Reynald’s voice was casual and even. “Draw your sword and let’s find out.”
“Tempting, but I have places to be. Another time, perhaps.” He leaned to the side, meeting my eyes. “Have no fear. I’ll find you again.”
“Not if you value your life,” Reynald said.
“If you want to see something interesting, my lady, you should head north, to the pavilions. Trust me, it will be worth a look.”
The man backed away and took off, vanishing into the market.
Reynald and I turned left at the same time and started north.
Clover caught up with us. “I bought six grums . . .” She saw my face and fell silent.
We headed deeper into the market along the Center Row.
“Who is he?” Reynald asked quietly.
“No idea. We met in the Garden.”
Reynald’s eyebrows came together.
“Not that kind of meeting,” I told him. “I was watching Hreban make an entrance, and he stopped by and said a few words.”
“What did you talk about?”
“He called Hreban a gilded toad. The attendants treated him with deference. He is a lord of some sort.”
“I know him from somewhere,” Reynald said. “I know the eyes and the voice. I just can’t place them.”
A faint yell came from ahead. It sounded like a woman who’d choked off a scream.
The crowd was growing thicker.
A woman about my age hurried past us, going in the opposite direction, wide-eyed, her face pale. Terrified.
Yep, that’s exactly the kind of “interesting” I was expecting him to point out.
Another woman, an older one this time, in a good quality dress, with a maid and two bodyguards, barreled up the street. Reynald not so subtly put himself between us and them. The small group rushed past us.
Ahead, the Center Row widened, flowing around three large pavilions, set in a column. A crowd had gathered in front of the first one, squeezing into a knot of tightly packed bodies.
I had to see what it was.
Three guards in chainmail with teal and black surcoats marched up from behind us, toward the crowd. The leading guard bellowed, “Part!” and the crowd opened in front of them. They strode into the gap, and I ducked in after them. Clover and Reynald barely had time to squeeze in behind me. I turned sideways and pushed my way to the front.
The press of bodies eased, the crowd ended, and I halted on the edge of it. In front of me, across twenty yards of clear ground, stood a simple open-air pavilion with a clay tile roof resting on ancient wooden beams. A row of timber columns held up the roof. Every column had two bracers, one on each side, that stretched from it at an angle to support the rafters.
The corpse hung from the central column.
The sight of it was so shocking, it didn’t seem real. There were other people around it—guards, a knight in chainmail and teal tabard—but I saw only the body.
The dead person was a man, middle-aged, naked, his arms tied to the bracers of the pillar. His head drooped, his salt-and-pepper hair falling forward over his face. His torso was split from his collarbones to his groin, the skin and muscle pierced by hooks attached to twine and pulled back, the twine disappearing behind the column. He was laid open like a book, all of his insides on display.
The horror of it was so heavy, it bounced from my brain. My mind needed a moment to come to terms with the visual input. I stared, numb, while my eyes catalogued everything in excruciating detail: bare muscle, bloodied bone, a mangled liver, the gory sack of the left lung that seemed almost chewed on, the cut to the right thigh that had drenched the leg in blood . . .
“Dame Gler,” one of the older guardsmen was saying, “we need a ladder . . .”
The officer of the City Guard, a knight of about my age, didn’t seem to hear him. She was standing there frozen, trying to process the body. The cluster of people around us was quiet, almost afraid to speak. The crowd had formed a crescent around the grisly scene, held back by some animal instinct, as if coming too close would somehow infect them.
