The Freely Given (Three Confessions)

The murdered do not lie. In the realm of Auremark a body dead by another's hand can be made to answer three questions, once, truthfully, before the third dawn, and only a consecrated sister of the House of Last Light can wake it and pay the price the dead demand.

Now the hardest asking of Confessor Minoe Caul's long life is waiting for her on a cold stone. The man who hunted her ward across the better part of a year, the silent child's own murdered father, lies dead within the House, and the rite will draw three answers from him and no more. Minoe must choose what to ask, because three questions cannot hold everything she needs: who the child truly is, what the brotherhood will do to get her back, and what a dying taker might, at the very last, freely give.

His three answers give the child away and give her father back, and they light a candle in a dark country. For the working of so rare a rite is a light that can be seen from a long way off, and out beyond the marsh a patient, unhurried mind has begun to reason toward the one truth the whole realm was raised to hide.

The Freely Given is the fourth novel of Three Confessions, a dark, literary fantasy mystery about those who pay for what they take, and those who never will.