She shrugged it off. “They have the kind of loyalty one cannot buy.”

“I thought you could buy anything.”

“I thought so, too, once.” She frowned towards the floor again. “It turns out I was wrong.”

“I never thought I’d live to hear you admit that. You have changed.”

“I’ve had to.” He caught a glimpse of the old iron as her eyes flicked up to his in the mirror. “Can you get past it?”

That memory bubbled to the surface again, but it was Leo’s hair Jurand’s long fingers were tangled in, and Leo’s ear he was biting at, whispering at, and Leo’s legs he was reaching down between…

“Leo?”

He turned his shoulder towards his wife, so she wouldn’t see the blood had rushed to his face. And not only his face.

“I suppose… I’ll just have to separate… their preferences from their value.” Certainly it would feel good to have someone beside him he could rely on. Someone who could make him smile again, even. With a grunt of relief, he finally pulled open the last buckle and the iron leg clattered to the floor. “I’ll write to Jurand.”

“Good. You’ve changed, too.” Savine lifted the baby from her breast, its tiny eyes flickering with ecstasy, and plumped it down next to the other. She was doing her dress back up when that one stirred, began to squeak. She gritted her teeth and started to unbutton again.

Leo winced, and looked away, and was able to sit up without embarrassing himself. Luckily, perhaps, there was nothing he found less arousing than his wife’s swollen, veiny, leaking tits. “You should get a nurse,” he said. Or at least she should do that somewhere he didn’t have to see it.

“I want to do it myself.”

“Well, you’re in tune with the times.” Leo rubbed ever so gently at his aching stump. “The Assembly never stops blathering about the proper responsibilities of a Citizeness. The sublime duty of motherhood, Risinau calls it.”

Savine snorted. “Fuck that fool.”

There was a green space outside the Agriont where they’d taken to dumping the old statues. Noseless, handless, legless lords and ladies who’d once presided over palaces now ruled over a stretch of patchy grass that smelled of the rotting water-weed in the bottom of the drained moat. Here or there some monstrous remnant from the famous statues on the Kingsway loomed over the rest. A towering hand. A mighty boot. Half a majestic sneer.

Leo had pushed himself too hard, as usual. He sat on the fist of Harod the Great, his iron leg stretched out in front of him. He was desperate to unbuckle the bloody instrument of torture but doubted he’d get it back on without help. He watched the workmen on their teetering scaffold chiselling away at the battlements of the Agriont—an endless, pointless, impossible task of demolition. The mornings were turning chilly and he huddled into his coat, blew smoke into his good hand. Even up in the North, he never used to feel the cold. Now it was in his bones all the time.