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criminals. Even if they were good sometimes, nobody was any good for long where I was stationed. And I know Jona wasn’t all bad. He was human, too, wasn’t he? He wasn’t just a demon child. He was a man, too.”
    “Did you burn a girl last winter?”
“Yeah,” he said. “We found that one. Bled true. Anchorites missed her. She was sneaking out at night like a dumb kid. Got
    in trouble. Didn’t even know what she was, inside.”
“She bled true,” I echoed.
    “Burned her alive. She’d done nothing to deserve it.” Calipari sighed, and looked down at his hands. “She was a demon’s child, too. If there’s two… I guess everyone needs to go looking around for more. Two of them, one after another, you’d think the crusades were still on.”
    “There may be more. My husband and I will try to find them. There were only three that Jona knew about, including himself, and of these three only Jona is dead. The girl was not one of them. Jona ruined the tests with his own blood to condemn that girl,” I said. “She died because Jona sent her to burn instead of the true demon child. There are others he sent to you to protect people who did not deserve protection. They weren’t burned, of course, but they were hung. You hung them like thieves.”
    Calipari put his hands to his eyes. “Please, don’t tell me this.” He coughed, his chest shuddering. He pulled his hands away. His face had hardened into a stone. “How many?”
    “Do you really want to know? This wasn’t your fault, but his. The deed is done.”
    His courage broke. “No, I don’t want to know.” He turned away from me. The window was open. If he could have sat up, he could have seen Franka with her son, riding a horse in the yard while her mother watched over him. The boy wasn’t his, but he was the only father that boy would ever know.
    “How many was it?” His voice was tight, his eyes turned from me. “Tell me.”
    “Nineteen, with the girl.”
    “Elishta but that’s a lot. Nineteen. Do you know their names?”
    “He remembers their names, and so do I. Had he done what he was supposed to do, you would have been number twenty.”
    “Elishta, that’s a lot,” he repeated.
    “The innocent die,” I said, “There is no perfect justice, because there are no men as wise as wolves. Wolves say that it is easy to be wise when your belly is full. When your belly is empty, it is wise to fill it. Farm with all of your heart. You are not a uniform anymore. Show mercy when you can, and live in peace.”
    He turned his gaze back to me from the window. His courage returned to him. He was the coiled spring Jona remembered, again, even if he couldn’t stand up to walk downstairs, yet. “I said I’d help you.” He pulled a sheet of paper from a drawer near his bed and began gracefully scripting locations and letters of reference for us to his informants across the city.
    I went downstairs and prepared his lunch myself. When I returned, he stopped to eat, and then picked up his quill again. “This might take a while,” he said. Paper, then, from all over the tavern. By nightfall, a stack of papers was piled beside his bed, sorted by the numbers of guard posts upon hand-drawn maps. More marks in the maps indicated people and places to go. He gave us letters of introduction, too. People in the Pens wouldn’t trust us, but they’d trust him. “Here,” he said, “I’ll stay here a while, but I got land waiting for me as soon as I’m strong enough to take it. I served twenty years. I got the farmland waiting for me.”
    Sergeant Calipari gestured at the man who had appeared behind me like a shadow from the hall. My husband had returned. “He don’t talk much do he?”
    “My husband?”
    “Yeah,” said Calipari, “is he all right?”
    “He’s been talking all along,” I said. “Silence is a word to us, Sergeant.”
    “Can’t be a nice word. What does he mean by it?”
    I looked over at my husband. He turned away from us, and