‘He’ll never hurt anyone again.’

‘But— how do you know?’

She took me in her arms again. I shuddered at the heat of her, but did not pull away.

‘I want to see it,’ she said. ‘For myself.’

Though the thought brought bile to the back of my throat, I could not deny that I shared it. I had determined, where possible, not to be one more onlooker to my night-brother’s investigation. That had to include its finale.

Rebecca refused any notion of washing herself, or changing her clothes. She did at least put on her night-sister’s coat against the cold morning, though she wore the hood down. I only had Christophor’s tattered coat with its many pockets now empty. I felt similarly spent. I opened the door for Rebecca. Another small gesture, which was all I had been able to contribute, in the end, to the efforts of keeping her alive, keeping her free. But I had tried. We all knew how I tried.

A gloom hung over Drekenford. Hunched shapes made their way along the opposite side of the street. The usual clatter and clang of a morning was softened by some general consensus. Or perhaps it was the fog, dampening our noise as it did our hair. Our steps barely registered on the cobbles. I did not offer my arm to Rebecca, to walk as we so often had whether we were occupied with an errand or simply for the pleasure of it. That morning was neither.

The town square made for a haunting tableau. I had no doubt it would stay with me for whatever years I had left. At its edges, people did their best to go about their daily lives. They dared not venture closer to the fountain. If I was a man prone to a wager, and I once was, I would have placed no small fortune on the fountain’s removal by the end of the year. No one looked directly at it, though it was obvious they all stole glances between bouts of pointedly staring elsewhere. Even the children knew better than to satisfy their curiosity. Rebecca strode right up to it.

Some remains of the makeshift stake were still evident – a scattering of half-burned pieces of wood, the corner of a crate that somehow escaped unscathed. But otherwise, everything was ash. It covered the fountain like snowfall.

Christophor had seen such a thing before, at the fort. Ash that defied the stirring wind, that stuck like glue and glistened the same. It covered much of the girl and her book. So much so, I had the impression she could be mistaken for a boy. A little boy who valued books of science, not Romances.

‘I wish it had been different,’ I said, feeling the shallowness of words. Christophor had hated her because of me. And I was too blinded by my feelings to see how dangerous that was. I could have stopped so much suffering.

‘Olesca was so young, just a boy, weak and frail in the end. A poor sacrifice,’ Rebecca said.