Chapter 22: Four Hundred Names

Redcliff Fortress stood black against the dawn, its gate torn half off the hinges where Corvin's riders had broken it open.

Tobin's chain still hung from the rings, blackened by the fire.

Joss was bound to the gate post with that chain.

The families of Redcliff stood around him in a wide ring with lanterns, hundreds of them, in the clothes they had slept in.

The Warden stood at the front in her pale cloak.

Beside her stood the twelve councillors, bareheaded, and Corvin's host in a long line behind them.

Sabine knelt at the foot of the post with her hands tied.

Tobin hung on his knees from a rope at his wrists.

When I came up the hill with Corvin, the ring parted without a sound.

Joss lifted his head.

His coat was gone, and his hair hung wet in his face.

He found me at once.

"Willa," he said. His voice was dry. "Thank the Moon. Tell them to stop. It's a mistake."

I said nothing.

"You know me. You know I would never..."

"You locked the gate," I said.

"I only meant to..."

"You locked it," I said, louder. "And you sat in a tunnel and listened."

His face worked.

I had come to see it break and I found it was already broken, and that I felt nothing but tired.

The Warden stepped forward.

"The law of Moonwatch gives the families of the dead the right to speak before sentence," she said. "Let them speak."

For a moment, no one moved.

Then a woman walked out of the ring with a wolf-tooth cord in her fist, the same one I had seen on the shingle.

She stopped in front of Joss.

"My son was twenty," she said. "He sang in the evenings. His name was on your page. Hear it."

She said his name.

Then a man came forward, and said his own son's name.

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