My own tongue proclaims

Yet the Elders are my voice

—Mysteries of the Fivefold, Children’s Instructive Edition

A tithe convoy of the Fivefold Church, in Ander Carmora’s sad experience, left three kinds of wakes. Armored wagons and oxen ripped lasting ruts in gravel roads, scarred them down to the mud. Tithe collectors gleaned their due from all and sundry, and left long swathes of land poorer than they’d found it. And the third wake: the bodies of any bandit crew daft enough to try its luck.

But keep pace behind the convoy, avoid Churchman outriders and hungry locals and the bandits in question, and you could make a gleaning of your own from the wreckage. If you had the need, anyway—nowhere to lay your head and nothing to your name, no trade, no decent boots.

This time around, half a day past Griever’s Mill, the take was the ruin of an ambush. Stacked stones marked three Churchmen’s graves. Robbers lay where they’d fallen, on all sides of a bend in the road where their work had gone sour. The convoy guards had snapped their spears, emptied their skinny purses into the tithe-wagons’ collection chutes, and moved on. All the silver was due elsewhere, far away for the Church’s glory.

Two looters searched the dead with haste. Liste Bluelark, thief and swindler, knew her business. Ander Carmora, former tithe collector of the Fivefold, knew only that he very much wanted to be elsewhere. There’d been a time when he guarded convoys, not picked at their carrion, and his new life didn’t sit well. He kept an eye or two on the churned-up road and the woods. One hand kept straying to the grip of his plain short sword. Gods and locals were watching, out of sight like all the other scavengers.

The smells—there was no single smell to butchery—pressed down on his spirits. More than once, he found himself rubbing the stone talisman knotted into his bracelet, a pebble carved as a simple elephant, with a few lines denoting fur, for a spark of good memory. As he searched the bodies and kept watch, he was halfway back in his long-lost childhood. Splitting his attention made him clumsy, prone to missing things, but at least he had that bit of refuge. Old memories, dredged up by the stone’s tired magic, kept him from thinking too hard. They kept the shame at bay.

“Your problem,” Liste said as they tugged off a robber’s putrefying footwear, “is you still think this is beneath you. Which means at some level you think I’m beneath you.”

This was an evolution of an earlier spat, and she was probably right. The boots yielded no stashed coins but a cornucopia of stink. To buy himself time for a decent answer, Carmora searched the boots thoroughly. He wasn’t as sure with his words as Liste, never had been. As a servant of the Church, he’d usually stuck to ritual and procedure, not conversation.

“I don’t,” he said at last, shaking a toenail from the left boot.

“Mmhmm.” The sound, he’d learned, meant Liste thought he was lying and wanted him to know it. He hated that sound.

He frowned and shook the boot again, and a little copper coin flipped down in the mud. Liste, who was interrogating the dead man’s belt pouches, leaned over and made the coin disappear. “Nice find,” she said. “Putting those tithe-taking instincts to work.”

He winced. “I wish you wouldn’t,” he mumbled. “I’m not proud of . . . ”

She eyed him for a long moment, crouched there as she frisked the belt pouches. Early rain speckled the torn-up gravel. “Don’t forget,” she said with emphasis. She displayed a pair of thin coins and a twist of wrapped sausage and put them away and moved on.

Carmora fidgeted with his braided bracelet, rubbing at the old talisman. That was Ninnagan, a mammoth, a god of memory, slaughtered by the Fivefold Church and scoured from the hearts of Carmora’s people. The carved stone held some shred of Ninnagan: It bolstered Carmora’s memory in times of need and helped him recall the childhood the Church had stolen. Just so long as he remembered the worst things he’d done. So long as he never let himself off the hook.

A bad trade on its face, but the price had a grim peace to it, far better than the hollow absolution of flagellation. Given to the Church young, he’d served as pupil, laborer, tool, tither-at-arms. Between those jobs and his own wrongs, he had plenty of old shames to offer the dead god of his childhood—even before he’d started looting to survive.

Don’t forget, Liste had said just now, meaning: Corpse-picking is foul work and I know it’ll weigh on you a long, long time, and that’s fair, but this is our life now. Better you accept it, or we won’t have much use for each other.

She’d never said all that as such, and didn’t need to. A good while they’d been on the run together: a turncoat and a prisoner, both maybe assumed dead after a certain fire at a certain treasure vault inside the body of a certain tree-god. They’d changed their looks with dye and hunger and scissors, covered the ornate rosette tattoo on Carmora’s forearm, practiced walking and talking differently, become new people together. They’d fumbled at night and laughed past embarrassment in the morning. They knew each other. So when she dropped a last word that signaled she might actually feel guilty over looting, and recognized that he did too—but drew, still, a firm expectation that he respect their work together, with all the potential consequences appended thereunto—he understood.

Didn’t mean he had the words to answer, so he ducked against the rain’s spittle and let her walk away, off to loot another.

• • • •

Our struggle is unending

Yet our triumph is assured

— Mysteries of the Fivefold, Children’s Instructive Edition

There was no treasure, but Carmora found better boots and a nice whetstone for his sword. The blade was short and flat-ground on the great grinding wheels of Church armories far, far away. Soon after his betrayal, he’d defaced the hilt furniture and sword-belt, scraped off rosette insignia and formal trim. He sharpened the plain sword, hands muffled under his ragged cloak, as night fell on the tumbledown cabin they’d found for a shelter. The place had no roof, but resurgent pines had closed around the homestead like a fist, reclaiming all cleared land. A few stars stabbed through the trees. The rain had moved on to better things.

This was no country for a fire, so their only comfort, once he’d hacked a pine-bough bed, was each other. In past nights he’d been eager, but now he felt a reticence, a distance that left him cold and unenthused. She was the eager one tonight, and he did his best, or told himself he did, because it felt like she was after something he couldn’t name or give. Afterward he turned his face to the wall and lost himself in scraps of memory.

• • • •

By morning she was gone. So were the three little coins. So was the bracelet off his wrist, the talisman of Ninnagan.

Carmora sat there in the ruined boughs, back against the sagging wall, jabbered at by jays, rubbing his wrist. Liste had given him the little stone talisman (and never told him where she got it, probably a mercy). She’d braided the cord around it too, made it a thing he could wear against his skin for memory and luck. She had a fair claim on it, but so did he, all anger aside.

Truth be told, if this feeling was anger, it wasn’t a kind he’d known before. He’d nurtured his share of helpless fury, resentment, terror-driven wrath, tired contempt, all leading up to the explosive night he’d left his life behind. The night he’d let himself admit his hate.

He felt no hate now, no fear, no contempt, and certainly no helplessness.

A small, long-buried part of him—the boy he’d been before Church school—just wanted his pebble back.

• • • •

All are equal under the Divine

Yet I know where I stand in the Chain

— Mysteries of the Fivefold, Children’s Instructive Edition

You needed to track sometimes as a tithe collector, to be sure every possible soul was properly asked for their voluntary donation to the work of the Fivefold. Liste, for all her competence and adaptability, was a creature of cities and frontier towns. Carmora found her trail and stuck to it.

She was not, it transpired, following the tithe convoy. She’d turned around for Griever’s Mill, which was poor, unfriendly country even before the convoy rolled through.

Sawmill or not, the trees grew thick around here, bringing down a cold false sunset long before the sun met the unknowable horizon. He lost the trail at the last bend before the village and kept going for lack of options. Either she’d taken shelter here, or he’d catch her tracks again in the morning, assuming it didn’t rain. Since rain might drive her to shelter too, all signs pointed to Griever’s Mill.

The village was largely the silent old mill, its outbuildings, and shacks of unknown purpose around a gravel crossroad. He glimpsed the evening fires of distant homesteads: the glow of chimneys and wax-paper windows. A sullen river, choked with rotten logs, spoke of more prosperous days. He’d grown up as a servant in the Church’s wars against lesser gods, including great pines as tall as mountains: Their faraway fall had reshaped waterways, uprooted timber markets, starved out backcountry logging. Few lived here now if they could help it.

Liste might have found shelter in any homestead around here, but—if unaided memory served—she’d got on well with the sawmiller’s second wife. Carmora headed for the mill.

Just days ago, the convoy’s elders and senior guards had bunked here as their due. Rank-and-file collectors had recorded tithes in logbooks and pressed inked brass rosettes to forearms, certifying that all the household were fully reconciled to the Fivefold. Some had lingered to do the same service for travelers and locals; when Carmora and Liste had passed this way the night before last, they’d had to arrange certain distractions to get out of having their own arms examined. This was for two reasons.

First was the collector tattoo on the inside of Carmora’s forearm, each portion subtly graded for comparison against tithe stamps in varying degrees of fadedness. (Match the inner part of the third petal, and a supplicant might be known as a man who hadn’t paid his tithes in months. For example.) A collector’s tattoo on the arm of a filthy woodswalker would mark said woodswalker as an apostate, a traitor to the duty of the faith, an automatically untrustworthy person and so forth.

The other reason was as big a risk or worse. Liste also had a forearm tattoo, a simple rosette that replicated a gently faded and still-current stamp. Such a thing was spectacularly foolish—a falsified tithe stamp could mean the gallows—and had often saved her money. Or, indeed, helped her secure it. A tithe-payer’s stamp opened doors to better work, lower taxes, Church toll roads, and the trust of men of means.

So the pair of them had thought it best to avoid expert examination of their respective forearms, which they’d managed by the skin of their teeth. At the time, Carmora had the feeling that the sawmiller and his two wives judged them as less than on the level. No questions had been asked, not in front of the tithe collectors and not afterward.

But this was a different night, and the mood in the common room had an unseasonable chill.

The sawmiller, a blocky disappointed man, was sharpening the teeth of a great blade on trestles at the side of the room. His wives were nowhere. In fact the common room—normally a dour little social hub for the town—held only the sawmiller at his task, Carmora, and no fewer than four tithe collectors.

“Your arm, sir,” said the sawmiller, straightening up with the file held like a knife. Maybe he meant to intimidate; maybe he was casting out a warning through incongruity. He’d seemed decent enough, tight-lipped but polite to visitors even after he sacrificed the expected portion of his silver to the Church. He hadn’t taken it out on them. A quiet sort, but not tonight. “Your arm,” the sawmiller repeated, louder. “I’ll have only faithful men cross my threshold, by the Five.”

The tithe collectors, who’d set up their logbooks and other affairs at a table opposite the sawmiller, were nobody Carmora knew from past tours. Youngish, brave, clean men, far different from the tired and seasoned collectors who’d politely gouged the mill’s coffers two nights before.

Carmora clamped down on a spike of fear and showed his arm. This place was lit only by candles in thin bronze reflectors. In bad light, at this distance from any of them—a good five paces—his rosette tattoo would look like a reasonably recent stamp. “I’m reconciled to the Five, sirs,” he said in the deferential way they’d expect, and rolled his sleeve back down, not too fast. “Has my wife come this way? Red-brown hair done up in braids?”

They were still looking at him, all of them, for no reason he could pin down. He forced himself not to stare at the tithe collectors, at how close their hands were or weren’t to their swords—

“Is that a tithe collector’s blade?” said one of the collectors as if he already knew the answer. Which, in fairness, he did.

Carmora bit back an impious curse. He’d defaced the sword and its furniture, of course, but the same gloom that muddled his tattoo reduced his gear to outlines and proportions, and of course it was all just like what these four boys wore every day. Their own swords were coming loose now.

“Did you loot a Churchman’s body?” spat another one, and all four of them were getting up from their table, and the sawmiller was—in the corner of Carmora’s eye—slipping away into another part of the mill.

The common room held little to recommend it as a battlefield. Fifteen paces long and five or six wide, low-ceilinged, dimly lit; a table at one end and the big sawblade on trestles at the other; a door outside and two more leading elsewhere. Carmora flexed sore toes inside his new-to-him boots and drew his sword. There was nothing else to be done. Any one of these younger men would run him down with ease if he bolted.

They closed in like dogs on a fox. He sidestepped and got his shoulder against the door and slid out onto the creaking front step. Cold mud shifted—bad footing—but he held that spot. They could only come out through the door one at a time.

He’d hoped that might give them pause. They developed the opposite problem. Three of them pushed forward to be the first, and they jostled each other, sought for balance and preeminence. One man’s sword went awry and took a careless chip out of the doorframe.

Carmora had killed a handful of Churchmen since his departure, sometimes men he’d known. Those deaths weighed on him, which was appropriate. You couldn’t go through life without piling up some justifiable guilt, Liste had told him more than once, flipping the stone Ninnagan talisman between her scarred fingers like a coin. Better, she’d said, to make peace with that in advance, expect it like a bad guest, and keep doing what you need to do.

He moved in on his mutually encumbered attackers. To his surprise he found himself as eager as they were.

Of the three men in the doorway, one scrambled back and the other two came at Carmora with simple, hard swings. Blocking the more dangerous one jolted him up to his shoulder. Carmora backed up a notch, which was as much ground as he could give them. That put them on the sagging front step, nestled between log pillars, deep in the gloom of the cedar-shake overhang.

One man put a foot wrong. His sword flailed aimlessly as he fought for balance, just for a heartbeat. Carmora slid in at an angle and put his sword through the younger man’s floating ribs.

He drove the point straight on, maybe shearing out the bottom of a lung, until the blade clinked against the spine from the inside. Blood rushed down the blade, over the simple guard, and washed hot against Carmora’s thumb and forefinger. Eyes bugged out, pale in the gloom, and Carmora felt a need to comfort him.

“Bah . . . bah . . .”

The rest of the dying man’s breath bubbled out between his ribs, stinking of beer and bad teeth, and Carmora’s empathy ebbed again. The collector slid off Carmora’s blade nervelessly; his rosette-marked sword came free of his grip, narrowly missed Carmora’s foot, and bit into the old step. The point tore up a spreading hand of splinters, pale in the dark.

The third man exploded from the door and struck Carmora full on, body against body. A hack from the first man went wide as Carmora staggered away. Carmora kept his feet but not by much.

The fourth man, still inside the mill, shrieked like the Fivefold Gods were whipping out his penance personally and generating not the slightest speck of adoration. That scream set Carmora’s gut on edge. It would have got him killed, but the two men arrayed against him paused as well.

They had to balance, in that moment, the threat from Carmora and from whatever had just hurt their teammate. In the same moment, they also had to negotiate the compounded bad terrain of a corpse and a sagging step. Experience, if they had any, might have led them to draw back and regroup. They had no experience. They had training, and their training said prosecute the withholder.

When one of them tripped, Carmora—his sword, specifically—was there to catch his fall. The sweeping upward strike, a backhand really, grated off the collarbone and bit deep into the side of the neck. The collector thunked into the torn-up earth. A wagon-rut muffled the last of his voice, which came out entirely the wrong part of his throat now.

The last of the three moved in with punishing hacks that cost Carmora real pain to block, all up and down his arm and spine. Every impact jolted Carmora’s wrist and tore at his grip.

The last collector was smiling—teeth back, eyes wide, exhilarated. He kept up the attack in a rhythm clear enough for Carmora to counter, on a better day. Tonight offered no chance to breathe.

That wagon-rut caught Carmora’s boot and wrenched it into a stumble. Something twanged up the side of his foot: pain and a gut-jolting terror that he’d broken himself irrevocably.

Nothing like the first time he’d rolled his foot on bad roads, of course, but in the moment the panic was rational and real. He forced his mind and body into balance, limping back as his foot swelled and his boot grew painfully tight.

He needed distance, but the tithe collector was not feeling generous. On a miss, the tip of the collector’s sword slid through Carmora’s coat and left a hot wet sting across his chest. Another graze left Carmora’s sword arm bloody.

A kick put Carmora on the ground. Where, frankly, he knew he deserved to be.

• • • •

The withholder cripples the Work

Yet no jealous miser shall prevail

— Mysteries of the Fivefold, Children’s Instructive Edition

Sprawling, aching, he kept his grip on his plain sword as a matter of principle. He’d earned it, hadn’t he, on bad back roads like this one.

“Throw down your blade,” said the collector, as collectors did. He stood over Carmora, just out of range of a kick or a swipe. The collector glanced at his two dead fellows—one pierced deep in the low ribs, one slashed in the base of the neck—and that smile went lopsided. “Throw it down and earn mercy.”

Carmora staggered to his feet. His stolen boot, now clamped around his swelling ankle, was more stable than he’d feared.

“Not mercy, no,” Carmora said, flicking mud from the tarnished sword. “You’re just trained to spare a man who can still pay tithes and pray under a lash.”

Behind the collector, in the doorway of the mill, a woman leaned on a long sawblade. Bloody hair and fabric choked its teeth. Backlit, she looked strong and wore her hair in braids, and Carmora knew it was Liste Bluelark from the way she watched him losing. Despite everything, he found a smile on his face.

“Dead man,” she taunted, voice hollow and slurred, to one or both of them. “You going stiff yet, dead man?”

The last tithe collector chose this moment to not be a fool. He shifted sideways, off toward the crossroads, while turning to keep the pair of them in his line of sight at the same time. Sword still pointed at Carmora, he eyed Liste, the saw, and the gloomy room where his last comrade had disappeared. She shook the sawblade with a sound like rain—a rushing and a splatter. To the collector’s credit, he set his feet and gave wariness its proper place.

“I need the stone back,” Carmora said to Liste, as if they were alone, as if she’d only borrowed it.

He limped toward her, past the tithe collector, daring the younger man to strike. The standard choice would be a crack upside the head with the flat of the sword, and Carmora would wake on a gallows.

The collector moved just so, a shifting of his boots in the mud. Carmora leaned his head aside, balance sickeningly unreliable, and let the sword rip past. His own sword came up—a lurch, nothing fancy. The tarnished point sank into the collector’s armpit and tented out the leather armor above the shoulder blade.

The young man breathed in—or maybe out—like Carmora had yanked on his lungs. The sound was a squeak, incongruous, caught high in his throat. Just like that, pain took the last collector from clever, prudent, half-innocent zealot to a thing to be acted on, a rabbit kicking in a snare.

Tears and words might have fought their way free of the blazing wreck of the young man’s mind, given time. Redemption too—well, maybe: He’d had so little time to build regrets. He fell with his brothers.

Their blood, Carmora felt, was what glued his fist to the sword. Will had not much to do with it.

Liste swayed in the door. The long saw chewed at the frame in falling. Carmora’s instinct was to go catch her, but she fell before he listened to that instinct. He limped over the bodies, up the creaking step.

The sword sank home in its sheath, all far too fouled to clean tonight. There was blood pasting his sleeves to his arms, warmer and gummier than the mud. Nonsensically, he found himself checking that his tattoo didn’t show through the bloody cloth. He thought of scraping it off his skin entirely. The saw might do.

• • • •

My day is irredeemable

Yet our dawn is divine

— Mysteries of the Fivefold, Children’s Instructive Edition

He found Liste curled up against the inside wall. She kicked the saw away hatefully. She’d done a number on the collector in here, used the blade’s weight for a descending cut or two. Not a fighter, Liste, but a killer when she had to be. She wore the cord bracelet with Ninnagan’s talisman until Carmora stripped it off. There was wine on her breath and she was crying.

The stench and weight of his own new kills sank in too. The young tithe collectors might have turned like him someday, found . . . if not honor, then at least their own paths. They’d each been some grandmother’s little boy, chasing snakes and crickets. They’d gone off to Church schools and been remade.

In his mind’s eye, crouching there with the little stone mammoth in his grimy hands, he felt he carried two balanced weights: the guilt that spoke of brokenness, and the wrack of clinging to tatters of memory. Ninnagan was dead, after all: The talisman had only so much power. Most days, his childhood was buried deep.

Holding the first weight was the price of the second. Instinct, not just the stone’s demands, said that facing the one was what made him fit for the warmth of the other. Mere shreds—scraps of grandmother and sunlight and crickets—were all he deserved.

Such mazes of thought and feeling had their place. He shoved them aside and focused on Liste, weeping there against the wall with bloody hands. But now that he’d taken the bracelet, her breathing slowed from a sob to something more controlled. She wiped her tears, smearing herself with blood across the eyes, and stood alone.

“I figured I could live with killing again,” she said. “I couldn’t live with letting them do for you.”

It was an awkward turn of phrase, not her style at all; she’d never had a problem discussing murder plainly or finding the right words after a drink or three. Carmora was used to being the tongue-tied one.

“From now on,” he said as he knotted the bracelet back on his wrist, “we should carry this in turns.”

But she was shaking her head as if she didn’t care that he was offering forgiveness. “Making that much place for, for guilt—that’s no kind of life for me. It’s too much, all the shames I’ve laid up in store. Almost got me killed tonight.” She gestured vaguely at the bracelet and stumbled to the door.

He limped after her down the sagging stair, over the dead, down into wagon-ruts that sloshed with cooling blood. She stood there in the gloom, looking around the tumbledown village and the equally uncaring woods, all dark and colorless. The distant homesteads had banked their fires and vanished in the night. There was no clear way to go, and no destination worth pursuing, and the stars were cold.

He wanted to let good excuses shrug him out from under the weight of the dead. They’d drawn first; they’d come at him to shed blood for the Church that had stolen his whole life; he’d been without the stone that stirred up the memory of his greatest crimes and the pain they’d incurred.

It would be so easy to make those excuses a natural channel for the flood of feeling that welled up after a killing. But thinking back, he could have avoided those deaths any number of ways. At minimum he’d worn that sword into a place where collectors might be. Deep down he’d known what he might do. For that, and for all the lives he’d impoverished and leeched as a collector . . . only a coward would let himself off the hook.

The moment Carmora decided that, the stone’s blessing answered. Precise memory blossomed: Liste last night in the tumbledown cabin on their bed of boughs, skin under starlight. He’d thought she was the eager one for once, but thinking back, her face had lit up with a different kind of wanting. He hadn’t noticed at the time, caught up as he was in his own knots and nets of feeling, in the selfishness of conscience.

She’d been searching for . . . what? For him to respond in a way that made her feel as if he didn’t consider himself better than her?

Maybe she’d taken back the stone because she was a looter, a survivor, and it had value. Or maybe she’d wanted to feel a little worse about a life of corpse-picking, because then he’d like her better.

The chilly silence cracked: Liste flinched as Carmora’s sword grated out of its filthy scabbard. He got it flat against the inside of his wrist and slid the tip through the bracelet, sheared away the new knot. The little stone mammoth, the last scrap of his grandmother’s god, thunked in the convoy’s ruts as if it weighed vastly more than it did.

Liste hiccupped a sob that might have been a laugh. “Ah, you poor broken soul. No, that’s not the way tonight will go. Think a move or two ahead: That pebble’s all you still like about yourself. Deep down, you’d resent me forever.”

He shook his head and tried for words. “It means . . . what it means to me, but Liste, you’re the only one who—at least, since . . .”

“And because I do care about you,” she said, filling in the rest, “I’m telling you no. Keep true to your dead little god and be someone you respect.” She drew herself up in the dark, feet planted in the bloody ruts of the convoy’s wake, head high, cold stars glinting on her cheeks. “I don’t think I’ve ever made a good choice, Ander. Call this my first one. Go on, it’s alright. Pick it up.”

“You don’t need to—” He crouched, grabbed the cut bracelet, and wiped filth off Ninnagan’s stone with his thumb. The smooth old lines of the mammoth trapped bloody mud too easily. He scrubbed it against his grimy trousers in vain. “Liste, we can still—”

She disappeared into the dark before he stood. The forest and the night made their separation feel permanent, vast, the moment she was gone. He had no fair claim to follow her, and anyway his ankle felt as heavy and rotten as the old logs sloshing in the river.

There were torches out there and the sound of horses. Carmora snugged his fist around the stone and limped into the cold forest without direction, knowing only that he couldn’t linger with the dead. He needed presence of mind. Instead, his focus committed itself to all the moments he should have made her understand how he valued her and their life together, how much he admired her. Those lost chances were irrevocable.

Facing that burden paid Ninnagan’s price. Far away or long ago, a mammoth trumpeted in pain. Perfect memory surged from the stone, clear and lasting: How tall Liste Bluelark had stood just now, and the pride and freedom in her eyes when she knew she was better than him. It was like she walked beside him, too far away to touch and never reaching out, no matter how he reached for her.

Cold comfort, that vivid presence. But not bad company.