The Executioner was tall. They say his whole family is that way. I stood by the ale shop, watching him weave through the crowd, his goose-neck swinging above everyone else. Lord, how the people parted for him. The fishmongers and merchant wives grew quiet as the giant in black robes passed. Their eyes, soft with fear, flitted to his face. Why shouldn’t they be afraid? Death was among them. The taker of lives, spiritually anointed but not exactly a spirit himself–although, you never can be too certain on that account. The Executioner met no one’s eyes, and their shoulders relaxed as he passed. When they started chattering again like starlings, I pushed through, following him. The candlestick containing the ghost banged against my leg, hidden in my skirts.

Be patient, Jack, I thought. I’ll do what I can for you.

The Executioner stopped at the bakery, and the baker, turning around, put his hand on his heart when he saw him. A slender man, the baker. They say not to trust slender bakers. He recovered himself and asked what the Executioner wanted. Bread, of course. Four fat loaves. I watched as they were handed across the cart, and wondered what it was like to buy bread instead of making lardy cakes from leftover drippings. They say the Executioners are handsomely compensated for their work, which is why they live on a hilltop outside of town. I could see the family mark on this one. The veins bulged on the sides of his bald head, just above the ears. They made curlicues, like writing, as if God carved the man’s destiny into him, a sacrament written on flesh.

When he turned around, I gaped in surprise because, what does my daisy aunt tell me? The Executioner was not old, as I expected. I had thought him a venerable man, but now, as he cast an impersonal eye in my direction, I saw that he couldn’t be much older than I am, 24 years. An ugly face, though. Round eyes too close together, and the lips, girlishly plump, and missing his front tooth, at that. Say what you will about Jack, but he had all his teeth, a fine jawline, and nice eyes, too.

If I were a man, I might have stepped forward and stopped the Executioner as he passed, but I am no man. Instead, I slipped between the stalls of the lamplighter’s market and turned my back so he wouldn’t notice me. Did the candlestick in my skirts vibrate?

“Keep still, Jack,” I hissed at it.

When the man had passed, I started after him again, hoping that I might dare speak to him. Through the market he went, stopping to buy a jug of ale and a wheel of cheese. The easy way he spent his money made me dizzy. The herbs I ate that morning had dissipated already and the humors that possess my stomach had traveled to my head, making black spots in my vision.

We passed out of the village and I trailed the Executioner across the field. The closer we got to his ancestral hall, the heavier my legs became until I was dragging weights through the grass. The sight of the keep on the ridge made me stop altogether. I crouched down and watched the lone black figure ascend the stairs so fast, it seemed he was half-crow. 

To follow the Executioner to his home felt beyond me. What would he do when he saw me, a hedgeborn woman, appear at his door and brazenly ask to purchase an Indulgence? Women aren’t supposed to buy forgiveness for the dead from the church, let alone from the death-bringer himself. I knelt in the grass, thinking that I could never, never do it, no matter what Jack wanted.

As I crept away, the candlestick moved in my dress. A ripple went through it, like a pressure moving up and down my thigh. It felt like fingers drumming in impatience. I knew we’d be in for some furious haunting soon.

He holds me hostage, this ghost Jack. Much like the man did to my heart.

***

I didn’t go to Jack’s execution because I was in bed with an illness, of sorts. It was true enough that Jack practically sealed his death warrant himself by stealing, of all things, a live fowl from the parson’s coop, and took it to his mother’s house and hid it in the cellar, intending to kill it and cook us a feast. But poor Jack didn’t think about how fowls make a racket. Soon that thing was screaming at all hours down there, and of course the wind-sucker neighbors noticed. They knew Agnes couldn’t afford such a thing as a live fowl, so it wasn’t long before the officials tracked the squawking thing down and took it back to the parson.

It was hardly the first thing Jack stole in his driggle-draggle life. He’d spent time in the stocks for food theft—once for his mother and me, another time for the little boy who lived down the lane, who succumbed to fever last June. Not that Jack was a saint, Lord no. Just as often, he was stealing ale or pipe tobacco, but he never got caught for that. It was that he dared take the fowl from the parson’s house that did him in. The cheek of it, to steal from a parson! After that, the constabulary had had enough of Jack’s shenanigans and lined him up with the other slags on the block. It was a particularly long day for the Executioner, and they say the sun was almost set before his work was done.

It still makes me sick to think of Jack up there, and I wonder often if he wanted to see my stricken face while he was forced out of this world by the cruel noose. As it was, his last memory of me was when I was standing outside the prison yard, trying to smile through tears as they took him and his fellow prisoners on the cart, hands bound, toward the block. His eyes were clouded and he only looked at me, and looked, and looked, until the cart pulled out of sight. His adam’s apple went up and down, as he kept swallowing.

Then, about two months after his death, the haunting started. The first time was in Agnes’s book, the only costly thing in the house except for a brocade belt and an iron dagger, from her father. The book was Pilgrim’s Prayers. Even though none of us can read, to have a thing made of paper and written by a learned man was a point of honor, so Agnes displayed the book above the fireplace. There it sat for ages until Jack began possessing it. I saw it myself, after Agnes told me to watch, hidden behind the partition one evening. Before my eyes, the book open and the pages ruffled back and forth in the stillness of the room. What could it be, but a ghost? And what ghost could it be, but Jack, who’d just died and left us to care for his unfinished business?

“But Jack never liked books much,” I said to Agnes later, after we recovered from the shock. “Or prayers.”

“That’s why it has to be him,” Agnes said. “He has learned the error of his ways, always shunning the church and sinning and testing the law, and now that he’s dead, he’s stuck in this world when he yearns to go on, at least to purgatory, if not heaven.” Her eyes became soft and she said in a louder voice: “Oh Jack. We see you, my boy.”

I didn’t know about that, but the ghost certainly liked to move about, just as the living Jack flitted to other abodes, and sweethearts. One of the reasons we never married was Maggie the barmaid, who I’ve known since girlhood and who I still see sometimes in the lanes. His ghost was equally unfaithful, and troublesome. The salt bowl started spilling itself. The curtains fluttered like bat wings when there was no breeze. My own hair comb trembled in my hands so that I shrieked and threw it across the room. It was a terrible time, when everything in the house seemed about to wink at me with uncanny regard born, I suppose, from the ghost’s infernal roaming.

In the end, it was the candlestick that Jack settled into, a bronze metal thing, heavy, with a grooved handle. The haunting made the object useless. The candle would sputter when you tried to light it, as if the wick was wet when it wasn’t. Then droplets of moisture would appear and slide down the base–“Tears,” Agnes said, although Jack wasn’t one to cry. Besides, the ghost seemed angry to me. Would a sorrowful ghost bang the shutters so you couldn’t sleep? Or knock the candlestick so that it landed on your foot? But when I mentioned this, Agnes said, No, it was his sorrow, the unending reaching of his soul toward heaven, that was making Jack so uppity.

But I knew something she didn’t. I was pregnant when Jack was executed. It was the reason he got the fowl in the first place—he decided I needed good meat. I wanted us to wed, but when he was executed for stealing, I decided to take the bitter herbs and end the whole thing. In truth, after the cramping and illness, when I was myself again, it was a relief to be done with it. Halting the pregnancy never felt like anything other than preserving myself from shame, so I hadn’t thought much about it until the ghost appeared.

I knew the ghost couldn’t be the baby, because it never felt alive in me. My belly was flat when it went. But the church says that babies are of spirit when they’re inside their mothers, so maybe I murdered it after all, but then it would have been an innocent and gone right to heaven. That doesn’t sound so bad to me, better than the life of a bastard begging beside its whore mother, and a dead father who was a condemned thief, at that.

I started to think that Jack disagreed with my decision. He always had an unearned pride in his seed. While he didn’t exactly hasten me to the altar when he discovered my condition, he did puff up like a Dutch barley-cake and strut around for days. So while Agnes interpreted the ghost’s actions as sorrow, I suspected it was more about him imposing his will on me, one way or another–which would be just like him.

But there was a way to rid us of Jack’s ghost. Since he, evidentially, was stuck on the mortal coil that was Agnes’s cottage, he could still be forgiven for his sinful life if we purchased an Indulgence from the church. It was the way of it–the family could intercede on the condemned man’s behalf by buying one of these holy papers, which they say is signed by the bishop himself. Once we had one, the ghost would be freed of his worldly cares and go on and stop bothering me.

The problem was that the church wouldn’t sell an Indulgence to us, two unmarried women, hedgeborn, the mother of a thief, and me, an orphan with an unsavory family lineage. However, we learned that we could buy an Indulgence from the Executioner instead. That family had long earned pocket money selling forgiveness to the criminals’ families–the ones too unsavory for the church to dignify.

Thus I found myself, six months after Jack’s death, trying to get my hackles up to approach the Executioner. Instead, I escaped through the tall grass and headed back toward Agnes’s cottage. It was windy, and as I walked, I looked up at the sky, heavy with dark clouds. Everybody knows that dead souls howl in the wind during storms. Not every storm, of course, just the beastly ones that rip off tree limbs. This was shaping up to be one of those, I thought, and shivered.

“Did you get it?” Agnes said when I came in. I shook my head as I took the candlestick from my skirts and sat down by the fire. She laid broth before me, and I ate ravenously. I’m hungry all the time. You’d think I still had the baby in me, but if I had, I’d be big as a boulder by now. I told Agnes about following the man through the streets, and how wantonly he spent his coin. We both felt reverence for that kind of money. It seemed proof that I had no right to approach this wealthy man, this bringer of death.

“How can I just walk boldly to his door?” I said. “Who am I to knock, like I’m fit to speak to him?”

Agnes sat across from me and looked at the candlestick. Moisture had gathered on the handle in little beads.

“Jack’s crying again,” she said.

“Or sweating.”

“Now, girl,” Agnes said, giving me a look every bit as condemning as my own mother—rest her soul. “I let you live here and eat my food, and all I ask is that you work for the launder and share the pay with me. Isn’t that true?”

“Yes,” I said. “And I’m grateful to you.”

“Well, you’re a good girl. Although I know you and my son were far from virtuous together, I think of you as my own flesh.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“But,” she said, standing up, a slender willow bough limping on her bad foot to stoke the fire. “You must have more sympathy for poor Jack.”

“I do. Of course I do.”

Agnes looked at me, lips tight, eyes narrow. Had I been so obvious? I did want to help Jack, but not because of his soul, so much, as I didn’t like being haunted by a past lover who seemed bent on punishing me. Why couldn’t he haunt Maggie the barmaid, the ruttish imp?

Outside, the wind tore down the lane and bits flew into the room through the cracks. I shuddered, thinking of all the dead people ripping over the earth, tossing rubbish at the living. I always wonder if they knew me, or if I would know them. My mother died in fever, my father in prison, my other kin were taken by the Executioner, or poverty, or both. Jack was the last in a long line.

Agnes laid a lardy cake in front of me, and when I bit into it, grease from yesterday’s stew squirted into my mouth. She sat across from me so that the candlestick was between us. The water was leaking onto the table, but we’d grown so used to these apparitions that neither of us remarked on it.

“There’s no one else who can help us,” she said. “The neighbors won’t talk to me since Jack’s hanging. And I can’t go to that keep myself, what with this hobbled foot.”

We both glanced at her foot, swollen and turned beneath the table. Her eyes, which were like Jack’s, were gray with sooty lashes. They must have been fetching once, but now they seemed out of place in her weathered skin.

“You’re the only one who can help him,” Agnes said. “So will you go to the Executioner again? For me, if not for Jack?”

The wind came in harder, and the fire was no match for the chill. I could hear the howling in the bluster, the muted voices of the dead. I shuddered.

“I’ll try,” I said. “If I can see the Executioner and talk to him, I’ll pay for the Indulgence.”

But as sinful as it may be, I didn’t intend to carry out this oath. I could never face the Executioner, so I determined to pretend to go, for Agnes’s sake, and say I was turned away. Then she would believe we tried our best to help Jack’s soul, and we could find another way to get rid of the ghost.

As I was thinking this, a small blue flame popped up on the candlestick and sat on top of the wet base. It was a strange to see–the candle didn’t melt and there was no smoke. It was a phantom fire.

“Now what’s he doing?” I said, irritated.

Agnes’s face was like a brand. “He hears us. He knows we will help him. It’s a flame of hope.”

I looked at it. I thought, but did not say, that I hoped it wouldn’t burn me.

***

That night, the candle bled so much water that in the morning, I heard Agnes exclaim, “Merciful heavens, he has wept up a well on the table.”

A pool lay around the candlestick and dripped onto the benches. Of course, I was the one to scrub it up as Agnes exclaimed about the grief poor Jack must feel to weep so much fluid. Either that or he wanted to give me a chore. It would be just like him, in fact. Once he knocked over a pan of coals just so he could see me pick it up. And so he did, sitting there with his spry legs crossed, watching me, my face getting redder as I picked up the coal, my fingers turning black. Was he watching now from his perch, enjoying the show?

I was in a foul mood as I started out, pretending, for Agnes that I was looking for the Executioner. Instead of going to the keep, I ambled through the marketplace with the candlestick plunged into the deep pocket of my skirts. I could feel it sparking and zapping in there, like having a cicada trapped in my clothes. 

“It will be nice to have you gone,” I muttered to Jack. “Agnes may want you to have peace, but I’d like some too.”

Then I felt the gush of water. It flooded from the candlestick and through my skirts so quickly that it flowed down my leg and pooled around my shoes. I gasped, and people turned to look at me. I realized it looked like I’d pissed myself. Turning, I ran into the alley and ripped the candlestick from my pockets, screeching in fury.

“You damnable rogue,” I said. “Why must everything be a game to you?”

Some men at the end of the alley glanced at me. I looked moon-bitten, but I didn’t care. Angrily, I shook out my skirts, water splashing on my legs, wondering whether this bit of revenge was because of my comment or because the ghost knew I wouldn’t be going to the Executioner. Jack was one for revenge, like that time he slept with Maggie after I said he wasn’t worth marrying. I didn’t mean it—I was angry that he was so terrible slow about marrying me in the first place. But he slammed out and went to her bed, and still, I took him back the next day. I always took him back.

Too forgiving. That’s my problem.

“No more of this,” I said to the candlestick. “No more of you, you cat. Ask Maggie to beg you an Indulgence.”

With that, I left the candlestick in the alley and marched away, swinging my dripping skirts. They would be wet for hours now, and it isn’t as if I have others.

But I felt freer as I went along, just as I felt when I solved the problem of the baby. It was true I might not be rid of Jack’s ghost, since it could show up in the book again, or my hair comb, or any number of things, but at least that candlestick was gone. I felt shackled to it, and its weepy tears, or sweat, or trickster water. Whatever it was, it was an evil thing, and Jack could haunt it in the alleyway behind the tavern for eternity for all I cared. 

I’d almost settled on a falsehood to tell Agnes as I approached our cottage. She was in the lane, and when she saw me, she limped forward, alarm on her face. I experienced a tightening in my gut, like a chain around my center was tugged by something large and vicious.

“He’s angry,” Agnes whispered, glancing for the prying eyes of the neighbors.

I followed her inside and slapped both hands over my mouth. For there was the candlestick in the middle of the table. Before I could say anything, it burst into blue flames and licked the wood around it. It was a terrible sight, fire spreading everywhere, yet burning nothing. There was no smoke or heat. I became weak in my legs and stumbled, catching on the old woman’s arm, pulling her down slightly.

“Come,” she whispered, leading me behind the partition to the chamber where the book sat peacefully above the fireplace.

“It’s impossible,” I said. “I left it in the alleyway. How did it get back here?”

“You did what?” Agnes said.

I explained about Jack wetting my skirts and leaving the candlestick to fend for itself. She shook her head. “And now we have an angry Jack in the scullery.”

“I give up,” I said. “I can’t do this task. I’m sorry. It’s too much of a burden.”

“That’s why it must be done,” Agnes said. “He must go on. He cannot remain here.”

I looked at Agnes’s gray eyes, and thought that maybe she’d grown tired of her son too. She was thinner, and older, since Jack died. It was more than his execution, I thought. To be haunted is to be sucked of life.

“I thought you’d be angry I left him,” I said.

“Oh please,” Agnes said. “Don’t you think I know what a trial my son was to you? And to every woman.”

We peered around the partition. The flame had spread down the legs of the table toward the floor, but it didn’t eat the wood. It sat on top of the furniture, undulating in a forget-me-not light. I thought of what the church would say if they knew such unearthly things were happening in our scullery. Perhaps we’d be called witches. The house would be exorcised and torn down. I’d heard of people being executed for less.

The only way to get rid of Jack was to talk to the Executioner. Agnes was right. And who knew what this angry ghost would do next.

“What if he does that to me?” I said, imagining my body engulfed in blue flames.

“Talk nice to it. Apologize.”

It was true, I realized. Jack loved to be apologized to, to stand with his arms crossed, head tilted, waiting for you to swallow yourself and kneel before him in your words.

Agnes pushed at me a bit and I walked into the scullery. The flames were on the floor around table now. I sighed.

“Jack, I’m sorry I left you in the alley. But you did soak me in water, now.”

The blue flames crackled and smelled of rotting eggs.

“If you stop that, and promise to be good, I’ll take you to the Executioner’s keep right away,” I said, and meant it.

We waited. The blue flames wavered, but didn’t go out. Agnes elbowed me and I sighed again.

“I’m terribly sorry,” I said. “Truly, deeply sorry. Won’t you forgive me?”

With a whiff, the flames were snuffed. The candlestick stood dry and waiting. Everything in the scullery felt as cold as a milk jug. When I put a hand on the base, it vibrated slightly.

“Put it in this,” Agnes said, holding up a drawstring bag she used to carry goods from the market. “It’ll catch some of the water if he soaks you again.”

***

But getting wet, I saw, was unavoidable. As I left the house, it began to rain with dreadful furor. The dead shook the land around me and I wondered, again, if they recognized me. Was my own father up there in the skies? My uncles? My sweet mother? All the people I loved, who poverty had taken. Poor wretches, I thought. Their fury, or desperation, was something to see.

There was one advantage to the weather in that no one saw me start up the stairs toward the keep. It was a long way, like climbing a mountain, and made heavier by my wet clothes. The candlestick was quiet, as if chastened now that Jack was getting his way. Also in my pocket was the money for the Indulgence, wrapped in a handkerchief and tied with a silvy pin. It had taken selling the dagger and abstaining from lard and milk for three months to save the sum, and part of me worried it wasn’t enough.

Halfway up, I stopped on the landing to catch my breath. Blocked from the wind, I looked at our village, white boils on a green meadow. I was thinking how I’d never left this place, not once in 24 years, when I heard the sound of feet coming down from above. I ducked back and, a second later, who should go by but the Executioner himself. My insides blanched at the sight of his huge hands hanging by his side, innocently, as if they hadn’t strangled men or chopped off their heads. He rushed past and I could do nothing but wait for him to come back.

Now, with no use in the hurry, I struggled up to the bailey, where no one was in sight. Usually a manor like this would be surrounded with people: stable boys, forgers, metal workers, and so forth. But there was nothing in the courtyard, not even a dog or crow.

A carving of a winged creature flew above the entrance and my humors wrenched inside me, because the door was red. I thought of the Israelites painting their doors with blood so the angel of death would pass them by. And here I was, asking to speak to him.

I stood by the door, under the carving, where the creature’s wings jutted out enough to stop the rain from hitting me. Its face was worn away, so I couldn’t tell if it was angel or demon. I trembled to stand beneath this carving of questionable character—heavenly or hellish, imparting either angelic protection or satanic trickery—but I had to choose between that or getting further soaked by the storm. In truth, I would have preferred the rain, but lightning was flashing over the village now. The candlestick might call down the fire. It would be just my fate to be killed by lightning thanks to Jack’s ghost in my pocket. 

As I was thinking this, I heard the Executioner coming back. He had a black hood over his head, and it made me start, because it was just how he looked when he was working his profession. My legs started knocking like a newborn lamb. I put my hand to the wet stones to keep upright, the harsh scrape of rock beneath my palm.

“Begone,” he said, pulling up the door handle. His voice was ordinary, which was a relief. I’d expected the booming tone of a demon. “We tolerate no beggars here.”

I forced myself to speak, “Please sir, I’m not a beggar.”

He pulled open the door, revealing a dark hallway, and seemed about to go through and shut me out, and then Jack would light the whole house, and me, and all the world, in blue flame. I stepped forward, pushing back my hood and the Executioner looked at me.

“I’m here to purchase an Indulgence,” I said, rain hitting my hair. “I have money.”

His face, up close, was old and young at once. Old in the baldness and veins bulging threadlike above his ears. Young in his eyes and babyish puckered mouth. He glanced down at my body, then nodded. “Come in.”

And like that, I was inside the Executioner’s keep. The hallway opened to a large room full of sumptuous furniture. I was speechless, having never been in such a place. There were tapestries on the wall with scenes from history: kings and unicorn and dragons and ships. The Executioner took off his cape and shook it out, water splashing on the stones. There was no page to take it from him, so he draped it on the chair.

He didn’t look at me as I stood there dripping, but went over to a desk that had iron work around it. The fireplace cast a glow onto the chair, which looked like a throne. He seated himself, his robes draping gracefully over his legs. From a drawers, he thumbed through official-looking papers. I saw a red wax seal, the sign of the church.

I’d never been this close to the man, this taker of so many lives. I assumed he was married, but I saw no evidence that a single soul lived here with him. And yet, that couldn’t be so. Someone made this fire, didn’t they? Surely not the Executioner himself, a man so wealthy and renowned. This man’s father had been an Executioner, and his father before him, and his father before that. There must be servants, or more family here, somewhere.

“How many do you want?” he said.

I looked at the stack of Indulgences. “Two,” I said, and bit my lip, hard. Why had I said that? This situation was confusing me. Did I think Jack was so bad that he needed two Indulgences? Was one for myself? Agnes? Did I think, now that the rare tickets of forgiveness were in sight, that I’d better get an extra, just in case?

He peeled them off and looked up expectantly, waiting for money. I knew I didn’t have enough for both.

“I don’t need two,” I said, my voice trembling. “Just one, please.” 

Again, his eyes were upon me, and I shrank from his gaze, thinking of all the dead faces he’d looked into. And Jack’s face. The hands that held the Indulgences had put a noose around Jack’s neck and pulled the lever so that boards fell away from his feet.

“Why did you say two before?” he said. I could see his missing teeth when he spoke. His mouth looked like the pit of a well.

“I misspoke, sir.”

The eyes flitted over my body again. I shivered. Water dribbled off me onto the rug.

“Stand closer to the fire,” he said, and I hesitated because to do so meant coming nearer to him. But I dared not disobey this venerable man. In my skirts, the candlestick vibrated.

I was close enough to smell the Executioner now. He had an aroma like fine oils on top of his body, and the rotting breath of people who eat sugar. It made me think of the vegetable bins behind the market stalls, where the pigs eat.

“You said two, then said one,” he said. “I can’t give these out willy-nilly. Explain yourself.”

“I misspoke,” I said. “I only need one.”

“Who’s it for?”

“Jack,” I said, my voice so quiet that he cocked his ear toward me. “You executed him for theft.”

“What did he steal?”

“A fowl.”

A pale caterpillar eyebrow went up. “They executed him because he stole a fowl?”

It was odd, his saying “they,” as if he hadn’t been the one to do it. “It was the parson’s fowl.”

The man let out a laugh. I wouldn’t have thought it possible that an agent of death could laugh. He leaned back, shaking his head, and pulled off an Indulgence. “All right then. The money?”

To get the money, I had to pull aside my cloak. As I did, my cheeks flamed like I was an innocent maid. Again, the candlestick rumbled against my thigh. Not now, I thought, but didn’t say.

I held out the money, and his eyes went from the handkerchief bundle to my face. He seemed annoyed and amused at once.

“You’re a playful wench, aren’t you?” he said. “Give me the money.”

With weak fingers, I pulled the pin from the handkerchief. The coins clinked as I put them in his palm. The candlestick was vibrating so much that I was afraid the Executioner would notice. I tried not to think what would happen if water gushed from me in this man’s hall. 

He counted the coins and looked at me, lips pursed in irritation. “This isn’t enough,” he said. “You’re short by three gullets.”

I found myself blinking, rapidly, as I took this in. Agnes was the one who said how much it costs. She asked the parson’s servant when he was lighting sanctuary candles.

“At the church, they said that sum,” I said, almost to myself, almost to the jittering candlestick.

“Do I look like a church?” he said, and I understood this to mean that the Executioner’s Indulgence would cost more. For the first time, I saw clearly that he was just another rich man making coin off us poor. Not, perhaps, as unearthly as I’d believed.

He stood up and I was awed at the height of him. It was a column of a man looking down at me. The nostrils of his squashed nose flared and I would have run from the room, but he had my money, and I had to get the Indulgence somehow.

“What can I do?” I said. “I must help Jack.”

“What was he to you?” the Executioner said. He reached and pulled back my hood so that my hair was exposed again. “A cunny girl like you, worried about a criminal? Was he your sweetheart?”

I nodded. “He’s haunting me.”

There was no surprise in his eyes at this news. What ghosts must haunt this man, the taker of lives, up here alone in this keep?

“You should leave,” he said, opening the drawer where the Indulgences lay. “I don’t give these away to every hedgeborn who shows up at my door.”

The candlestick sparked against my leg, a feeling like a bug bite. I jerked, stepping closer.

“I can work for you,” I said. “You need people here. I would clean, or bake, or launder, for you.”

The big man crossed his arms. “Move aside your cloak again. Let me see you.”

There were many reasons why I didn’t like this. One was Jack, shaking my skirts like a song bird in a bush. Another was the Executioner’s eyes, which were roving all over me.

Still, I unbuttoned the cloak and took it off, and he looked at me. I knew what he wanted, and though I normally would protect myself from such things, now I concentrated on the candlestick. I could almost hear a voice–not my own—saying to let the man get closer. The Executioner’s eyes asked the question, and there was an unexpected loneliness in them that made me pity him, despite what he was.

The voice in my head said, Let him do it, Kathy.

I nodded.

His arm reached out and hauled me to him, trapping me in his grip, and the nauseating vegetable-bin smell surrounded me. I squeaked as he mashed his mouth on mine. The sound was muffled in the quiet hall.

And I thought again that he was a man, just a man, not the angel of death, not a being from another world. I felt it in his body, the way he pressed against me. He was a man who made money off poor families trying to appease the furious ghosts who haunt them. A murderer of hundreds, gripping me in his hands, and I’d never been handled by the likes of him before. 

I struggled for a way to free myself, wriggling, attempting to kick his groin. Finally the Executioner pulled back.

“Stop that,” he said. “Do you want to pay your price or not?”

This stunned me, his saying that, and I could see the loneliness in his eyes again. It dawned on me that I could leave here. I was free to go.

At the same time, I could hear something else, a cajoling, pleading, in the voice that was not my own, and not this man’s either. Please, Kathy. I’d heard that voice before, only then, it was close to my ear, traveling on the hot breath that came from Jack’s mouth.

If I did this thing, the ghost would leave me, I knew it. I could hear the assurance in the thought, which was both my thought, and not my thought. It was the agreement that Jack and I could never come to in life because I adored him so much, and because he could never quite love me enough–not as much as himself, anyway.

Again I nodded. The man pinned me against the the desk so that the wrought iron went into my back. Almost as if I weren’t quite doing it myself, I reached into my pocket and the candlestick jumped into my hand. Then I understood something: It wasn’t the Indulgence that was driving Jack’s ghost. It had never been about that. I knew, as if he were whispering in my ear, what to do, and a feeling that I could only call revenge overtook me. Yes, I thought—someone thought—this is what I want. Justice.

As the man pawed my tunic, I slid the candlestick—still in the Agnes’s bag—out of my skirts. The vibration moved into my arm, deep into my flesh. Where before I needed both hands to lift the candlestick, now I had a man’s strength—no, more than a man’s strength. I lifted the candlestick as easily as an eggshell and brought it down on the Executioner’s head, once, twice, three times.

The Executioner slumped on top of me. A gash was in the bald head, and red blood burbled out of it.

He was heavy. I pushed with all my might until he heaved onto the floor. For a second I stood over the Executioner, looking at him.  I snatched the candlestick and money, then jerked on my cloak, thinking that I must get out before someone saw me. Right before I ran, I grabbed the stack of Indulgences.

When I opened the door to the keep, the dead blasted me in the face. I was pushed back a step by the weight of them. They shrieked around me and into the hall where the man lay.

I ran down the stairs as fast as I could, mind reeling. I’d killed the killer. I’d killed death itself. I’d be killed too, if they caught me.

Finally, my feet hit the landing. I went to the nearest hiding place I could find, the fields below the keep. There I knelt in the tall grass, which was wet and cold. The rain had stopped. No one could see me, except the dead, who brushed the tops of the grass around me, making it tremble. I dropped the bloody bag to the earth, and held the candlestick.

It did nothing.

Jack wasn’t there anymore. I knew it. It was inert, lifeless, nothing but metal in my hands.

The seed heads howled and thrashed above me and the dead in their tongueless rage roared. I wondered if Jack was with them now.

His haunting had nothing to do with me and our baby. What he wanted was revenge for his death. It made sense now—the anger and insistence in my going to the keep. And the strange strength that filled my arm before I brought the candlestick down on the man’s head. Had I killed the Executioner? Had it been me? I thought of that moment beforehand, the joy at my revenge. Had those been my thoughts? My emotions?

Above, the clouds had parted enough so that I could see the stars blinking in the heavens. The grass nodded and swung violently, like the tall featureless bishops bending down to look at me, a murderer of the murderer. I was shaking, my breathing harsh. The Executioner’s line was dead. If that man had no children, I’d killed the last of them. And, I thought, judging from the loneliness in his eyes, that was likely to be true. I’d ended something, for a moment, but there would always be another man to take his place. Someone was always willing to rise above the rabble on raven’s wings.

Though it was dark, my thumb skipped down the stack of Indulgences. I’d never held this much paper before, never been this close to important writing. I hugged my knees with my other arm, thinking how I had something valuable now.

Forgiveness.

I looked up at the sky, wondering if the dead were looking down at me in my hiding spot. Did they know me? If so, how did I seem to them?

Slowly, I raised my arm holding the Indulgences above my head until the white parchments were just above the grass. The wind pushed against the papers in my fingers, tugging at them, eager. I hesitated, thinking how valuable they were, how the Executioner had made a fortune with them, profiteering off our sorrow and loss.

Jack would crow to possess such bounty. But I am not like him.

The wind roared at my hand stretched up above the grass, cold and fresh, like the reverse of a breath. I thought of my family, of Jack, of all the loss that had filled my life until this very moment. And I opened my fingers and let the Indulgences go.