The silence, when it finally came, tickled her with its abruptness. She hesitated, heard the strange hum of unvoiced expectations, of endless eyes watching. Finally a solitary cough broke the hanging spell, and she started down the monumental stair, led the twins past the mirrored shields of the assembled Eöthic Guardsmen, then around the folds of the great crimson curtain that had been raised about the scaffold.

The swish of her gowns seemed to blot out all other noise. She could smell them now, her people, raw and sour. The uniformity of their faces seemed to dissolve into insulting details. The painted hauteur of the caste-nobility assembled immediately below. The woollen leers of the caste-menials crowding the innumerable distances beyond.

How many of them, she wondered, harboured souls that would see her and her children dead?

She glanced at the twins, trying to smile for their sakes. Kelmomas looked …. blank. Tears silvered Samarmas’s cheeks.

Eight of them, she thought.

Theliopa hid in her soulless apartments, far too fragile for ceremonial carnivals such as this. Moënghus, Kayûtas, and Serwa marched with their father in the Great Ordeal, at a distance appropriate to children who were strangers. Inrilatas screamed from the prison of his room. And Mimara … wandered.

Eight. And only these two boys loved.

Whispering, “Come,” she led them to their gilded and cushioned seats. A call rang out as they sat, and all across the depths of the vista before them, the masses fell to their knees. Unable to reach over the arms of her throne, she relinquished her sons’ hands. The golden claws of twin Kyranean Lions arched above her, signifying the continuity of empires from the present back to the murk of Far Antiquity. Upon her left shoulder, she bore a grand ruby brooch, symbolizing the divine blood of her husband, which had passed through his seed into her, and thence into their children. Across her right shoulder, she wore a sash of felt, blue chased with gold, the sign of her command of the Eöthic Guard, the protectors of the Imperial Precincts, and in the absence of the Aspect-Emperor, her own private army, bound to her by oaths of life and death.

She heard rather than saw the release of the curtains that concealed the scaffold behind her. Shouts like a thunderclap. The mobs surged, not so much forward as outward. Hands were raised in air-pummelling exultation. Lips curled. Teeth flashed with sunlit spittle.

Somehow, through the roar, she could hear Samarmas bawling to her right. When she looked, she saw him huddling, shoulders in and chin down, as though trying to squeeze through some hidden passage within himself. A kind of maternal hatred clamped her jaw tight, a wild urge to order the Guardsmen into the masses, to cut and beat them from her sight. How dare they frighten her child!