They left the Keep Lawn and proceeded down the Great Boulevard. Here, someone had placed wooden barriers to keep people out of the center of the road, but the mob crowded up against the barriers, nearly knocking them over, shrieking at the wagon the entire way. When the procession passed Powell’s Sweet Shop, Ewen saw Mr. and Mrs. Powell out front. Powell’s had always been his favorite shop, ever since he was little, when Mum used to take him and his brothers every Sunday if they had been good in church. Mrs. Powell was nicer to Ewen than she was to his brothers; she would always stick a few extra pieces of taffy into his bag. But now Mrs. Powell’s face was twisted and dark. Her eyes met Ewen’s, but she did not seem to recognize him, nor did she stop screaming, high furious cries that meant nothing.
“Hey, Ew! EW!”
Ewen looked around and saw his brother Peter, clinging to the top of a lamppost with one hand, waving wildly with the other. Peter pointed beneath him, and Ewen saw that they were all there: Arthur and David, his two younger brothers, and Da. Even from this vantage, Ewen could see that Da was leaning heavily on Arthur’s arm, that he would have fallen over without help. Ewen longed to wave at Da, but he could not; he was a Queen’s Guard, and he sensed the Mace watching him, looking for him to make a mistake. Da didn’t wave; he was too weak. But his old eyes were gleaming, and he smiled as Ewen went by.
As they left the boulevard and entered the twisting labyrinth of streets that led to the Circus, Ewen finally turned his attention back to the wagon. The crowd followed, screaming blood and murder behind them, but Ewen no longer heard them. He had never imagined that one single moment of life could be so important. He was a Queen’s Guard, and Da had seen, and Da was proud.
FOR THE FIRST few minutes, Kelsea had been able to convince herself that the crowd was merely expressing healthy anger. Seventeen years of the lottery required some outlet, and Thorne was the perfect target, for he stood nonchalantly in the wagon, smiling as though he had not a care in the world, as though he were going to a Sunday picnic rather than his own death. The crowd hurled objects at Thorne, howling like animals, and by the time the procession reached the Circus, Kelsea could no longer deceive herself about what was going on here. This was not a crowd, but a mob, and it was only winding itself up as the procession continued.
The Circus was New London’s unofficial plaza, a wide oval of broken paving stones at the center of the city. It was a convenient place for meetings, for it stood at the intersection of five streets and its perimeter was dotted with pubs. But today the plaza was dominated by a high wooden structure: a scaffold, built by contractors in the past week. The platform was taller than Kelsea had expected, perhaps ten feet high, and the scaffold itself seemed to loom over the crowd below.
Three long, twisted ropes, ending in nooses, dangled from the crossbar. Two of them were already occupied, tightened around the necks of Liam Bannaker and Brother Matthew. Kelsea had expected some pushback from the Arvath; technically, only the Holy Father could sentence one of his people to death. But there had been nothing from the Holy Father for days, no complaints or demands. He was waiting for something, Mace said, but if Mace knew what the something was, he kept it to himself.
Kelsea had hoped that the sight of the rope would touch Thorne, even a little, but he continued to smile broadly, and the crowd screamed louder, and their fury fed his smile, and his smile fed their fury, until it sounded as though the world was ending. Everywhere she looked, Kelsea saw clean hate, eyes and faces and mouths burning with it. Even the evacuees—men and women in the thick, patched trousers and loose shirts of the Border Hills and eastern Almont—had come into the city to see Thorne hang. But Thorne seemed not to care.
There must be something, Kelsea thought, her eyes pinned on him. Something that would break him.
She turned to Mace, but he was keeping a careful eye on the boy, Ewen, watching to see that he did not get distracted. Mace thought all of this energy expended on Ewen was a waste of time, but there were some things that you could never explain to Mace. For perhaps the thousandth time, Kelsea wondered what had happened to him, to make him so immune to kindness. In this respect, at least, Thorne had won the chess match: Kelsea never really stopped wondering about Mace anymore, about the strange childhood where Mace and Thorne and Brenna had somehow intersected. But if she asked Mace, he wouldn’t tell, and if she ordered him, she would be a tyrant and he wouldn’t tell anyway. Thorne had refused to speak another word, even to the last, but Kelsea had kept her end of the bargain. Brenna was now installed in the Keep proper—five floors below the Queen’s Wing, to Kelsea’s relief—and each day one unfortunate guard had to go down, bring her food, and guard her chamber for the day. Mace had begun to treat the duty as a punishment for small infractions by the Guard, and according to him, it had been surprisingly effective. Kelsea could ask Brenna about Mace’s origins, perhaps, but she couldn’t imagine that the albino would be willing to tell her anything. She had considered bringing Brenna down here today, but in the end decided that such a move would be too cruel. Now she wished she had done it, just to see the look on Thorne’s face. Maddening, to have so many questions to which the answers were hidden by a single pitiless mind.
Kelsea was pleased to see that Ewen’s size, at least, was an advantage here. After they stopped the wagon, Ewen held Thorne’s arms tightly while Elston dealt with the knots. Normally, it would have been Kibb with Elston, as always, but Mace was still testing Kibb, trying to analyze what had changed since his illness. Kibb was different, even Kelsea could see it. He sang less, laughed less, seemed more introspective. From time to time Kelsea would catch him staring at her, puzzled, as though trying to decipher some code that only the two of them understood.
At the foot of the scaffold, Kelsea dismounted and headed up the stairs to the platform, surrounded by her Guard. The crowd howled around her, a sound for nightmares, but she no longer minded, for the cacophony fit her mood. After months spent hunting for Thorne, this should have been her day of triumph, but somehow everything had gone wrong. Thorne had not stood trial, and Kelsea could feel Carlin’s certain disapproval, like a low headache at the back of her mind. Eight days ago, the Mort had crossed the Crithe, and no amount of ingenuity from Hall or Bermond could hold back their numbers; soon Kelsea would have to evacuate the sprawling camp outside the city and move the refugees inside. Whenever she closed her eyes now, she saw the Mort: a faceless black horde, waiting, at the end of the New London Bridge. What did they wait for? Kelsea shrank from the answer.
She beckoned her herald, Jordan, who had hung back from the group of Queen’s Guards in clear discomfort. The guards were not unkind to him, certainly, but there was little doubt that Jordan was a mouse among hawks.
“See if you can get them to settle down.”
Jordan moved to the front of the scaffold and began yelling, waving his arms. His deep voice was strong enough to make the wood thrum beneath Kelsea’s feet, but still, it took a few minutes for the crowd to fall into an uneasy silence, one broken by hisses and muttering. Elston and Ewen had moved Thorne to the pinnacle of the scaffold, where he stood with bound hands, staring far over the crowd.
“Arlen Thorne, Brother Matthew, and Liam Bannaker.” Kelsea was pleased to hear her words ring across the Circus and bounce back again from the wall of pubs. “You are guilty of treason, and the Crown has sentenced you to death. Should you have anything to say before you hang, the Crown is listening.”
For a moment, she thought that Thorne might speak. He scanned the crowd, and Kelsea knew without knowing that he was looking for Brenna, for the damnable albino who had such an incomprehensible hold on him.