“Lower,” ordered Galen. His men obliged, working fastidiously.

“No, even lower. Another half a hand’s width.” Galen watched Tarin work the rope, tying it higher up the tree. Yes, that would do.

“That will suffice for now,” he proclaimed loudly as he stepped to the fore of the crowd and looked out over the huddled faces of those gathered.

All around him the raff of Traëlent had amassed in an apprehensive wait on the edge of the village, the sun mercilessly warm at midday. Many of them kept their candles close to their chest, while mothers here and there were anxiously trying to keep their children from playing with the wax warming in the heat. The few soured old men the village still had were clumped up together some lengths away and conversed quietly with one another in grumbled tones, clutching their candles like readied daggers as they looked Galen’s way.

Galen had sent his men into the vineyards to corral even those that had risen before the sun did to start the second harvest of the year, bringing them back to witness. Even a single day too long on the vines could have disastrous repercussions for the quality of the grapes, a fact, Galen knew, would earn him great ire from everyone in the village.

Well, not him alone.

“Bring him forward,” said Galen, crooking a finger towards the back of the crowd.

Beneath the shade of a large nearby elm stepped forward a pair of his men, holding between their arms the shell of a beaten man, his mangled feet leaving long lines into the earth behind him. The slurred prayers and intelligible pleadings on his lips for mercy and compassion were plentiful and unceasing, but he made no effort to resist from being dragged forward. His men had made sure he was no longer capable of it, having had both his feet and hands broken.

A display unbecoming of a ripened man, Galen thought, as his men threw the tortured, blubbering soul that had once been the local leatherworker before him. Galen reached down to help the man painfully to his knees, then grabbed hold of his chin to inspect his face. Even in the shadow of his sunken, battered features, Galen recognized the tell-tale markings of what had likely once been a man of proud strength and stature.

“Reverend, please. Mercy. The king’s mercy, I beg of you. Please. Mercy not for myself, but for--,” the man stammered through shattered teeth, but was cut off by Galen pressing his other hand gently to his lips, imploring silence.

“All is well,” he said softly. The man, choiceless and terrified, stilled. Galen looked back up to address the raff. The low thrum of conversation and subdued anxiety from the nearby crowd had now fallen eerily quiet.

“Today, we have come gathered here as friends. And as friends do, we shall speak plainly and truthfully to one another,” began Galen.

“This man,” and Galen's hand moved from just the man’s lips to roughly encompass the whole of his face as he spoke with increasing volume, “has been brought here before us today, beseeching me for the king’s mercy. He asks this of me in the name of friendship. But what he asks of me, I cannot give him. For what he asks of me is not mine to give. It is yours.”

Galen felt the man’s face shudder in his grip as he so said..

“All that you are, all that you have built with your hands belongs not to you. The beasts in these woods that you hunt for food, the bountiful river from which you draw your drink. The soil in which you plant your grapes and the trees you fell in these forests, all of them, all of it, belongs by ancient right to your king. It is only by his unsaid leave that you are allowed to enjoy the fruits of his lands.”

Galen squeezed the man’s head hard between his long, spindly fingers, roughly rubbing his palm across the features of his face. Galen could feel the way the man’s skin slid across the surface of his skull as he tightened his grip; he could feel the wetness of blood, saliva and tears gathering at the base of his hand.

“You all enjoy the grace of your king’s protection as he assures the safety of your homes from invaders and brokemen. He assures that you who live in his lands may do so in peace, safe in the hands of his watchmen that patrol your roads and who protect you from molestation, who protect you from harm. He gives and does all these things,” shouted Galen as he began squeezing the man’s face in his hand even further, feeling the man shaking viciously in the palm of his hand, struggling for breath, “and all he asks of you in return is to pay the tax on your wine, to pay the tithes to your preachers, and…”

Galen stopped his speech for just a moment. The man’s body had slackened from the knees up, his torso and broken limbs held solely upright by Galen’s vise-like grip on his face, a grip that was threatening to crush it altogether.

Then he released him, suddenly. The man collapsed at the reverend’s feet again, crumpling into himself, and all that then came out of him were whimpers and desperate lungfuls for life.

“For you to come when called upon,” Galen finished, pointing an accusatory finger at the man by his feet.

”When his king called upon him two harvests ago for the first time, he did not come. And when his king called upon him last harvest for a second time, still he did not come.”

Galen raised his voice to a shout, his face twisted into a mask of passionate anger.

“And when he was called again for a third time this harvest, he did not come! Instead he cowered and shirked his plight, his duty, and watched cowering from the shadows how your sons and husbands went off to war!”

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“And she!” Galen shrieked, spittle flying from the sides of his mouth, and turned around to point the same finger at the naked woman suspended by her rope-bound wrists from the tree behind him. The reverend had not allowed the leatherworker’s wife to be marred by his men, but her face was an asphyxiated blue, a thin leather strip circling her neck to cut off her voice and most of her breathing. Her blood-shot eyes were wild in their panic, the tips of her toes barely reaching the earth under her feet and leaving wild scrapes across its surface. Her flabby white flesh exposed to all shook and roiled as she desperately struggled for more purchase.

“She said nothing!” screamed Galen at the crowd. “Instead, she helped him hide. She fed him! She clothed him! All the while watching as your men left you to go fulfill their duty to their king, while she protected her own by helping him hide in the forest. He would have remained hidden there until the end of his days, had my men not found him cowering in his hole last night. I tell you this: these are no friends of mine!”

Galen brought his arms out wide as if he were attempting to encompass and embrace all those present. He was pleased to see that the enmity visible on their faces originally directed at him had now turned to the leatherworker and his woman. His voice calmed.

“And so I must then ask you: are these then friends of yours?”

Angry cries of “No!” and “Never!” came up from the women in the crowd, first just the one voice and then in quick succession most of all, with even the youngest of children mimicking their mother’s shouts. Even the clump of soured old men made known their disgust of the cravenly pair.

At their expected response Galen signaled towards Tarin who adjusted the rope tied around the tree, raising the woman slightly higher up again. From the dangling woman’s tightened throat came but the whisper of a pained wheeze as another one of Galen’s men handed him a freshly lit candle.

Galen turned to address the crowd again and spoke loudly.

“Under the auspices of His Majesty Dauriën IV, king of Sacrelia, lord of Santes, Casse and Cieux, Hauterose and Rochecort, protector of Viënnes and the Viënneselles, Defender of Elia’s Holy Word and Heritor-Incumbent to Her Holy Empire, I, Galen Castamine, agent-executor in the name of the king, hereby sentence Rienne of Traëlent, first-and-only-born daughter to Perroit of Traëlent since six harvests deceased, to be candled until death.”

Galen then beckoned one of the women off to the side in the crowd.

Ferne Mauve stepped forward with no hesitation. Between her hands she gripped an unlit candle as if it were the hilt of a sword. At the ferne’s approach, the leatherworker raised his head to speak to her.

“Mercy… mercy, please.”

The ferne did not respond and merely stepped around the broken man on the ground. Her eyes were narrowed and unwaveringly focused on the naked woman hanging from the tree.

“Loulanne light your home,” Galen said reverently as ferne Mauve came before him, holding out his candle.

“Loulanne light your heart,” ferne Mauve replied, leaning forward to the touch the wick of her unlit candle to his burning one.

“I was asked to grant the king’s mercy, but these are no friends of mine. What say you?” asked Galen.

“They are no friends of mine either. I shall not ask for mercy on their behalf.” said ferne Mauve.

“Then I ask you to help me see the king’s justice done.”

Ferne Mauve gave a nod in reply as she turned to watch the woman helplessly dangle before her.

“We wept together, Rienne,” said ferne Mauve after a few moments. Her voice was a choking anger as she addressed her former friend.

“Many nights we sought comfort with one another, waiting for news for our husbands. I waited and waited. I have not heard from my husband since the last snowfall, more than three months ago. You lied to me. You lied to me, Rienne, when you said you too were waiting for news.”

Open hatred was visible on the ferne’s worn face and her voice was beginning to choke through with anger.

“Rienne!” The ferne hissed through clenched teeth. “You lied to me! For yours was here, hiding all along, for well over a year! Your husband may have been a coward, but you are far, far worse. You are a liar. A craven liar, not worth the candles in your sentencing.”

Ferne Mauve knelt down to place the candle just below her former friend’s feet, the flame of it just the width of a hand out of reach of her toes. She then smoothed her skirt and wiped the tears from her eyes as she stepped back towards the crowd, saying: “Friends do not lie to one another.”

The leatherworker whimpered on the ground nearby as he uselessly watched the scene unfold not half a length away from him, his broken, unnaturally angled hands and feet making him impotent in the face of what was to become of his wife.

Within moments, Rienne’s feet began to shake and reflexively kick and she tried to swing herself by her rope-bound hands hanging over her head, away from the source of the heat. Rienne tried to scream, but the leather strip noosing her throat was strangling most of her breath.

Already she was getting tired when the next pair of a mother and her young daughter, scant eight harvests old, came before Rienne. Both loudly denounced Rienne and her husband, calling them no friends of theirs, as they placed their candles next to the ferne’s under the swaying woman’s feet.

It wasn’t long before Rienne stopped being able to delay the inevitable as first her toes, then her feet, then the lower parts of her legs slowly started to cook from the heat of half-a-hundred candles having been placed beneath her soles as all the left-over inhabitants of the village of Traëlent did their part in making sure that the king’s justice was done. She would not die for many hours, slowly being cooked alive from the feet up.

The leatherworker would afterwards be dragged into the village square by his men and left there like a dog, to serve as a broken but living reminder of the fate of those who saw fit to deny the king’s summons. Perhaps the villagers would come to pity him and see that he was at the very least fed and clothed, or more likely he would be carried by his former friends into the wilds and left there to be eaten by the beasts.

Galen did not care. He had come to teach a lesson and so he had. He had already resigned himself to watching the spectacle of Rienne’s candling for the better remainder of the afternoon when one of his men, a ruddy-faced youngling with a red mop of hair by the name of Leonal, approached him.

“Reverend,” said Leonal.

“Yes? What have you for me?”

“Delar thinks he may have found sign of them,” the boy replied. Leonal produced something from his pocket, offering it over to the reverend.

Galen took the item from the boy’s hand and held it up to the light. A coin of silver, with irregular, jagged edges. A zilverpiece.

With the smell of pig so strong in the air Galen couldn’t help but smile and tongue the gap between his two front teeth in remembrance of the meal he had had the previous day.

The reverend pocketed the coin and turned back to Leonal.

“Show me,” he said.