It had taken that long for him to get out from under the house arrest. Ishil’s decision. When Gingren finally brought him home on the first day of the execution, pale and trembling, vomit-stained, Ishil had taken one look at her son and snapped. She sent Ringil to his room with icy aplomb, and as soon as he was gone she turned on her husband like a storm. The whole house heard her bawling him out. It was the only time Ringil could remember that she’d truly unleashed her anger at Gingren, and though he was not there to see the results, the lack of marks on his mother’s face the next day suggested Gingren had withered in the blast. In the aftermath, the servants crept about the place, and the orders stood in no uncertain terms—Ringil was not to leave the house before the end of the week. Jelim had been a husky boy, and it was well known that Kaad’s executioners could, on request, draw out the suffering of an impaled criminal for a good three or four days, if the victim was strong.
Ringil got out at dawn, out of his bedroom window, along fingertip ledges of stone to the corner of the house, and then over the roof to the stables. He went wrapped in a nondescript brown cloak that didn’t show what it was worth, squeezed through the hole in the fence, and fled toward the eastern gate.
When he got there, Jelim was still conscious.
And children were throwing stones.
It wasn’t unheard of, wasn’t even uncommon. If your aim was good and you had a decent-sized stone, you could jolt the condemned man on his spike and make him scream. In the absence of the Watch, enterprising souls among the urchins had been known to bring a supply of rocks and sell them for pennies from a tray.
The first child Ringil noticed was about eight—fresh-faced and grinning, hefting his stone as he stepped forward and cocked his arm. Comrades of a similar age offered jeering advice. Numb and dizzy, Ringil failed to grasp what was happening until the missile flew, and clanged off one of the cage bars.
Jelim made a girlish, shrilling noise. Ringil thought he heard the raw edge of the word
“Oi, you kids,” someone shouted. “Pack that in.”
Laughter, some of it adult.
“Yeah,
Ringil killed him.
It happened so fast no one, Ringil himself least of all, realized what he was doing. He grabbed the raised arm at the elbow, locked his hand into the boy’s neck, and wrenched. The boy screamed, but not loud enough to drown out the hollow, meaty sound as his shoulder joint snapped.
It was not enough.
Ringil bore him struggling to the ground and smashed his face into the paving. Blood on the dung-strewn stone, and a wet mewling. He thought the kid was still alive when he dragged the head up the first and second times, thought he heard him still wailing, but on the third impact he went abruptly silent. And by the fourth and fifth, it was definitely all over.
He kept on pounding.
Thin, high screaming in his ears like a steam kettle left on the stove.
By the time they dragged him off, the kid’s features were pulp, barely recognizable as human. It was only then, as they hauled Ringil bodily away, thrashing and snarling and lunging out at the openmouthed terror of the other urchins, that he registered the high-pitched shriek in his ears for what it was—his own voice, like nails scraping at the doors of madness.
He shook it off.
He walked away.
At his back, he thought he heard her cursing him.
HE WAS ALMOST BACK TO THE GLADES WHEN HE REMEMBERED THE last time he’d seen that pocketknife.
He’d put it in a pocket of his leather jerkin in Gallows Water, the night of the corpsemites. The jerkin he wore out to the graveyard and lost there in the fight.
Left there among the dead.
It was on Greasing Night—night of masking and unmasking, night of Ynprpral Walking and the cold that strikes through like a blade, night of acknowledging the wheel of the seasons and inevitable change—that the sign Poltar had been waiting for finally arrived. He supposed it was appropriate in its way; he grudgingly approved of the symbolism it drove home.
Mostly, he was just glad the waiting was over.
