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goddess Erin wills me so.”
    “What do you want to know, anyway?”
    “Anything you want to tell me. If you want, you can just tell me about Jona. You don’t need to implicate anyone. We won’t be arresting anyone. If there’s a crime, we’ll hand the criminal over to the king’s men.”
    He didn’t say anything for a long time. He was right not to believe me. I don’t know how familiar he was with church law, but my husband and I could kill anyone who carried the stain, or burn down any building. If he knew the extent of our duties, he wouldn’t speak a word. He rested silently, considering. I thought it a sign that he knew more than he was giving me. It could have been fatigue. He fell asleep for a time, as did I in my chair. Franka came up from downstairs with soup, and woke him up with a gentle hand. He ate what he could stomach of it. I didn’t touch a drop. I stayed there, quiet and still. Franka did not touch my arm to offer soup.
    It took a long time, but Calipari finally spoke. “People get sick,” he said.
    “They do.”
“People die?”
    “Sometimes.”
    “I know some people that died,” he said. “Lost plenty good boys. Lost so many. Some of them, I know why. Some of them, I don’t. You expect it to happen sometimes, especially you walking about down with the worst of everybody. Still…”
    I nodded. He still had trouble looking at me. I had come here to save his life, and he couldn’t even make eye contact because he knew what might happen if he spoke. He knew something I could use. “Help me,” I said.
    “Yeah, I guess I should.”
He did.

    ***

    Jona was the Lord of Joni. He still had the family home, but no lands in the city or out of it. All the good furniture and finery were long sold off. The house stayed together because they only used a little bit of it, and watched the roof for signs of rot. His mother sewed dresses for noble families luckier than hers.
    Jona’s father’s fortune had been stripped during the war. Smuggling was illegal, but everyone did it in wartime. Jona’s father wasn’t smuggling things the king needed, and he had so much land that could be sold off to pay for war. For his crimes, the Joni lands were confiscated, and he was hung next to common thieves, disgraced and poor.
    My husband and I would have to dig up the body, later, and burn the ground where we found it. Jona’s stain probably came from his father, a demon’s child himself.
    After the lord’s death, the war continued for months, and food was expensive. Jona’s mother had nothing but land to sell for it. Trees came down as the ground was sold. Jona watched what was left of his family’s estate devoured by the streets and shops and abbatoirs of the city that took his father to take the family’s land. He watched from his bedroom window while men with hammers and sweating backs placed stone upon stone. He wore black the day his father died. He kept wearing mourning black long after his father’s death, because his mother told him to, because she had to sell land to buy bread for her son, and the king hadn’t even left the widow half a coin from the ancestral treasures. Land to sell was the only wealth they had left. Jona wore cheap wool, itchier than hay, and watched the workmen building where once he had swung from the trees, carefree in white silk.
    Jona’s grandfathers were all dead, and her mother’s brothers had died in the war. Without a patriarch, the family fell hard into poverty. Jona’s mother found work as a seamstress.
    Her son grew up tall, and strong.
    Jona entered the city guard. His mother threw him out of the house for swearing an oath to her husband’s murderer. He wasn’t doing it for the king, but she’d never understand that. The best that she could ever do is see how it could help her son improve their life. After he trained, out in the countryside, he returned to the city. He lived in barracks for a while, scrivening until he was promoted to Corporal to walk