“Brother!” A man wearing bright new armour spotted with blood hauled Broad out into the mould-stained corridor, but the way you’d greet a long-lost comrade rather than the way you’d drag a convict to their death. “You’re free!”

They were unlocking the cells, and with each door flung open they’d give a cheer, and at each prisoner pulled out they’d give another. Armoured men hugged a woman must’ve spent months in the darkness, pale and shrivelled, squinting at the light like it hurt her. “What’s your name, Sister?”

She just sat against the wall, floppy as a rag doll. “Is it… Grise?” she whispered. Broad saw one of her hands was all smashed, crooked fingers bloated like sausages.

Someone clutched at his shirt. “Have you seen my son?” An old man with wild, weepy eyes. “Do you know where my son is?”

Broad brushed him off. “I don’t know anything.”

Someone threw their arms around him from behind and he had to smother an instinct to lash out with an elbow. “Ain’t it wonderful?” A girl no older than sixteen with a patchy shawl about her shoulders, crying and smiling at once. “Ain’t it wonderful?” And she grabbed someone else, and they danced a floppy jig together and barged over an old woman who’d been brandishing a mop with a knife tied to the end. She nearly stabbed Broad with it as she fell.

Maybe he should’ve felt a caper coming on himself at his unexpected taste of freedom, but Broad had seen this mix of mad joy and mad anger before, during the uprising in Valbeck. Knowing how that turned out didn’t make him want to dance. Made him want to slip back to his cell and lock himself in.

There were Breakers among the crowd. Veterans with shiny new gear Broad well recognised. The arms and armour he’d brought from Ostenhorm on Savine’s orders and handed over to Judge in return for the Breakers’ support. Looked like they’d risen up after all. Just on their own timetable.

Broad had to push against a joyful current of people to get up the steps, into a wider, brighter hallway. A man in a leather apron ran past laughing, a wedge of documents clutched to his chest, papers slipping out and flapping to the floor. Another man bashed at a lock with a heavy ale flagon. This was where the music was coming from, a woman sitting cross-legged with some clerk’s tall hat jammed down to her eyebrows, eyes closed as she tooted jauntily on her flute.

And shuffling through the madness, freed as unexpectedly as Broad himself, came his old employers, the Lord and Lady Governor of Angland. Even with his lenses on, it took him a moment to recognise them. The Young Lion had his right arm around his wife’s shoulders, his gaunt face scattered with scabs and twisted with pain, moving in lurching hops with his left arm uselessly dangling and one trouser leg rolled up to the stump. Savine had one arm around her husband, the other under her swollen belly, struggling along with back bent and teeth bared, tufts of dark hair sticking from the bandages around her head.