She had suggested they postpone the wedding, but her father was as deaf to that as he had been to the Breakers’ arguments. He refused to put off his only child’s happiness on account of a crowd of ruffians. Harbin laughed at the notion that the capital could fall to an army of peasants, so Lilott forced out laughter, too, since agreeing with your husband-to-be was expected of a young lady. At least before the marriage. They had convinced themselves it would not happen.

They had been horribly mistaken on that score, too.

She hardly recognised the streets she had grown up in, flooded with crazed humanity, surging on invisible currents of joy and fury. She was so cold. Not exactly crying but her eyes and her nose constantly leaking, her bare shoulders clammy from the drizzle and her bare feet bruised from the unforgiving cobblestones. Her breath came in terrified whoops, her skin crawling under her half-finished, pearl-stitched bodice.

Only that morning it had felt so important that all the right guests should accept their invitations. That the words of their vows be perfect. That the hem of her dress was stitched just so. Now the hem of her dress was black with road-filth and, Fates help her, speckled brown with her father’s blood, and all the world was turned upside down and inside out.

She hobbled on. Not knowing where she was or where she was heading. Some unsewn flap of her dress caught on a broken fence as she ran past and nearly jerked her off her bare feet. Someone laughed at her. Another clapped. On any other day, a desperate, barefooted girl in a blood-spattered wedding dress would have excited some attention. Today it was nothing to remark upon. The whole city had gone mad. The whole world.

Over the roofs she glimpsed the parapet of the Tower of Chains, the tallest tower of the Agriont, and she gave a moan of relief. But when she burst gasping onto the paving stones beside the moat it became a groan of horror.

She had wandered lazily across this bridge on happy summer days, among the wealthy revellers, on her way to the Agriont’s park to see and be seen, to applaud the fencers at the Summer Contest. She remembered smiling at floating ducklings following their mother in dignified single file, remembered counting the green and red and purple lily pads with Harbin, on the day he proposed. So picturesque.

The gates were sealed now. People were crushed against them, waving frantically, wailing at the towering gatehouse to be let in. An old woman in a very fine dress was scratching at the wood with her fingernails. Lilott added her voice to the rest as she staggered across the bridge. She hardly knew what else to do. “Help!” she screeched. “Help!”

She saw a pale man with a red scarf staring past her and spun about to follow his eyes. A crowd was coming up the wide Middleway, banners bobbing over it, steel of pikes and armour glinting.