The Punishment

They were almost at the gate when Will began talking about the road home.

He thought they could make up some time if they ate as they walked. There was a stretch beyond the city where the road rose and the ground beside it stayed dry; they could stop there if Elias wanted, though he would rather keep going until the walls were out of sight. He had been speaking like this since they woke, filling the morning with small decisions. Elias let him. Neither of them had mentioned the knight.

The city was dismantling the fair around them. Men rolled stained awnings into bundles and knocked wooden pegs out of the ground. A woman knelt beside a broken basket, picking onions from the mud while a cart waited for her to move. Above the street, the bright cloth that had looked so splendid when they arrived sagged between the houses, wet with dew. Elias stepped over a length of discarded ribbon. His feet hurt, his clothes smelled of smoke and other people, and he wanted the familiar weight of his own blanket.

Will offered him the heel of their bread. He had kept the larger piece for Elias, pretending to discover the difference only when Elias looked at it.

“You can have the next one,” Will said, putting it into his hand before he could object. “If we wait to buy anything outside the gate, they’ll charge twice what it’s worth. They know everyone leaving has already spent their money.”

Elias broke the heel in two and gave part of it back. They ate while they walked, close enough that their shoulders occasionally touched. For a little while, with the gate ahead and the morning opening beyond it, he could imagine getting home and allowing the last day to become something that had happened elsewhere.

The traffic stopped near the archway. At first he thought a wagon had lost a wheel. People leaned sideways to see, and a man leading two mules swore when the animals began backing into him. Then a command came from farther up the street, followed by the hard knock of a staff against a cart. Heads turned towards the sound. A mounted guard appeared above the crowd, the king’s colours hanging beside his leg.

Will caught Elias’s sleeve and drew him towards the houses. They were moving with everyone else, but there was nowhere for the people ahead to go. A shuttered shop filled one side of the street; on the other, a wagon stood crooked against the gutter. Elias turned his shoulders to let an elderly woman pass. Behind him, someone shouted that they were trying.

The first guard reached them on foot. He used the shaft of his spear across people’s chests, pushing until the crowd folded into the space behind it. Elias felt a woman’s basket drive into his back. He lifted a hand to show the man they could go no farther, but the guard was already forcing Will sideways, dragging him by the collar to clear the wagon’s wheel.

Will’s foot caught in the gutter. He fell against the stones with one arm underneath him, and when he tried to get up the guard shoved him down again.

“There’s no room,” Elias said. He reached for Will, putting himself between them. “We’re moving. Let him get up.”

The spear shaft struck Elias across the upper chest and drove him into the wagon. A bolt caught painfully beneath his shoulder blade. The guard put his weight against the wood, pinning him there while Will struggled at his feet.

Elias pushed him with both hands. It was an angry, stupid movement, made before he thought of the armour or the colours or anything beyond getting the man away from them. The guard took a backward step. His heel slipped on the wet stones, and he had to catch himself against the wagon.

For a moment nothing happened. Elias heard Will getting up behind him. He saw the guard look down at the place where his hands had touched the breastplate, and understood, too late, that he ought to say something.

The blow came from the side. He did not see the second man until his face was against the wagon and someone had his wrist bent high between his shoulders. His cheek scraped along rough timber. He tried to turn his head enough to speak, but a hand closed around the back of his neck and struck his face against it again.

“He only pushed you off. You saw what happened.” Will was close, his voice louder than Elias had ever heard it. “Let him go. We were trying to get out of the way.”

The pressure on Elias’s neck eased. He mistook it for release and tried to straighten, only to have his legs kicked from beneath him. His knee hit first, then his mouth. Something small and hard moved against his tongue. He spat it onto the stones without understanding what it was.

A boot struck him beneath the ribs. He tried to breathe and could not. His body made an ugly, empty sound, reaching for air that would not come. He pulled his knees up, one hand going to his side, and the next kick caught his forearm. Will was shouting his name. Elias could see him beyond the guard’s legs, held against the shopfront by a man with a forearm under his chin. He was trying to wrench free. Another guard took his wrist and forced it backwards until his face changed.

Elias wanted to tell him to stop. He opened his mouth, but the breath he had finally managed to draw broke apart when the boot came again.

The first guard crouched beside him and caught a fistful of his hair. He lifted Elias’s head from the street, making him look at the breastplate he had shoved. There was a shallow scratch beneath its polished edge, old enough for dirt to have settled in it. Elias fixed on that scratch while the man said something about putting hands on the king’s guard. He tried to apologise. Blood came over his lower lip, and the man let his head fall.

Someone in the crowd protested. Elias heard a woman say that he was only a boy, and then another voice, closer to her, telling her to be quiet. Feet moved away. Through the legs around him he saw the onions scattered in the gutter. One had been crushed under a wheel, its white layers pressed into the mud.

He no longer knew which man was hitting him. There was the warning scrape of a sole, sometimes, or the small sound of someone drawing breath with an effort, but he could not move quickly enough to protect the place where the next blow would land. He covered his head and exposed his side. When he curled around his side, a heel came down on his fingers. He began trying to make himself smaller, pressing his face into the filth, willing them to find nothing left worth striking.

They were not stopping. He had thought they would stop once he fell, and then once he could no longer move, but he was lying still now and another blow had come. He waited for the next with a terror so complete that he could not think beyond it. The space between one kick and another was all he had, and each time he spent it trying to breathe.

“Enough. Surely he has had enough.”

The voice reached him clearly, though it had not been shouted. A man began to answer, using a title Elias could not follow. The boot near his face turned away.

“I can see what he is doing now. Stand back from him.”

Elias knew that voice. The certainty came before any memory, and he tried to lift his head towards it. His cheek dragged on the stones. Light entered the narrow space between two guards and hurt his open eye.

The princess stood beside a horse whose reins were held by another man. He recognised her from the tournament, though it was difficult to bring the face above him into focus. She was looking directly at him. Her lips parted a little when he managed to raise his head, and something changed in her expression, an attention that seemed suddenly particular to him. He could not tell whether it was recognition or simply the sight of what they had done to his face.

He tried to hold on to her voice. Somewhere there was a reason he knew it, something involving anger and a much narrower space, but his thoughts would not stay together. Her eyes moved over him. He tried to tell her that his friend was still being held, but he could not get the words out. The men had obeyed her. If he could make her understand, perhaps she could have them let Will go.

A hand took his arm. The street tipped as they lifted him, and the pain beneath his ribs flared so violently that he lost the princess, the horse and the light before he could make a sound.

* * *

When he woke, he thought he was lying on his arm.

It had gone numb beneath him. He tried to roll over, still expecting the ordinary discomfort of sleep, and pain opened through his side. For several breaths he could do nothing except hold himself rigid against it. There was stone beneath his cheek. He could smell urine, old damp and the sourness of his own clothes.

He kept his eyes closed while he remembered.

When he opened them, a strip of light lay across the floor a little beyond his hand. It came through an opening high in the wall, too small to be a window anyone could use. The cell had a door made of heavy boards, a bucket in one corner and a scattering of straw pushed against the far wall. There was no bed. He lay where someone had left him, one leg bent awkwardly beneath the other.

“Will?” His mouth scarcely shaped the name. He swallowed, tasted blood and tried again, louder, though the effort pulled at something deep in his chest.

He listened until he could separate the sounds beyond the door: a distant scrape, water somewhere, footsteps that faded without approaching. Nobody answered. He did not know whether Will was in another cell or still out in the street. He could remember the arm across his throat. He could not remember seeing him after that.

Getting upright took a long time. He began by drawing his knees closer, then abandoned that when his side seized. He lay still until the worst of it passed and tried to push himself onto one elbow instead. His hand had swollen across the knuckles. Putting weight on it made him gasp, and the gasp hurt worse than the hand. Eventually he used his forearm and the wall, moving a little at a time, pausing with his cheek against the damp stone whenever the room threatened to turn.

Once he was sitting, he was afraid to move again.

His shirt had stuck to his back. The left side of his face felt thick and strange, and one eye would not open properly. He touched his mouth with his tongue and found a sharp edge where part of a tooth had been. The knowledge unsettled him in a way he could not account for. He kept going back to it, testing the small broken place, as if it might be different the next time.

He tried to examine his ribs. Even lifting the hem of his shirt made him feel sick. There was a broad, darkening bruise along his side, with a swelling beneath it that he could not bear to touch. He had seen men return from falls holding themselves like this. One had spent weeks moving carefully, his wife bringing a chair wherever he wanted to sit. Elias could not remember what had been done for him, only that people had come to help.

At the first footsteps he dragged himself towards the door.

He had meant to stand, to look like someone who could explain what had happened, but he could not get his feet underneath him. By the time the footsteps reached his cell he was on his knees with one hand against the boards.

“My friend was with me. Please, I need to know if they brought him here.” He spoke towards the narrow opening beneath the door, where he could see a passing shadow. “His name’s Will. He didn’t do anything. They were holding him when they took me.”

The footsteps stopped. Keys moved against one another, and Elias raised his head, expecting the door to open. Instead a wooden bowl slid through a low hatch and struck his knee. Some of the water spilled into the straw.

He asked again while the man was still there. He added that he needed to send word home, that his parents would be waiting for him. The hatch closed before he finished.

For a while he stayed kneeling. It seemed impossible that the man had heard him and simply walked away. He listened for the keys to return, making excuses for him: there were other prisoners, perhaps he had to ask someone, perhaps he had not understood. By the time Elias accepted that no answer was coming, his legs were trembling too badly to hold him.

He drank with both hands around the bowl. Most of the water was gone already. He tried to save some, setting it carefully against the wall, but his mouth was so dry that within minutes he had taken it up again. When it was empty he held it in his lap, ashamed of himself for that too.

They should have been well beyond the city by now.

He pictured the road with such precision that for a moment the cell became difficult to understand. There would be a place where Will wanted to stop, a stone or a fallen trunk, and Elias would complain about his feet while they divided whatever food they had left. They would work out what to tell at home and what to leave out. He would have asked Will not to mention the knight, at least not straight away. He had wanted one evening in which his mother did not look at him differently.

Instead she would be waiting, and at first she would only be annoyed. He held to that because he knew how to bear it: her hearing a footstep outside and turning back to what she was doing when it passed the house, deciding that he had dawdled, that there was some last thing at the fair he had insisted on seeing. Later his father would go to the door. Elias could picture the pause there, one hand on the frame, his face turned towards the road.

He pressed the heel of his good hand against his mouth. He had never considered how much he depended on being expected somewhere. Now he could think of nothing except that place being kept for him and the hours passing while he failed to arrive.

It had taken so little. He remembered the guard stepping backwards and his own hands still raised between them. He went over it until he could almost make himself do something else. He could have caught Will by the sleeve and kept his eyes down, or said they were sorry. He could have taken the shove against the wagon and let it hurt. Each version ended with the gate opening onto the road and the two of them walking through it.

Then he would move, or need a deeper breath, and find himself back against the wall.

He knew the man had hurt Will. He knew he had been trying to get them both out of the way. Those things were clear when he thought of them separately. They became confused when he imagined telling his father that he had shoved a royal guard. He could hear how it would sound. He tried to prepare the explanation, but every attempt began with something he should not have done, and by the end he was apologising to an empty room.

In the corridor, a door opened. Elias held his breath despite the pain.

A man was asking for his purse back. His voice was strained but indignant, and someone answered him with a short laugh. There was a murmur Elias could not make out, then the man said that was all he had. Coins rang against a hard surface, one after another. The door closed; two sets of footsteps went away together.

Elias felt inside his own clothing. His little purse was gone. He searched again, awkwardly, using his swollen hand to hold the fabric while the other checked each place they might have missed. There was nothing. He could not remember anyone taking it.

When the gaoler next passed, Elias told him he could pay if someone would send to his parents. He had no idea how much they would ask. The offer came out before he considered it, and once it was spoken he wished he could take it back. He imagined men at their door demanding money because of him.

The gaoler looked through the hatch this time. Elias could see one eye, part of a cheek rough with beard.

“You go before the magistrate in the morning. Save it for him.” The man started to close the hatch, then added, “Keep that bowl by the door if you want it filled.”

Elias put the bowl where he had been told. He thanked him after the hatch had shut.

The promise of morning gave him something to arrange his thoughts around. There would be someone who had not been in the street, someone whose work was to listen. He would explain about the wagon and Will falling. He would admit that he had pushed the guard. He would not raise his voice, however much it hurt to speak. The princess had seen him; perhaps she had told someone what happened. He tried to remember her exact words, but whenever he reached for them he heard Will shouting instead.

Darkness came gradually. The strip of light climbed the wall and thinned, and the stones lost their separate edges. Hunger arrived as a dull discomfort beneath everything else, then faded. Once he heard someone crying farther down the passage. He listened with his forehead against his knees, wanting the sound to stop and dreading the silence when it did.

He had to use the bucket before the night was over. Getting to it was bad enough. Afterwards he could not manage his clothes with his injured hand, and the effort of bending left him sweating and shaking against the wall. He cried then, quietly at first, with an embarrassed attempt to keep control even though there was nobody to see. Each breath caught in his ribs. He tried to stop because it hurt, and that frightened him into crying harder.

He wanted his mother with a need he could not soften into anything else. He wanted her to come through the door and see him, to know without his having to explain that he was hurt and could not get home. For a few moments he let himself imagine her kneeling beside him. Then he thought of her seeing his face, and he covered it with his hands.

Later, when he could move, he dragged a little straw beneath his hip and lay down. He slept in brief stretches, waking each time his body tried to turn. Once he came awake certain that Will had called him. He answered into the darkness and waited so long for a reply that he could no longer remember whether he had heard anything at all.

* * *

The men who came in the morning were impatient with how slowly he stood.

One pulled him upright by the upper arm while the other waited in the doorway. Elias’s knees failed at once. He caught at the man’s sleeve, trying to keep his weight off his side, and was shaken loose.

“You’ll have to walk. There’s a whole corridor to bring up after you.”

Elias tried again. He found that he could stand if he leaned forward and took very shallow breaths. The man fastened an iron cuff around his right wrist and used the chain to lead him out. It was too short for Elias to fall behind, so he stumbled after him, his free hand pressed against his ribs.

They went up steps worn hollow in the centre. Halfway up, Elias had to stop. The guard pulled until the cuff bit into the tender skin at the base of his thumb, and he climbed the rest with his shoulder against the wall. At the top he could smell bread baking somewhere beyond the prison. His stomach clenched so sharply that he thought he would be sick.

The room where they took him had tall windows and a table covered in papers. Daylight fell across a clerk’s bent head. Beside the table stood a merchant in a fur-edged coat, turning a ring around his finger while another prisoner was led away. A second clerk brought the merchant a document. They spoke about a seized wagon and a payment made that morning, and the merchant was told where his men could collect the goods.

Elias waited, swaying slightly. There was a chair close enough to touch, but nobody offered it.

The magistrate sat behind the table. He was a broad man with carefully combed hair and a small ink stain beside one thumbnail. He looked towards the windows while the clerk found the next sheet. From outside came the sound of hammers and men calling instructions to one another.

“Have these copied before tomorrow,” the magistrate told the clerk. “The royal party departs after the public sentences. We are not keeping His Majesty waiting on the steps while you sort your papers.”

Then Elias’s name was read aloud.

Hearing it in that room steadied him briefly. They knew who he was. There was a record; there was something that could be corrected. He tried to straighten while the clerk read the charge: obstruction of the royal passage, assault upon a guard in the execution of his duty, resistance to arrest.

The guard from the street stood near the wall. Elias had not noticed him until he moved forward. There was no mark on his face. His armour had been cleaned.

“The street was being cleared as ordered. He struck me when instructed to move, then struggled with the men who restrained him. His companion attempted to interfere.”

Elias shook his head too quickly and had to close his eyes until the room settled.

“I pushed him. I shouldn’t have, but he had knocked my friend down and there was a wagon behind us. We couldn’t move any farther.” He stopped for breath. The magistrate was looking at the paper. “They kept hitting me after I fell. I couldn’t get up. The princess told them to stop.”

The magistrate looked up at that. For an instant Elias thought the name had helped him.

“Her Highness ordered an end to a disturbance in the royal passage. You will not represent that as her taking your part.” He turned to the guard. “Was a weapon drawn?”

The guard said there had been none. He sounded faintly inconvenienced by the question.

Elias tried to explain that Will had only been helping him. The magistrate spoke over the beginning of it, asking whether he denied putting his hands on the guard. Elias said he did not, and tried again to tell him about the wagon. The clerk had already dipped his pen.

“Ten lashes, to be administered publicly tomorrow morning, and five years at hard labour in the Crown’s prison camps. Enter his name for the next transport.”

Elias had been watching the clerk’s pen. He kept watching it after the man stopped writing, waiting for him to cross something out. Five years was too large to belong to the thing he had done. The words seemed to have come from another case, one of the papers beneath his own.

“I was going home,” he said. His voice sounded thin in the high room. “We were leaving. I only pushed him away.”

The magistrate asked the clerk whether there was room on the next transport. Elias heard an answer about a wagon and a list, and understood that they were discussing where to put him. He tried to draw enough breath to speak again. His side would not let him, and by the time he could manage it the magistrate was reaching for the next paper.

“Please. There’s something broken in my side. I can hardly walk.” He pressed his hand against the place, as though showing it might help. “I couldn’t work like this. If you’d let someone look at me, or send for my father—”

“You should have considered the consequences before striking a man in the king’s service. Take him down.”

Elias tried to stay beside the table. The chain tightened, drawing his arm away from his body, and the pain forced him to follow. He looked back once. The merchant had returned to ask about the wagon’s horses. The magistrate was listening to him.

On the steps down to the cells, the guard had to stop while Elias was sick. There was little in him to bring up. He clung to the wall with his free hand and retched until his ribs hurt so badly that he thought he would fall, while the man waited above him with the chain held short. When he had finished, the guard told him to move his foot out of it.

Back in the cell, he sat beside the bowl and tried to understand how long five years was.

He began with winters. He could remember five winters if he went backwards carefully, finding something that belonged to each: a fall on frozen ground, a stretch of weather when the road had disappeared beneath snow, a pair of boots he had outgrown. There was so much between them. Whole days he could no longer remember, meals and arguments and mornings when he had wanted nothing except to stay in bed. He would have to live through that much time before he could come home.

He tried to picture his parents at the end of it. His father had begun holding things farther from his face when the light was poor. Elias had noticed without thinking much about it. Now he could not stop thinking about what five years might do to him, or what might happen in their house that nobody would tell Elias until it was over. His mother might be ill and ask for him. There would be no way to explain to the men with the keys that this was different, that he needed to go just for a day.

Will would grow older without him. He would work, make other friends, have things to talk about that Elias knew nothing of. Elias tried to imagine meeting him on the road after five years and found that he could not make Will’s face change. He could only see him as he had been in the street, held by the throat against the shutters.

When the gaoler brought water, Elias asked where the camps were. The man said he would learn that when the transport came. Elias asked whether his family would be allowed to visit, and whether anyone would tell them where he had gone, but the man was already lifting the next bowl from his tray.

“Do people come back?” Elias asked. He had meant to ask it last, after the ordinary questions, so the man would not hear how frightened he was. “When the five years are finished. Do they let them come home?”

The gaoler paused with the bowl in his hand. He told Elias to eat what had been brought and keep his strength up. Then he went on down the passage.

There was bread this time, a piece too hard for Elias’s broken tooth. He softened it in the water and swallowed what he could. He hated the care with which he did it. Some part of him had already begun obeying, preparing to be put in the wagon, keeping himself alive for a place he had never seen.

Late in the afternoon, voices gathered outside his door. Someone asked whether this was the boy whose father had come. Elias was halfway upright before the answer came, his hand slipping against the wall.

“He’s gone up to the hall with a priest. They had a letter to show the captain. Nobody comes down here without an order.”

Elias called to them. He gave his name, then called for his father, louder than he had managed since the beating. The effort made him cough. He bent over his knees and coughed until he could taste blood again, listening between the spasms for a familiar voice. The footsteps went away.

For the rest of the day he watched the door. He was certain, for a while, that it would open. His father had come all this way; he would not leave without seeing him. Elias tried to smooth his shirt and wipe the dried blood from beneath his nose. He did not want the first sight of him to be worse than it had to be.

When the light failed, he stayed sitting up. There had been some delay. His father was speaking to someone, and the priest would be with him, choosing the right words. Elias had heard him settle quarrels that seemed impossible when people brought them to his door. Perhaps they would send for the magistrate. Perhaps the magistrate would listen differently with two grown men standing there.

He lay down only when he could no longer keep his head upright. Even then he faced the door, and each time he woke he lifted his face from the straw to see whether there was light beneath it.

* * *

They brought him to the covered yard the following morning with the other prisoners.

He sat on the ground because his legs would no longer hold him. A woman beside him cradled one hand inside the other. Farther along the wall, a man with grey in his beard stared at the open doors. Nobody asked Elias what he had done. When he tried to wet his lips, the woman pushed a cup towards him with her foot, and he drank the little that remained without knowing how to thank her.

Beyond the doors, people were gathering. Elias heard a herald announce that the king would receive the city’s tribute and witness the administration of his peace before departing. The words reached the yard in pieces, broken by footsteps and the shifting crowd. Somewhere close by, a guard complained that they ought to have finished this before the royal escort was needed at the gate.

They brought the woman out first. She left the cup behind.

Elias tried not to listen. He fixed his attention on the seam of his sleeve, working a loose thread between the fingers of his good hand. He could hear a charge being read. Then there was a pause, a movement in the crowd, and a cry that made the man beside him shut his eyes.

By the time they came for Elias, he had rubbed the skin beneath his fingernail raw.

The square was brighter than he could bear. He lowered his head as they led him into it, seeing at first only boots, the hems of coats, the pale boards of a platform. People stood behind a rope on either side of the path. Some were still eating. A small child sat on a man’s shoulders and was lifted down when Elias passed.

He saw the royal family on the steps of the hall. There were chairs beneath a canopy and mounted men waiting at the edge of the square, their horses shifting in the cold. The king was speaking to the magistrate. An attendant held a long wooden box open between them. For a moment Elias stared at it, unable to understand how the ordinary exchange could be taking place beside the thing he was being led towards.

Then he saw Will standing close to the rope, hair flattened on one side, his face pale beneath the dirt. There was bruising at his throat. He had both their bundles clutched against him, one strap wound around his wrist as if he had been holding it for a long time.

Elias nearly stopped walking. Whatever had happened after he lost consciousness, they had let Will go. He was outside, standing among people who could leave when they wanted. Elias had been afraid for him for so long that the relief left him briefly unsteady.

Will moved along the rope to keep beside him. “I sent word with a man going out on the road. Your father’s here, Elias. I told him everything. They wouldn’t let us come down to you, but we’ve been here.”

He looked behind him, and Elias saw his father pushing through the people at the rope.

He wore the coat he put on for journeys. There was road mud high on its hem, and his hair was flattened where he had slept against something without taking time to comb it afterwards. Elias knew the coat so well that seeing it here, among the guards and the strangers, made him want to reach out and catch hold of it. He had spent the night imagining what he would say. Now he could think of nothing except that his father had found him.

His father stopped when he saw his face. The movement was slight, no more than a break in his stride, but Elias saw it before he came the rest of the way to the rope. He looked older than he had when Elias left home.

“I’m here. We’ve spoken to them, and I’m staying until you’re coming with me.” His father kept his voice steady, although he had to speak over the people between them. “Listen to me, Elias. Whatever they’ve told you in there, you haven’t been left on your own.”

Elias tried to answer. His mouth would not quite do what he wanted. He nodded instead, too quickly, and had to stop because the square shifted around him.

The village priest stood just behind his father. He carried a folded document in one hand, its edges softened from being opened and closed. He was watching the men on the steps. Elias waited for him to come forward and show them the paper, to say that something had been settled and the guards could take their hands off him now.

A clerk came down from the hall before the priest could move. He carried a fresh sheet. The magistrate followed as far as the edge of the platform, and the guards brought Elias to a halt.

The clerk read the original sentence first. Hearing the five years spoken in front of his father made Elias lower his eyes. He could not help it. He knew what had happened, knew that the guard had knocked Will down and pinned him against the wagon, but standing there in irons while a man read out what he was to be punished for made him feel as though everyone could see something shameful in him.

Then the clerk unfolded the second sheet.

“Upon the petition presented on his behalf, and in recognition of past service to the Crown in its armies and holy campaigns, His Majesty has been pleased to exercise clemency. The sentence of labour is remitted. The prisoner shall be released into his father’s keeping upon completion of the corporal sentence.”

Elias looked up. The relief came before he could guard against it. He would go home with his father. The five years were gone, spoken away by the same kind of voice that had given them to him, and for a moment he could think of nothing else. He looked for the priest, wanting to thank him, wanting him to see that he understood.

The clerk paused over the remaining lines. He glanced towards the magistrate, then brought the paper closer to his face.

“The corporal sentence is amended to one hundred lashes.”

Elias heard a murmur spread through the people at the rope. His father moved forward so abruptly that the cord caught him across the waist. The priest caught his sleeve, but his own face had changed. He looked down at the document he held, then towards the magistrate.

“That was not put to us.” His father was speaking to the men on the platform, raising his voice as one of the guards stepped between them. “We were told he could be released into my care. You can see the state he’s in. He needs someone to tend him before anything else is done.”

The priest came beside him. “There must be an error in the copy. Let me see the order. His Majesty received our petition last night; there was no mention of this.”

The clerk had turned the paper towards the magistrate. Elias heard him say, more quietly, that he had never entered a hundred before. The magistrate put a finger against the bottom of the sheet.

“You have the seal. Read the order as it stands.”

Elias looked towards the king. He was close enough to hear the disturbance, and he was watching. Elias waited for him to correct it. His father had said there was a mistake, the priest had said it, even the clerk had stopped to check. Surely someone would send the paper back.

The king remained where he was while the magistrate signalled to the guards.

His father began to come under the rope. Two men met him before he had straightened, one taking his arm while the other set the shaft of a spear across his chest. Elias felt the remembered pressure of it against his own ribs. He tried to call out, frightened suddenly for his father, but the priest had hold of him too now, speaking close to his ear, and his father stopped struggling. He stood between them with his eyes fixed on Elias.

They brought Elias to the whipping frame. He went because the men on either side moved him. A hundred was still a number he had heard rather than something that could happen to his body. He could imagine ten strokes, although the thought made him sick. He could imagine ten more. Beyond that his mind refused to go, returning instead to his father’s promise that he was coming home.

The frame stood side-on to the hall steps. Its uprights were dark where hands had worn them smooth. A man waited beside it with his sleeves secured above his wrists, adjusting the leather wrapped around a whip’s handle. When the clerk gave him the order, he read it for himself. His eyes travelled down Elias’s body. Then he handed the paper back and asked for another man to stand ready at the frame.

They pulled Elias’s shirt over his head. It caught beneath his arms, forcing them upwards, and he could not stop the noise that escaped him. The guard tugged harder. Cloth peeled from dried blood across his back. When it was finally off, he stood shivering in the open air, one arm folded against his chest.

He did not want his father to see him like this. He tried to turn his injured side away from the rope, but the guards took his arms and fastened his wrists high against the wood. Straightening dragged at his ribs until bright spots gathered in his sight. He tried to tell them what hurt. One man checked the bindings while the other moved his feet farther apart, arranging him so that he would stand.

Through the open side of the frame he could see the steps. The princess stood beside her chair, her hands resting together in front of her. Her gaze moved from his face to the bruising along his side. She had seen the men do it. He remembered her looking down at him in the street, and the immediate way the guards had moved when she spoke.

He looked from her to the magistrate and then to the officer beside the platform, trying to judge which of them might still intervene. The officer was watching the crowd. The magistrate had turned towards the clerk. Elias went back to the princess because she was looking at him, because he had heard her give an order and knew she could be heard here too. He tried to lift his head enough for her to see that he was awake, that he understood what was about to happen.

Someone behind him told him to keep his feet beneath him. He found a nail near his left thumb and pressed against it, fixing his attention on the small hard edge. He had begun trembling and could not stop. His father was somewhere behind his right shoulder. Elias wanted him closer and at the same time wanted him to go where he would not have to watch.

The first stroke made him lose the nail. His whole body moved against the bindings. Pain spread across his back so quickly that he could not separate it from the tearing pull inside his chest. His mouth opened, but he caught the cry there, jaw shaking, while the clerk called the number.

He had expected a moment to breathe. The second came before he had finished drawing air, and he struck his forehead against the wood. He stayed there with his cheek pressed sideways to the upright. On the steps, the princess flinched. It was a small movement of her shoulders, checked almost as soon as it began.

He waited for her voice. The next stroke came instead, and he shut his eyes against the brightness that burst through his head.

By the fourth, he was no longer able to stop himself moving. Each stroke drove him forward; the ropes caught him and pulled him back into the next breath. He tried lifting some of his weight onto his wrists, then setting his feet wider, but there was no position that changed what happened. He could hear air forcing its way through his teeth. He concentrated on keeping that sound small, because his father could hear it and he could not bear to make this worse for him.

At six his knees began to give. The bindings held his arms while his weight dragged downwards, and the pain in his side became so deep that for a moment he could not see. The second man caught him beneath an arm and hauled him upright. He stood because the man placed his feet beneath him. The clerk waited until the guard had moved clear before he called the next number.

His father was speaking somewhere beyond the frame. Elias could hear the effort in his voice but could not make out the words. He turned towards it and caught sight of Will, standing beside the priest with both bundles at his feet. His father was in front of them, one hand extended towards the platform. He kept it there while he spoke, as though someone might take it and let him through.

Elias wanted to tell him that he was sorry. The thought had been waiting since the cell, growing around all the things he could no longer put right. He was sorry for bringing him here, for making him stand behind a rope and ask strangers to stop hurting his son. He tried to draw breath enough to speak, and the next stroke emptied him of it.

When the clerk reached ten, Elias closed his eyes. This was where it would have ended. He had been afraid of ten in the cell, had thought of it as something terrible waiting between him and the wagon, and now he would have given anything for the man to set the whip down. He could not imagine another ninety. He could scarcely imagine standing through one more.

The next came while he was still trying.

A sound broke out of him, low and involuntary. He bit down so hard that the damaged tooth sent a sharp pain through his jaw. His feet searched the boards. He wanted to stay upright because each time he fell against the bindings something seemed to tear farther inside his chest, and the guard who lifted him could not know where to put his hands without hurting him.

He searched the steps again. The magistrate stood with the order held against his coat. The king had not left. Elias had imagined, without knowing he was doing it, that someone with the power to stop this would eventually find it unbearable to watch. They could see his legs failing. They could hear him trying to breathe. There was nothing he could explain that was not already in front of them.

The princess’s eyes closed at the next stroke. When she opened them, she looked towards the clerk, then back at Elias. He tried to understand the movement. Perhaps she was waiting for a number. Perhaps there was some point at which she was allowed to speak. He watched her mouth until another blow turned his face against the wood.

He could no longer tell whether his father’s voice was coming from the crowd or from somewhere he remembered. There had been a time, when he was small, when his father had carried him home half asleep. Elias remembered the movement of his coat against his cheek and the certainty that he could let himself be carried. He tried to find that voice now, beneath the counting and the sound of his own breath, but the man beside him shifted his grip and the square returned in a wash of pain.

At twenty, the clerk hesitated before saying the number. The man with the whip waited, breathing heavily. Elias hung forward, his forehead touching the upright, and felt the pause extend long enough to begin hoping. He tried to raise his head. A guard was coming towards him, and for one foolish moment he thought the man was there to loosen his wrists.

Instead he took the other side of Elias’s weight. Between them, the two men brought him upright and held him clear of the wood.

Elias heard his father then, clearly enough to understand.

“He can’t stand. Look at him. Please, let me take him down.”

There was a movement in the crowd, a scrape of boots on the platform, and the clerk called the next number. Elias tried to turn towards his father before the blow came. He wanted to see him, wanted to make sure he was still beyond the rope. Then the pain reached him and he could not remember what he had been trying to do.

The numbers went on. Some he heard; others seemed to pass while the square was somewhere farther away. He kept losing the steps and finding them again. Once he thought he saw the priest with his head bowed over his father’s shoulder, but when his sight cleared there were guards between them and he could not tell. His hands had gone numb. That frightened him until another stroke arrived and left no room for anything except getting through it.

He stopped trying to understand the sentence. He would have agreed to the camp now, to five years or more, if someone had asked him. He would have said that everything the guard told the magistrate was true. He tried to form the words, to offer them to the man holding his arm, but his mouth moved against the wood and nothing came out that the man could understand.

Through the narrowing blur he found the princess again. She had drawn her hands tightly together. There was a brightness beneath one eye, though his own sight was running and he could not tell whether it was a tear. He did not know why he was still looking at her. The officer was nearer. The magistrate had the paper. Any of them could raise a hand, and he tried to look towards each in turn, afraid of missing the movement that would mean it was over.

His father’s voice came again. Elias tried to answer it, but his head would no longer lift. The men holding him adjusted their hands, and he felt the terrible steadiness of their grip as the clerk began another number. He was trying to hear the end of it when the sound thinned and the boards vanished beneath his feet.