Chapter 15 · free to read
Everything I had — a physician, a captain, two books and a brand — was in one room, at one hour, in front of two hundred men who had already decided that deciding was dangerous.
Nine days ago he had been dying on a mat. He would not be carried in. He said a man who cannot cross a floor cannot hold a throne, and then he took four minutes to cross it, in front of everybody.
Two books, a certificate, a poison slip and a bird with long legs. I had spent six months collecting four pieces of paper. In that hall they were worth more than the Guard.
She did not shout. She did not produce a last document. She stood at the back of the hall she had owned for ten years and let it be taken off her, and I understood that she had known since the physician's second sentence.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.