“Aye, well,” said Sholla, and Clover flattered himself that she might be struggling to hold back a tear or two. “Didn’t want to give the bastard the satisfaction o’ killing you.”

“You’re joking! I had that bloody half-head just where I wanted him. Waiting for my moment was all.”

“What’ll you do?” asked Flick, who wasn’t trying to stop himself crying at all and had dirty tear tracks all over his cheeks.

Clover grinned. “Something usually comes up.” And he turned and started walking, sword over his shoulder.

Sunrise

“You don’t like the palace,” said Leo.

Savine didn’t seem to like anything lately, and her husband least of all. “I find it hard to sleep here,” she said, with a sullen glance at one of the Anglanders who were guarding every landing and doorway.

He wanted to say she was lucky to be alive but was trying hard to be sympathetic. He’d won, after all. He could afford to be. “After what you’ve been through it’s a wonder you can sleep at all.”

“The place is a ruin,” said Savine, sweeping past a mural of some grand coronation with all the faces chiselled out. “It still smells.” She watched a man in blazing-sun livery teetering on a stepladder so he could scrub at slogans up near the ceiling. “There is evidence of the Burners’ tenancy everywhere. Of… Judge’s tenancy.” She gave an ugly shiver of disgust and held baby Ardee closer. “It feels like a prison.”

Leo clenched his jaw. How grateful most people would’ve been to be kept in a cage like this one. “The children are safest here, in the Agriont.” He winced as he shifted Harod’s weight in the crook of his arm. “We’re already patching up the walls. A king belongs in a palace, and Harod will be king now.”

“Harod is a baby.”

“That’s why he’ll need guidance.”

Savine looked sideways at him, and hardly with the proper affection a wife should have for her husband. “From you, I suppose?”

“From both of us.” But it was only right that a father should have the final word when it came to his son. By the dead, his stump was throbbing, his bad arm tingling, his shoulder aching from the effort of holding the child as he lurched along. “We’re together in this.”

“Are we? When we discussed bringing back the monarchy we never mentioned changing the monarch.”

“Plans have to bend with circumstance,” grunted Leo. The sort of thing he’d always hated hearing his mother tell him. “I would’ve warned you if I could. Of course I would. But how could I? I was scrambling to save your life. To save the bloody Union!”

He had to stop. He’d wanted to sweep into the Hall of Mirrors carrying his son. To be seen as a father, head of the ideal family. The shining example to be copied across the reborn nation. But dropping the tiny king on his head then tripping over him would have won him few admirers. To be a cripple well, you have to accept what you can’t do.