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Let me you tell about the first time I killed a man.

On the morning of that day my father, Anto, lay on the simple, straw-stuffed mattress that I’d dragged out to the kitchen fire, choking on his own life as a wasting sickness ate at him from the inside.

He had been like this for days now. I had watched him grow thin, watched him cough blood, and listened to him swear at the gods in a steady mumble which I struggled to hear over the crackle of the kitchen fire.

I burned the fire to keep him warm, even though winters in Lesser Khaim were not the kind that kill men, like the ones far to the North. Winter was a cool kiss here, in Lesser Khaim, and the fire kept him comfortable and happy in his last days.

“Why haven’t you fetched the healer yet, you useless creature,” Anto hissed at me.

“Because there are none to fetch,” I said firmly, gathering my skirts around my knees to crouch by his side. I put a scarred hand, the sign of my long years of slaughtering animals at the back of the butcher’s shop, to his forehead. It felt hot to my old, callused palms.

There had been a healer, once. A wrinkled old man who lanced boils and prescribed poultices. But he’d been chased away by the Jolly Mayor and his city guards, accused of using magic. The old man had been lucky to flee into the forest with his life.

“Then bring someone who can cure me,” Anto begged. “Even if they are of the deadly art. I’m in so much pain. ”

His pleading tore at me. I leaned closer to him and to the crackle of the fire that burned wood we could barely afford in these times, when refugees from Alacan crammed themselves into Lesser Khaim, eating and using everything they could get their hands on.

I sighed as I stood, my knees cracking with the pain of the movement. “Would you have me look for someone who can cast a spell for you, and then condemn us all to death if that’s found out? It would be a heavy irony for anyone in this family to die at the blade of an executioner’s axe, don’t you think?”

I thought, for a moment, that he considered this. But when I looked closely at his face for a reaction, I realized he’d sunk back into his fever.

He was back to muttering imprecations at the gods in his sleep. A husk of a blasphemer, who took so much joy in seeing the pious void their bowels at the sight of his executioner’s axe. This was the man who would lean close and whisper at the condemned through his mask, “Do you not believe you will visit the halls of the gods soon? Don’t you burn favors for a god, perhaps one like Tuva, so that you will eat honey and milk from bowls that never empty, and watch and laugh at the struggles of mortals shown on the mirrors all throughout Tuva’s hall? Or do you fear that this is truly your last moment of life?”

That was my father, the profane.

Unlike his outwardly pious victims, Anto believed. He had to believe. He was an executioner. If there were no gods, then what horrible thing was it that he did?