Sometimes felt like all Broad had was doubts. But they changed nothing. He took another nip. The more he drank, the harder it was to keep count. The more he drank, the less he cared about innocence or guilt. The more he drank, the less their crying bothered him. Their arguing. Their endless fucking reasoning. A cuff across the head would shut ’em up, when it got too much. It’d been the same with the prisoners in Styria. No food to spare for the enemy, so… get Gunnar Broad. He’ll do what needs doing.

And he did. The families gathered here, in the cold shadow of the Tower of Chains, to say their last goodbyes. To hope for some nick-of-time reprieve that would never come. There was a woman bundled up in a blanket, her face all pink and raw from cold, eyes shining with tears. She blundered out and caught the prisoner closest to Broad.

They clasped each other. Whispered something to each other, foreheads pressed together. Broad wondered what he’d have done, if that was him and Liddy. Him and May. Maybe he’d find out, one day soon. If there was any justice.

He drank again, spirits burning his sore gullet. It was like taking the lenses off his mind. Made everything a blur. So he didn’t have to see Liddy’s face, or May’s. Didn’t have to think of what they’d say. Didn’t have to put ’em next to what he was now. Didn’t have to fear what he might do to ’em. Made it easier, being drunk. Or did it make it easier to have something to blame? I was drunk, so I wasn’t thinking straight. I was drunk, so I couldn’t help myself. I was drunk, so it wasn’t really me, even though, when he was drunk, it was really him even more than when he was sober. It was never really him until he was drunk.

Truth be told, he was a man who broke everything. He’d been running from it ever since Styria, and all he’d done was run straight into it again. Told himself it was the safest thing for Liddy and May to stay in Angland, and for him to stay here. Told himself he was doing it for their sakes. Better’n the alternative. That he was doing it for his own.

They clung to each other with desperate strength, these two, trying somehow to put off that final parting. Broad had the pain of sentimental tears at the back of his nose as he prised them apart, hands numb from the cold, numb from the drink. But he still did it.

“I love you!” the woman called as one of the other Burners pulled her away and Broad pushed her man on towards the Tower of Chains. I love you. Like her love might be a cushion he could bounce on when he hit the frozen ground.

Over the anger of the crowd, faint from beyond the Agriont’s broken walls, he could hear the dogs. A different kind of bloodthirsty. There were packs of ’em in the streets now. Turned almost as feral as the people. Wolves and foxes, too, drawn out of the cold countryside and into the city by some glimpse of fire, some whiff of blood. They slipped through the crowds outside the Agriont, darted up to lap at the half-frozen spatter at the base of the tower.