The park opened up before them, a muddy, overgrown mockery of the shimmering greenery he’d swaggered through when he first visited Adua. There were running figures everywhere. Running towards him, running away. Almost as much chaos as the day of the Great Change. Over the roofs ahead he could see the great gilded dome, gleaming dully beneath its streaking of soot, and beyond it the black spike of the Tower of Chains.

The thought suddenly floated up of how much simpler things might be if Savine had already taken the long drop.

Leo pushed it angrily away. She was his wife. The mother of his children. He was duty-bound to do everything he could to save her. The Young Lion might not be swept away by every feeling any more, but he still took his duty very seriously.

“Forward!” he roared over his shoulder. “To the Lords’ Round!” He’d be damned if anyone would call it the Court of the People ever again.

The Sentence

Savine had become something of a connoisseur of mayhem. She had been caught up in the vicious uprising in Valbeck, been a prisoner in the Agriont on the day of the Great Change, borne personal witness to the terror that followed. But the chaos in the Square of Martyrs now was not the purposeful kind that the Breakers, then the Burners, had chosen to impose upon the Union. This reminded her more of the rout after Stoffenbeck. The outright panic of the losing side in a battle. The vicious frenzy of every person for themselves.

Quite a crowd must have gathered for her execution, but now, with news of the approaching royalist army, it was their own imminent deaths that were commanding all their attention. Mobs had formed around the archways leading off the square, people screaming and shoving and trampling one another, tangled with riders and hawkers’ carts. Here is how things end: not with some grand drama, but a shameful scuffle in a gate.

Over the slaughterhouse squealing of mortal terror, Savine thought she could hear the faint sounds of fighting. The same distant clamour of men and metal she had heard at Stoffenbeck, and it sparked that same mixture of hope and fear, though with an even more desperate edge now.

Judge glowered back up the rubbish-strewn steps towards the Lords’ Round. The Commons’ Round. The Court of the People. The heart of the Union, whichever version of the Union you subscribed to, rebuilt even more grandly on the grand ruins of the one Bayaz had laid waste to, its stonework pocked and scarred and daubed with the slogans of the Great Change.

“Burn it,” she said.

The way they set to the task it must have been a plan long arranged. Burners trotted off with torches and a few moments later Savine was shocked to see flames flicker up the sides of the building. Wood stacked in readiness, she supposed, and buttresses painted with pitch.

Judge took a long breath and blew it out in a sour grunt, like a woman looking back on the dream home from which she has just been evicted. “Court stands in recess,” she muttered. “Let’s go.”