The Trouble with Peace (The Age of Madness #2) - Joe Abercrombie Page 0,241

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