“It could happen,” murmured Zuri.
Arinhorm wobbled to his feet, but he had nothing to say. Savine had made sure of that. All he could do was turn on his heel and stalk from the room.
“Oh, and Arinhorm?”
He looked back in the doorway, fists, teeth and no doubt arsehole clenched. “Your Grace?” he managed to hiss.
“When you see her, do pass on my regards to Selest dan Heugen.”
The door clicked shut and Savine settled comfortably back again. She realised she had not thought about Valbeck all day.
“Is it wrong of me to have enjoyed that one?” asked Zuri, checking the watch then marking another tick down in her ledger.
“We must take our pleasures where we can. Who’s next?”
A Little Public Hanging
“I hate bloody hangings,” grunted Orso.
“Distasteful but necessary.” His mother spoke in Styrian, of course, testing the limits of the human skeleton for regal bearing and surveying the swarming humanity in front of the gibbet like a swan forced to preside over crows. “Like so much of life.”
Orso watched the hooded executioners test their machinery, oil the lever, tug at the noose. “A little more than distasteful, don’t you think?”
“Deliver a last-minute pardon, then. Be Orso the Clement.”
“Technically possible. Politically unthinkable.” Orso looked towards the banks of seating reserved for the nobles and found more than a few of the sparse attendees glaring angrily back. At least Lady Wetterlant had stayed away. No doubt entirely consumed with plotting her revenge. “The nobles would hate me no less,” he observed. In the great pen where the commoners were crowded, by contrast, there was a carnival atmosphere: drinking, whooping, happy children up on their fathers’ shoulders. They loved seeing anyone killed, of course, but the public execution of a member of the Open Council was a dream come true. “The commoners would hate me far more. And I’d look a wavering weakling to boot.”
“If it cannot be helped then stop complaining. Be Orso the Stoic.”
He slumped ever more sourly into his gilded chair. “I doomed us to this when I looked for a compromise. When I tried to do the right thing.”
The Queen Dowager issued a frustrated tutting of her tongue. “Please, Orso, you are not the tragic lead in some overwrought play. You are a king. You have no business talking about the right thing.”
“Orso the Pragmatist is beginning to see that very clearly.”
There was a ripple of noise. Hooting, booing, insults. A wave went through the crowd as they pressed towards the barriers, grim-faced soldiers of the King’s Own holding them back.
Wetterlant was led up the steps to the scaffold, hands tied behind him.
He had changed again. His hair had grown back to an ugly fuzz, face gaunt and eyes sunken in dark rings. No trace of arrogance. The reality of his situation must finally have impressed itself upon him. Orso had trusted Isher and ended up looking a fool. Wetterlant had trusted Isher and it would cost him his life. The crowd jeered louder as he was dragged into the shadow of the gibbet, his wide eyes rolling up towards it.
“I almost feel sorry for the poor bastard,” muttered Orso.
His mother displayed no more emotion at the spectacle than a marble bust might have. “If you hate hangings so much, why even attend?”
“It’s the king’s justice. How would it look if the king couldn’t be bothered to see it done?”
“Your father was just the same. Never so happy as when he was miserable.”
Orso slumped further yet. “I never doubted I’d be a terrible king, but I never thought I’d be my father’s son so— ah!”
She gripped his wrist with a sudden strength, immaculately manicured nails digging into him. “You are my son, too! So smile. And contemplate your revenge.”
“Fedor dan Wetterlant!” bellowed the Inquisitor in charge. The noise dropped back to an ugly murmur, peppered with yells and jokes. “You have been found guilty of rape and murder and sentenced to death by hanging. Have you anything to say?”
Wetterlant blinked stupidly at the nobles. At the commoners. At Orso and his mother. He took a shuffling step forward. “I…” He swallowed. “I—”
Something spattered against his shoulder. A thrown egg, maybe. As if that was a signal there was another surge through the crowd. Soldiers shoved people angrily away from the barrier. The noise was redoubled. More thrown rubbish bounced across the scaffold. Wetterlant tried to shout something but his voice was lost.
The Inquisitor gave a grimace of distaste, then nodded to one of the executioners and he thrust the hood over Wetterlant’s head from behind. His shrieks were quickly cut off as the noose was dragged tight.
“Let him speak!” roared someone from the nobles’ enclosure. “Let him—”
Something hit one of the executioners in the face and he stumbled back, catching the lever with his elbow. The trapdoor fell open but Wetterlant wasn’t quite in position. He gave a muffled cry as one of his legs dropped, but his other foot stayed on the scaffold and he ended up halfway through, twisting and jerking with his knee trapped under his chin and the rope almost but not quite taut.
The crowd gave half a great cheer to see him drop, then half a great boo to see he hadn’t quite dropped, then laughter and taunts and more food flung while the Inquisitor bellowed at the executioners to no effect.
Orso’s mother closed her eyes, delicately pressed her middle finger to her forehead and swore softly in Styrian. Orso could only stare. This was his reign so far. When he finally decided to hang a man he hadn’t wanted to hang in the first place, he couldn’t even manage it without the whole business descending into farce. He jumped to his feet in a sudden rage. “For the Fates’ sakes, just get it done!”
But Wetterlant was wedged in the trapdoor and the executioners had no solution. One of them wrestled pointlessly with the lever, the other had the prisoner under the arms, trying to drag him out, another was kicking at the one leg still wedged above the trapdoor, trying to shove it through. Meanwhile, he was making a high-pitched squealing, the rope not quite tight around his neck and the front of his hood wildly flapping with his desperate breath.
One of the nobles from the Open Council—Barezin, maybe—was on his feet and roaring his outrage but was entirely inaudible over the screeching commoners, who were pelting the scaffold with rotten food. There was a shriek, followed by another surge through the crowd but wilder, arms flailing. A fight breaking out and quickly spreading.
People were throwing things at the nobles’ enclosure now. Not only fruit but coins. Stones. Orso heard a bottle shatter. He saw someone stumbling from their seat with blood on their face.
With a final vicious kick, one of the executioners managed to free Wetterlant’s leg and he vanished beneath the platform, the rope snapping taut. There was a half-hearted whoop in some quarters, but it hardly registered above the mounting chaos in the square. One could almost have described it as a riot now, a seething mass of flailing bodies with soldiers straining at the periphery, people scrambling for safety in every direction.
He thought he heard someone shout, “The Breakers!”
A missile thudded against the sun-stitched cloth of gold that hung behind Orso. He felt wet in his hair and jerked away, shocked. A bleeding head wound might have offered some romance, but he rather suspected it was rotten fruit.