blade in, one that would give them too little time to cry out, he knew, and be too sudden to hurt much, he hoped. As they lifted that chin though, their hood sliding back from their forehead, Cin caught the outline of their face and—
God, not her.
“I’m sorry,” Dorthe Earhart, Aldous’s wife—widow—whispered, a kitchen blade slipping from her fingers. It clattered on the street’s stone, the sound so loud in the night. Beneath her hastily donned cloak, she still wore the nightgown Cin had last seen her in as he’d watched upside down through the windowof her stairwell, as her husband had pulled her back into their room, her face already stained with tears. They hadn’t dried yet.
Cin’s fingers went clammy around his blade. His lungs felt too big for his chest, not enough air in all the space between himself and Dorthe. He couldn’t hurt her. He couldn’t let himself.
Cin forced his body away with a jerk. His shoe caught on the uneven stone of the street, and he felt something snap, but he righted himself quickly, keeping his hood up, his face in the shadows.
Dorthe’s chest heaved once. A tremble ran through her. She looked so uncertain that it broke something deep in Cin’s chest.
“Go,” he hissed, hoping the raspy edge to his voice was enough of a disguise.
