When he looked to the door, dappled sunlight through the trees outside the window shifting across it with the breeze, he had this strange urge to walk out. This strange thought that he didn’t belong here any more, in the safe and the warm. Not with what he’d seen. Not with what he’d done. What if no one who stepped in there with him could ever be free of it?

But the path leading out was a coward’s path. He took a sharp breath and clenched his aching fists. If there was one good word said over his grave, it’d be that Gunnar Broad was no coward. It’d be a lie, but still.

Took all the courage he had to open that door, when he finally heard the knock. More than it had to man the barricades in Valbeck, or charge into the battle at Stoffenbeck, or fight Judge’s Burners on top of the Tower of Chains. But he stepped up to it, straightening his collar, licking his lips, and finally turned the knob.

The door rattled open, and there she stood. She’d changed. Not near as much as he had, but she’d changed. Sturdier, maybe. Softer, maybe. But when she smiled, it still lit the gloomy world, the way it always had.

“Gunnar?” she said.

And he just started crying. A jolting sob first, that came all the way from his stomach. Then there was no stopping it. He fumbled his lenses off and all the tears he hadn’t shed the last six months came burning down his crushed-up face.

Liddy stepped forwards and he shrank away, hunched and hurting, arms up as if to fend her off. Like she was made of paper and might crumple in his hands. She caught him even so. Thin arms but a hold he couldn’t break, and though she was a head shorter than him, she held his face against her chest, and kissed his head, and whispered, “Shhhh, now. Shhhhh.”

After a while, when his sobs started to calm, she put her hands on his cheeks and lifted his head so she was looking straight up at him, calm and serious. She wiped the tears from his face and traced the healing scratches with her thumbtip.

“It was bad, then, was it?” she asked him.

“Aye,” he croaked out. “It was bad.”

She smiled. That smile that lit up the world. Close enough that even without his lenses he could actually see it. “But I’m home now.”

“Aye. You’re home now.” And he set to crying again.

The thump of May’s ledger opening made Broad flinch. Made him think of Judge’s hammer as she passed the sentence. He told himself she was dead. Told himself she’d be the last one ever thrown from the Tower of Chains. They were filling the moat again, the water risen higher and the stains in the bottom covered deeper every day. The Court of the People was burned down to charred rubble. He’d seen it. Wasn’t sure he really believed it, though. Kept expecting to hear Judge bark at him to drag some fool out, beat some fool down, make some bloody example. Kept expecting to hear her say, You’re mine.