Chapter 4 — The Sister's Fold

He opened the letter at last, three days after the blade, in the grey hour before the shrine's first visitors.

It was not an accusation. It was an apology, twenty years late and written in a hand that shook — his sister's, unmistakably, though the court had told him she died the same winter as the execution.

'If you are reading this,' it began, 'then I outlived the story they told you.'