Eleven of his fellow conspirators stood in a row on the platform, all with hands tied behind them, all watching him. Some he didn’t even recognise. Lord Mustred was at the far end, bloody bandages wrapped around one eye. Lady Wetterlant, even now keeping her pointed chin high. Lord Barezin, closest to Leo, blinking about as though he could hardly believe what had happened. What was happening. At the feet of each one of them was a trapdoor. Beside each one of them was a lever. Above each one of them was a noose.
It all felt strangely bland. Strangely banal. He’d hardly known what to expect. Yet another irony. The first hanging he’d ever attended would be his own.
With jaw clenched, he hopped to the trapdoor and stood swaying, each breath a smothered groan. There was a taste in his mouth. Blood from the fall, maybe. Or a lingering sweetness from his breakfast. He licked at the grooves between his teeth, trying to root out more. Tiny pleasures seem huge when you know there’s no time left. All the wonderful things he used to have, used to do, that he’d hardly noticed, let alone appreciated. Now a sweet taste on his gums was a bounty to feel thankful for.
He glanced up. The sun bright in the sky. The long beam black overhead. The nooses dangling down. His noose, right above him. He wondered how many necks had already been stretched by it. After what he’d done, there were a lot of traitors to hang. They might’ve done ten batches already today. From the cellars where they’d been keeping the prisoners, you could just hear the clatter as the trapdoors dropped open. The thud as the ropes stretched taut. The faint gasp of the onlookers, each and every time.
Was there dried blood on the rope? He felt vaguely affronted by that. For something so intimate, each person should surely get their own. Felt like dying in another man’s underwear. Though the underwear of those who’d gone ahead was no doubt in a far worse state. People pissed and shat and leaked every fluid when they were hanged, he knew. It had seemed quite a laugh when Antaup told them all about it over drinks. Didn’t seem much of a laugh now, needless to say.
“Havel dan Mustred!”
Leo looked down, blinking. It was only now that he noticed the audience. Not a large one, and most of them strangers, seated on an assortment of battered chairs dragged from the wrecked buildings about the square. It was Lord Chamberlain Hoff who spoke, droning the name from an ink-spotted list. “You are found guilty of High Treason and open rebellion against the Crown and sentenced to death.” King Orso sat beside him, scarcely looking like he was enjoying this any more than the convicts. “Have you anything to say?”
“I did not fight against my king,” growled out Mustred, “I fought for Angland. That’s all.”
On the king’s other side, Lord Marshal Rucksted gave a great snort of contempt. The worms of the Closed Council. But Leo could summon up no hatred. He saw now that their tyranny had only been an excuse, and a flimsy one too. All he’d wanted was an enemy to fight. Jurand had been right about that. Jurand had been right about everything. The one consolation was that his best friend could remember him as he had been. Would never have to see him… like this.
It was better to imagine that Leo dan Brock died on the battlefield. It was true, in every way that mattered. He’d been a great fire, burning brightly. Why cry at the snuffing out of the feeble ember that remained?
One of the executioners offered Mustred a hood. He shook his head. He was guided onto his trapdoor, and as the noose was pulled tight, Hoff was already naming the next in the line of the doomed.
Leo’s bleary eyes wandered across the faces in the audience. Not far from the king sat a gaunt woman with close-clipped hair and a bandaged forehead. He wondered for a moment why she was looking at him with such desperate intensity. Then he let out a gasp, and the one knee he still had began to tremble so badly he nearly fell again.
It was his wife.
He’d never seen her stripped of all artifice before. Without her paint, her wig, her jewels, her dozen attendants, her hundred carefully calibrated smiles. He realised now that even her appearances at breakfast had been carefully staged. Even her appearances in bed. Especially those, maybe. It seemed she’d emerged from the Battle of Stoffenbeck almost as broken as he was.
But it was her.
What should he have felt, to see her in the audience at his execution? Useless guilt, at what had become of her? Impotent anger, that she’d urged him on? Sappy sorrow, that he wouldn’t see his child born? You’d have thought a man with only a few breaths left would have no time to waste on shame, but shame was what won. A crushing weight of it. At how pitiful he must look. At how badly he’d let her down. At how little was left of the man she’d married.
He could hardly bear to look at her. Even though hers was the only sympathetic face in the whole ruined square. Because hers was the only sympathetic face. At the sight of her, he might realise all he was about to lose.
Hoff was still naming the convicted. Each faced death their own way. Some raged against the world. Some tearfully begged forgiveness. Lady Wetterlant barked insults at every witness until the king ordered her gagged. One young man with broken eye-lenses started to make a speech on the deficiencies of monarchy, maybe hoping to bore a pardon from the king. Orso cut him off after a minute or two with a curt, “If you wanted to change the world you should have won.”
There were even different kinds of silence. An obstinate refusal to speak. A baffled inability to understand what was happening. A lip-trembling, stuttering, quivering fear.
“Stevan dan Barezin, you are found guilty of High Treason and open rebellion against the Crown and sentenced to death. Have you anything to say?”
“I have,” croaked out Barezin, jowls wobbling as he turned to stare at Leo. “It was Leo dan Brock that brought us to this! He was the instigator! He was the perpetrator! It was you that brought us to this, you bloody fool!”
There were a dozen other people who’d brought them to this. A hundred. Isher, nowhere now to be seen, had sown the seed. Heugen and Barezin himself had eagerly watered the sprouts. Savine and Stour had their parts in tending the crop. Even Rikke and the Breakers, by going back on their word, had helped bring in this harvest of hangings.
But Leo didn’t have the strength to defend himself. He hardly had the strength to look up. Without him, it could never have happened. Why not shoulder the blame? He wouldn’t have to carry it for long.
“I throw myself on your mercy, Your Majesty!” Barezin was almost sobbing. “It was all Brock!”
“You damn coward!” snarled Mustred from the far end of the line.
The blubbing brought nothing but contempt from His Majesty in any case. “Stick a hood on him,” he snapped, and Barezin squawked as the hood was shoved over his head and the noose pulled tight.
Leo saw now that his father had been wrong. It’s after the battle. That’s when a man finds out who he truly is.
He was no hero. He never had been. He was a fool. A great bloated tower of vanity. It had got his friends, his allies and hundreds who’d followed him killed. Now it would get him killed, too. He wondered for a moment if he might’ve become a better man for the lessons he’d learned here. He stared down at that endlessly throbbing leg that wasn’t there. It hardly mattered now, did it? He’d go back to the mud, as the Northmen say, and all the hard-learned lessons with him.