AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The cleric draws back beside her companions. The king makes a small motion, and one of the soldiers next to the prisoner pulls the sack from the sorcerer’s head.
The face he exposes looks sallow and doughy with the effects of the stupefying drug. Straggly black hair droops across the man’s forehead and cheeks.
If “man” is even quite the right word. From this distance in the hazy light, it’s difficult to judge his age, but I’m not sure the hunched figure at the noose is even out of his teens. He could be as young as Princess Klaudia.
As the soldiers fit the loop of rope around the sorcerer’s neck and tighten it, my throat constricts as if a noose of my own presses against it. My stomach churns.
But I don’t let myself look away.
This is my most likely future. This man—or boy—has a soul just like mine.
I’ve escaped punishment for my crimes while he stands up there. The least I can do is bear witness.
The soldiers retreat. The sorcerer’s shoulders sag as if he can barely hold himself up.
Up on the balcony, the royal family and the clerics tap their foreheads and torsos in the three-fingered gesture of the divinities.
Then someone yanks the lever.
The trap door pops open, and the prisoner plummets. His body jerks as the noose catches his fall.
Even drugged into oblivion, a hanged person’s limbs still shudder and spasm. The sorcerer’s feet kick involuntarily before going slack.
He sways on the end of the rope, more like a broken doll than a human being now.
Did the first impact snap his neck? Or is his brain still fizzing beneath the drugs as the rope cuts off his breath?
This is the tenth execution of a riven I’ve watched, and I can never tell.
After a minute, the crowd begins to stir. One soldier checks the body and nods to confirm that the sorcerer is dead. The others ease back to allow curious citizens to approach the platform.
Some of the spectators clamber right onto the boards to prod the corpse, as if they need to feel with their own hands that the monster is vanquished. I see one woman spit on the slumped, purpled head.
Bile burns in the back of my mouth. I’ve witnessed enough.
I hop down from my perch and slip away through the throng. Keeping my hood drawn low over my hair, I pad through the thickest shadows away from the city core.
A thick, mossy stone wall marks the border between the neighborhoods of the have-much and the have-less in the most concrete way possible. The crumbling structure was once the outer wall of the city, when Florian was just establishing itself as an urban center.
Once enough peasants had gathered and constructed homes in the lands beyond the original wall, the royal family of times past saw fit to erect a new, taller wall to fully encompass the city’s growth. No one’s maintained the old wall in centuries other than to ensure no blocks fall right off onto the head of a passing noble.
The many gates through the original wall have had their doors removed, and citizens traveling through are no longerofficiallymonitored. But one or two of the Crown’s Watch are almost always hanging around near them, happy to badger anyone they deem suspicious-looking.
To avoid any potential hassle, I prefer to simply go over the top. In plenty of places, a well-situated shed or shrubbery makes for an easy scramble across the stones.
A few streets beyond the wall, I reach the building that contains a cloth-making business and my home, as much as I can call the place where I sleep that.
The three floors where workers weave, dye, and store reams of linen and wool lie silent for the night. I clamber up the rusting ladder at the back, meant as an escape route in case of fire, and spring from there to the lip at the top of the third story.
A brief scoot to the side, and I’m at the shuttered attic window that’s just large enough for me to squeeze my scrawny frame through.
The sprawling attic is cluttered, but I know it well enough to navigate the stacks of boxes and abandoned furniture by only the faint streaks of moonlight that seep around the shutters. I’ve helped myself to enough of the factory’s discards to create a mattress of heaped wool that’s decently comfortable, with a linen sheet and a patchy wool blanket.
A few emptied boxes turned on their side serve as a series of shelves. I wriggle out of my tunic, trading it and my breeches for a nightshirt, and fold them to set next to my meager assortment of clothes.
I consider the remaining dumplings, but my stomach balks, so I set them onto a different shelf next to my stash of nuts and dried berries. They’ll make a perfectly good breakfast.
My gaze slides through the dimness across the hills of boxes still full of their original contents. The books I’ve retrieved from those boxes stand in uneven stacks on the floor in between.
