He’d won, but it was nothing like his victory over Stour Nightfall in the Circle. No adoration from the crowds, only fear and suspicion. No surge of joy, only a nagging dissatisfaction. No hugs from his friends. He’d led most of them to their deaths.

He was surprised when he heard the door shut and the Lady Regent glided in. She could barely stand to look at him these days, let alone spend time in the same room. The way things were, he’d have been shocked if they ever fucked again, but he didn’t miss it. Since he lost his leg it had gone from what felt like work to what felt like humiliation. She could keep her quim to herself, and he’d take everything else, and consider it a fair division of the assets.

“Joining us, Your Highness?” he asked.

“Since there is a seat free.” She calmly met his eye as she arranged herself with even more than usually regal bearing in the tall chair at the foot of the table. The one that for centuries had sat empty for the First of the Magi. “Not expecting Bayaz, are we?”

Those might’ve been the first words they’d exchanged since the hanging. The slightest thaw in the winter of their marriage? Or more likely her ruthless, realistic self was worming its way back to the surface, and she was making the best of what she couldn’t change. She’d always been a woman who liked to win. But if she intended to fight him now, she’d better get used to the taste of dirt.

“I think we’re all here.” Leo sat forwards, setting his clenched fist on the table. “We have a new Closed Council. Young. Hungry. A dozen men—and women—ready to reforge the Union for a new age.”

There was polite applause. From everyone except Savine. She sat with that icy dignity she specialised in, glaring down the long table at Leo as though she could taste piss. But he wasn’t about to let her wounded fucking feelings spoil his moment.

“It grieves me to say that the nation is weak,” he growled, grinding his fist into the wood. “The rot was already setting in long before the Great Change. The army is in demoralised tatters. We have to give the men back their pride! Their purpose!”

Glaward clapped his hands. “Well said, Your Highness.”

“We could start by returning the Square of Marshals to its former glory. Those names underfoot are… an ugly reminder of things better forgotten. The ruined flagstones must be replaced so we can have drills, parades, manoeuvres, demonstrations of the Union’s strength—”

“I feel that would be a mistake,” said Savine.

Leo licked sourly at the hole in his teeth. “You shock me.”

“It should remain the Square of Martyrs,” she said, holding his eye in a challenge he did not at all appreciate. “If we sponge away the evidence of our failures, how are we ever to learn from them? We should leave the names of those who died for the Great Change and add the names of those who died in it. Let us commemorate the horrors of the old regime and the new, in the hope that we shall never repeat them. We must have a better Union.” Her knuckles were white as she clenched her own fist on the tabletop. “It cannot all be for nothing. It cannot.”