The women, men, and children of the keep had been placed on either side of the path leading to it. They were lying on their backs, each of them speared through the gut and held to the ground like a collection of beetles. Their hands had been tied to their neighbors’, so they formed a chain, and every fourth or fifth person in the chain had had their arms cut off at the elbows. It was a broken chain of the dead. The reward for a queen’s broken promises.
