The Prisoner’s Span was the bridge farthest to the south. The cages that hung from it held the guests of the magistrate’s justice. The crowd that stood on the bridge was the families of the prisoners or their detractors, tossing down food or throwing stones. But all went quiet when the Timzinae arrived. Guards cleared the bystanders from the bridge, but once removed, the citizens didn’t leave. The sides of the Division grew thick with people. Witnesses. There were voices, but no cheers. No shouts. No jeering at the fate of the enemy. Geder didn’t know whether he was pleased or disappointed at their solemnity. The cold of the air tightened his chest. Just the cold. Nothing else.
The guards lined the children against the side of the bridge in ranks. They covered it with their bodies. How many children had been in that prison? A nation’s worth. Hundreds at the least stood here in the cold. The maw of the Division itself gaped below them. For a moment, Geder saw the great urban canyon as a titanic mouth. The city swelling up to swallow the world, and all of them in the path of its hunger. The witnesses stood together, still bound by ropes. The others stood anxious and confused, looking to the north, toward the Kingspire and the crimson banner of the goddess.
The carriages, his own included, stopped on the bridge. Crows shouted from the sky. Sparrows darted across the wide air, as if agitated by their presence. Or celebrating it. Geder couldn’t tell which. He looked to the west. It wouldn’t be ten minutes’ walk to the little ruined yard where he and Cithrin and Aster had hidden during the insurrection. It seemed like it should have been farther away. In some other city, or vanished perhaps into a kind of legend. He imagined her there, dressed in white, her pale body among the dark-chitined Timzinae. Her eyes hard and rich with contempt. Or weeping from fear of him.
It’s not me, he thought. It’s them. I didn’t want to do any of this. It was all of them that forced this.
And then, worse. No, not just them. It was you. You’ve made me do this. This is your fault, not mine.
“My lord?” someone said, and he realized it wasn’t for the first time. The chief gaoler stood waiting at the carriage door. Geder felt a sudden and powerful urge to talk with the man, to ask where he’d been born, where he came from, how he’d happened to become a gaoler for the crown. What he thought justice meant. He didn’t even care what the answers would be, only that he wouldn’t be giving the order.
The Timzinae children stood in the cold. Some were shivering. If they wept, they did so quietly. And in the carriages, the great men of the empire waited, growing colder themselves. He saw the one girl who’d caught his eye at the prison. Who’d smiled at him. Geder pointed to her.
“She’s in the wrong place,” he said. “She’s to be a witness. Pull her back.”
“Yes, my lord,” the gaoler said. “And… the others?”
“You may begin.”
The gaoler saluted with his upraised whip. The first child in the line was a boy, perhaps ten years old. He wore grey rags and a soiled bandage on his right arm. The guard standing behind him put a foot on the boy’s back and shoved. Geder watched the boy’s arms fly out to catch himself on ground that wasn’t there. His screams were taken up by the other children.
It went on for a long time.
It was almost evening when he came unannounced to Lord Skestinin’s house. It was always a bit hard going there. Lady Skestinin always greeted him, a mixture of hope and dread in her eyes. She never said the words, quite, but she skated around them. Is my husband free? Is he dead? Is there news of any kind? And of course, there wasn’t. He hated seeing the relief and disappointment when he asked only whether Sabiha and her new daughter were accepting visitors.
As Lord Skestinin had been away with the navy more than in Camnipol, it was a smaller compound than other lords of equal dignity might have. The gardens were modest, the stables frankly small. There were servants and slaves, such as anyone might have, but fewer, given the needs of the house. For most of the time he’d known it, the house had actually been overfull.
Jorey Kalliam and Sabiha had lived there together after Lord Kalliam’s failed revolt. And later Jorey’s mother Clara and her retinue. And when Sabiha’s birthing had been in danger of failing, Geder had very nearly lived there with his guard, and a full complement of cunning men besides. The sense he had as he sat in the withdrawing room, that the house was empty and hollow, actually just was that it wasn’t unnaturally full. The Kingspire would likely have felt the same. Or anywhere. Anywhere in the world.
The door opened, and Geder jumped to his feet. Sabiha entered. Since the baby had come, her color had gotten better. Her hair had lost its ashen dullness. He’d never been around new mothers before. He didn’t know whether this was normal. If he imagined that she hesitated or that her smile was just a degree forced, it was surely just his unquiet mind. She was his best friend’s wife. Maybe his only friend’s wife.
It was why he’d come.
“Lord Regent,” Sabiha said, and he interrupted her.
“Geder. Please. It’s only us.”
“Geder,” Sabiha said. “Mother said you wanted to see me?”
He wiped his hands on his thighs. “Well, I wouldn’t, wouldn’t have said it that way quite. I mean, I did. Want to see you. I do. But really what I said was to ask if you were, were free.” He was stuttering like a child. No. Not like a child. Like something else. But he was stuttering. “Is the baby well? She’s not, she’s not with you.”
Sabiha’s brows knit and she turned her head a degree, like a bird uncertain whether it was seeing a vine or a snake. “She’s sleeping. She does that quite a lot.”
“Is she all right?”
“Yes, she’s fine. It’s what she’s meant to do. Geder, is something the matter?”
He laughed, but the sound came out strained. Thin and high as a violin badly played. He walked to the window and then back as he spoke, unable to keep from moving. “You’re the, the second person to ask me that today. And the first was Basrahip, so I couldn’t, couldn’t really answer him, could I? Not when I don’t know the answer. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I don’t mean to be a trouble. I really don’t. It’s just that Jorey isn’t here, and you are, and you love him, and he loves you, and you have a baby, and so you’re like him. I mean you aren’t like him, but you’re connected to him. And I don’t have anyone.”
He stopped. A plume of white rage rose from his gut to his throat, as sudden and unexpected as a lightning bolt in bright sun. “I don’t have anyone,” he said through clenched teeth.
Something moved inside him, a knot of emotion he could put no name to shifting in the space below his heart. He wanted to stop talking, to leave and go back to the Kingspire with Aster and have everything be what it was supposed to be. He wanted to erase the alarmed look from Sabiha’s eyes. He wanted to stop talking, but he couldn’t. He’d started, and now it was like a landslide.
“It’s all going so well, you see. It’s all just the way it was meant. The goddess, she’s coming back to the world, and she’s bringing peace and truth, and all the lies are dying. Everywhere. Since we stopped the apostate, everything in the world’s been getting better and brighter and purer.”
“Do you want to sit down? Can I have them bring you something? Tea? Wine?”
“If, if, if they had just done what they were meant to do in Suddapal, this would never have had to happen. They knew. They knew what would happen, and they did it all the same. They rose up. And then I had to. Because of the farms and because of the fucking traditional fucking families in Borja pushing at Inentai, and because if I didn’t do what I said, they would all be laughing at me. And I told them I told them.”