Standing on the grassy parapet above the drainage ditch, Jon Hale looked down at the twenty-nine-year-old prisoner standing ankle-deep in the cold blue clay.
In the early morning light, Jon’s right wrist hung bare below the cuff of his brown wool coat. Around the heavy wrist-bone shone the two permanent bands of his covenants: the raised, chalk-white keloid of the Non-Execution Covenant, and beside it the narrow, smooth silver line of the Witness Vow, which he had sworn on the cellar stone in the sixth loop when he promised the parish that he would never speak a falsehood to comfort a dying man or to buy an easy peace.
For twelve months since the bronze collar had shattered at the bottom of the dry basin, the silver band on his wrist had never once grown hot or pinched his skin, because Jon had never tried to bend the truth around it. Yet he knew in his bones that if he looked down into this ditch right now and gave Cael Ardent the easy, priestly absolution that men in stories give to repentant sinners—if he told him Yes, Cael, ten years of honest sweat washes the slate clean, and the dead are satisfied—the silver scar on his wrist would burn like hot iron.
