The bright summer’s day has a paradoxically carnival atmosphere to it. People flock to Aegis Township from all of her outlying areas, all to see the spectacle of the day. Multiple peddlers offer meat pies, boiled eggs, and tarts filled with last year’s fruit preserves.

To young Deirdre, it would be an exhilarating adventure if not for circumstances well outside her control. She rubs red-lined eyes with a dirty fist.

“Don’t let them see you crying,” her mother counsels her gravely. They stand on the precipice of the guardhouse in the blistering summer sun. Her mother kneels to be level with her face while speaking to her.

Deirdre wears her finest feast day dress. It is yellow with a bright blue ribbon disguising where her mother stitched extra material to lengthen the hem. It is stiff and itchy with starch.

“No, mama,” she answers, rubbing furiously at her eyes to disguise the tears. Sweat runs between her shoulder blades. She shudders. “I hate them.”

Deirdre looks out at the crowd that has gathered to watch someone she loves die and she hates every one of them. Their smiling faces mock her sorrow. The smells of their celebratory foods cannot hide the stink of their ugly enjoyment of another’s suffering.

She scowls, wrinkling her little button of a nose most sourly. Her mother licks a thumb and wipes the dirt and the tracks left by her tears from the child’s face.

“You must never let them know you feel that way.” The expression on her mother’s face is tightly controlled. There is a coldness in that look that has nothing to do with what lies within her heart. “You must have them think you are nothing like him. You must convince them you are like them. My child, you cannot let anyone think you have sympathy for the accused.”

Deirdre bites her lip and forces her face into something that technically qualifies as a smile, but the set of her chin and the fury in her eyes lose the effect.

Behind her, Sigismund stands alone. The tall little boy has no one with him. He stares jealously at the interaction between mother and daughter.

Deirdre’s mother laughs, a sound that is as false and brittle as her child’s forced smile.

“Why mama,” Deirdre begs, “why does it matter if I cry?”

Her mother shakes her head sadly.

“They will hold this against you.” She takes her daughter’s hand as she stands up again. “They will always see you as his granddaughter first, before you have any chance of being your own person. Don’t let them see any reason to believe that to be correct. It’ll haunt you if they know how to hurt you.”

Deirdre tries to fix her face to match the excitement of those in the crowd, but can only force her lips into a determined line.

Her mother leads her down the steps and into the crowd that throngs through the streets. All the traffic goes same direction. They walk slowly, not in any hurry to beat the crowds. At her height, Deirdre has a superb view of everyone else’s elbows.

She catches the occasional glimpse of her cousin following at their heels. He looks wild and uncared for in his too-short trousers and his grubby shirt. Dark hair sticks out at all odd angles on his head, which hasn’t seen a brush in ages. His face is dirty except for where his tears have washed it clean.

Deirdre ignores her cousin. He doesn’t matter to anyone. He certainly shouldn’t matter to her.

It takes some time to walk all the way from the guardhouse to the hangman’s tree. It must feel much longer, or perhaps far, far too short, for Grandpa Burrows.

The crowd gathers around the ancient tree, all waiting to see the spectacle of a death in public. Deirdre can’t see more than the highest branches of the ancient tree from her place in the crowd. No one makes space for her to pass, and she does not want to let go of her mother’s hand to force her way through.

Sigismund has no such restraints and weasels his way between the gathering mob until he finds himself perched atop a fence post with a group of older teens. The older children jeer at his appearance, but they’re unable to remove him from their presence. He focuses intently on the scene that unfolds over the sea of people before him.

Deirdre only hears what happens.

The voice of the young magistrate rings loud and clear over the heads of the gathered crowd. He shouts for their attention and the crowd slowly settles down to listen. There is no humor in his voice when he speaks.

“People of Aegis Township!” he calls. “One of your number stands accused of the crime of creating forgeries of coins with which he has tainted the value of the currency. Because of his actions, the value of coins from Aegis Township is lower than coins from anywhere else. He has tarnished your town’s reputation for honesty, and paid his debts to you with fakes.”

The sea of elbows ahead of her blocks the view for Deirdre. She cannot see more than the top branches of the tree. She hears the thick rope of the noose hiss as it slides over the limb chosen for the occasion. The branch creaks as the hangman tests its weight.

“This man is Heinrich Burrows,” the magistrate continues speaking. Deirdre hears the creaking steps of her grandfather as he climbs a ladder beneath the tree. She cannot see him from here.

“Mr. Burrows,” the magistrate addresses her grandfather in a voice that carries, “would you have anything you want to have said?”

“Look away, Sigi,” Deirdre hears her grandfather shout over the heads of the crowd. “Look away.”

The crowd chatters amongst themselves. They do not find his last words to be fitting. They do not think this is a reasonable action for a man about to die.

“People of Aegis Township,” the magistrate calls out again, addressing the crowd directly, “Is there any single one of you who will show him mercy? Is there any of you who would stay the executioner’s hand?”

The crowd reacts as expected.

They jeer and shout obscenities. Someone throws a moldy turnip that bounces off Deirdre’s grandfather’s head with a loud thump. Not a soul is willing to be the only one to stand against the demand for punishment. Not a single human soul will go against the crowd’s demand for the crown’s permitted bloodletting.

Deirdre’s mother is a silent statue at her side. She does not flinch at seeing her father-in-law so abused. She does not even blink.

Deirdre watches her mother instead of the surrounding elbows. She does not understand. She does not think it’s fair. She does not think it’s right. She does not want to understand.

But she stays silent.

The jeering continues and covers the sound of her grandfather’s last rites. It covers the sigh of fabric as the hood covers his face. It covers the hiss of the noose being tightened and carefully measured.

The crowd quiets, almost as if it were requested specifically of them, when the hangman stands at the ready. A pregnant silence falls over the gathered residents of Aegis Township and its surrounding areas. The collective holds its breath in anticipation.

Deirdre’s mother puts her hands over her daughter’s ears. This is ineffective.

The sound of the ladder being shoved away is a muffled thump to the young girl’s ears. Her elder’s neck cannot break as he falls, and she hears the muffled sounds of his gagging suffocation through her mother’s desperate hands.

Deirdre twists around and buries her face into her mother’s sweat-stained linen dress.

The crowd cheers. It is a vicious, horrible thing. Deirdre wishes she could be deaf. She wishes she could be anywhere else.

Beyond her mother’s elbow, she can see her cousin, Sigismund, still sitting on the fence post. He stares straight ahead and watches intently. His red-rimmed eyes are wide and he cries no more.

She watches as he shakes off the panic and looks around at the older boys sharing the fence. He watches how they act. And then she sees him respond with inexpert mimicry. He acts as they act.

It is more than Deirdre can cope with. She hides her eyes in her mother’s dress until she can smell only sweat, hay, and laundry soap.

Deirdre’s mother waits for the crowd to clear. She does not move or flinch or even give Deirdre any hint of what she is thinking. When the crowd clears, there is a tiny hitch in her mother’s breathing.

Deirdre pulls away to look up into her mother’s face.

The stoic expression there may as well have been carved in stone for all it has changed.

Without the security of her mother’s hands, there is nothing to muffle the hiss and thump of her grandfather’s corpse being removed from where it hangs.

It is only when the body lies still on the ground that Deirdre’s mother moves again. She strides confidently forward.

And meets her husband over the lifeless corpse. Deirdre sees her father, and he is a man crushed. She has never seen him with such pain in his eyes. His shoulders slump as though he carries across them an unbelievably heavy weight. She does not know if she only notices it now, but the lines on his face appear deeper and the sparse white hairs in his beard appear more numerous.

Deirdre’s parents accept the empty shell of her grandfather from the magistrate. They carry him home on a litter.

Deirdre will never forget the sight of the deep purple mark across his neck where he hung. She will never forget washing the body of the condemned man and seeing the marks of the questioner’s care.

And she will never forget how they laid him to rest, naked, in an unmarked grave because the law does not permit the condemned to have a sanctified resting place.