Six men stood on the scaffold below. One in a hangman’s hood, black as truedark. Another in a priest’s gown, white as a dove’s feathers. The four others wore ropes at their wrists and rebellion in their eyes. But as the hooded man had slipped a noose around each neck, the girl saw the defiance draining from their cheeks along with the blood. In years to follow, she’d be told time and again how brave her father was. But looking down on him then, at the end of the row of four, she knew he was afraid. Only a child of ten, and already she knew the color of fear.
