‘I frustrated an attempt by the Closed Council to prevent me taking my brother’s place as lord governor, did you know that? The Closed Council. Do you really suppose some soldier’s daughter might succeed where they failed? Address me only once again without the proper respect and I will crush you and your husband like the pretty, ambitious, irrelevant lice you are.’ He calmly plucked his eyeglass from her limp hand and looked through it towards Osrung, precisely as if he had never spoken and she did not exist.

Finree should have whipped out some acid rejoinder, but the only thing in her mind was an overpowering urge to smash the front of Meed’s eyeglass with her fist and drive the other end into his skull. The room seemed uncomfortably bright. The violins ripped at her ears. Her face burned as if she had been slapped. All she could do was blink, and meekly retreat. It was as if she floated to the other side of the room without moving her feet. A couple of the officers watched her get there, muttering among themselves, evidently party to her one-sided humiliation and no doubt relishing it too.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Aliz. ‘You look pale.’

‘I am perfectly well.’ Or, in fact, seething with fury. Insulting her was one thing, no doubt she deserved it. Insulting her husband and her father were other things entirely. That she would make the old bastard pay for, she swore it.

Aliz leaned close. ‘What do we do now?’

‘Now? We sit here like good little girls and applaud while idiots stack up the coffins.’

‘Oh.’

‘Don’t worry. Later on they might let you weep over a wound or two and, if the mood takes you, you can flutter your eyelashes at the awful futility of it all.’

Aliz swallowed, and looked away. ‘Oh.’

‘That’s right. Oh.’

So this was battle. Beck and Reft had never had too much to say to each other, but since the Union first started fighting their way over the fence they hadn’t said a word. Just stood silent at the windows. Beck wished he’d got friends beside him. Or wished he’d tried harder to make friends of the lads he’d found beside him. But it was too late now.

His bow was in his hand, an arrow nocked and the string ready to draw. He’d had it ready the best part of an hour, but there was no one he could shoot at. Nothing he could do but watch, and sweat, and lick his lips, and watch. He’d started off wishing he could see more, but now the rain had slacked off, and the sun was getting up, and Beck found he was seeing far more than he wanted to.

The Union were over the fence in three or four places, into the town in numbers. There was fighting all over, everything broken up into separate little scraps facing every which way. No lines, just a mass of confusion and mad noise. Shouts and howls mashed together, din of clashing metal and breaking wood.