When the show was over and the departing crowd had been pressed for a few undeserved copper kreers, I stepped beyond the curtain. I found Tanter shaking down the boy, who was hurriedly trying to explain.

‘What do you mean, someone stopped you?’ Tanter hissed.

‘Exactly that,’ I said.

‘And who— Hello, Inspector.’

‘Put the boy down.’

‘Yes, yes, of course.’ He brushed at the boy’s ill-fitting coat. ‘You didn’t happen to see the show?’

‘The fester-root. Now.’ I held out my hand.

‘Would you believe—’

‘No, I wouldn’t.’

Tanter’s ingratiating smile turned to a more sincere grimace. ‘How am I supposed to do justice to the dread queen’s memory without the root? Nothing smokes so strong, so despicably coloured, so true to her character. You’re denying people their history, Inspector.’

‘I’m on my way to St Leonars. I could deny you more than history.’

The showman hopped to, rummaging among crates I had neither the time nor the inclination to search. He eventually produced a leather pouch tied tighter than my own coin purse. As I looked inside at the sickly green shavings, Tanter fidgeted.

‘Is this all of it?’ I said.

‘Yes.’ He nodded emphatically. He was a poor liar and a poor magician. Ultimately, he was just poor. ‘You… you wouldn’t make a King’s matter of me having that, would you?’

I paused long enough for Tanter to picture the gallows. ‘No,’ I said, and he all but collapsed. ‘Pay the boy, even though he didn’t lift a purse.’

I continued on through the slums towards St Leonars, the pouch of fester-root secure in my increasingly burdened pocket. When burned, fester-root created a harmless, though acrid, green smoke. When ground and put in food, a pinch could kill a man and the horse he rode. What that same ground powder did to metal, when a little water was added, was a sight one couldn’t un-see. It was a good thing a man like Tanter wasn’t important enough to have real enemies.

*

St Leonars prison was an appropriately imposing building. It rose out of the surrounding shacks and huts, solid stone with a singular, unified purpose – one building in the centre of a scattered jigsaw. The walls were easily twenty feet high, and gave the impression they were twenty feet deep. Guard towers stood at each corner of St Leonars’ great square, with mounted muskets pointing both inwards and outwards.

At the entrance, night-releases were still coming out. They looked tired, beaten, and those that met my eye recognised the same when they saw it. They knew what I was.

In its way, despite the walls and guards and muskets, St Leonars prison was entirely escapable. The night-brothers and sisters of those incarcerated were, before my very eyes, walking out of prison. There were those relatively rare people who were convicted criminals day and night, both sides of the ettiene. But the rest were released at either sunrise or sunset when the change occurred. They willingly returned just the same because the King’s Justice wasn’t escapable: the King couldn’t hang just one brother or sister. Hanged at night was still dead come sunrise, and vice versa.