This is the first choice point of the story. The decision you make here changes who walks beside you and who stands against you on the road.
Tarn's Rest gathered in the moot hall that night because there was nowhere else big enough to hold all of them. Dessa sat at the head of the table with her stick across her knees, and the heads of the six old families sat on either side, and behind them the rest of the village crowded in, shoulder to shoulder, standing along the walls and sitting on the rafters, and a child's face peered over every windowsill. They had brought lanterns. They had brought blankets. They had brought food that no one was eating. Several had brought weapons, scythes and hay-forks and the long ash staves that were kept in the barns for wolf season, and they held them awkwardly, the way people hold things they have never needed before.
Orrin stood at the foot of the table with his hands at his sides. Serath waited outside in the square, sitting on the well with his back to the hall. He had said he would not enter unless asked, and no one had asked.
They were all looking at him. It was the same look he had known all his life, only now, for the first time, it was not afraid of him. It was afraid for him. That was worse.
"You've heard what he's said," Dessa began. "You've heard it from Lysa, and from Brannoch, and from me. But you haven't heard it from the one he asked. So we will hear it now. All of it, Orrin. Whatever you know."
He opened his mouth.
And he knew, with a sudden, cold clarity, that there were two things he could say.
He could tell them all of it: the Hollow Altar, the Weight, the drop from the sea he had felt in his bones. He could tell them what Serath had admitted, that something would pass to whoever struck the blow, and that the god would not say what. The truth would frighten them. It would make them furious, some of them. It would give Harl Dunmore every reason to demand that the god be driven out. But it would also be honest, and they were his people, and they had the right to know what was being done in their name.
Or he could tell them only enough. He could say that the god wanted to die and had asked for his help, that he would escort the god away from the village and draw the danger with him, and that the less they knew, the safer they would be. It would be easier. It would hold the village together. And it would leave the hardest part, the part he did not yet understand, between himself and Serath alone.
The lanterns hissed. Somewhere at the back, a baby had begun to fret.
He looked at his mother, standing among the millers' wives with her arms folded and her face unreadable. He looked at Lysa, white-faced and watching. He looked at Brannoch, who gave him the smallest nod, a nod that could have meant either thing.
What does Orrin tell them?