The courtroom was beyond capacity before proceedings began.
Men stood along the walls. Women pressed shoulder to shoulder in the balcony. The railings bowed slightly under the weight of bodies leaning forward.
Harrow noticed.
He did not comment.
"Proceed," he said.
The first two cases moved quickly. Admission. Sentence. Removal.
The third did not.
Samuel Griggs stood in the dock, hands trembling.
"You are charged with aggravated assault," Harrow began.
"I did it," Griggs said.
"You struck Mr. Tilney with a hammer."
"Yes."
"And you understand the charge."
"Yes."
The prosecutor began outlining testimony. Griggs interrupted.
"I struck him before that," he said.
The prosecutor stopped speaking.
"You were not charged previously," Harrow replied.
"I should have been."
The words came too fast.
"I struck my cousin once. Broke his nose. I said he fell."
A stir moved through the gallery.
Griggs gripped the rail hard enough that the wood creaked.
"I took money from the church box," he went on. "I said I'd forgotten my tithe."
"Confine yourself to the charge," Harrow said.
Griggs shook his head.
"I beat my dog when it barked. I left it outside in winter."
The murmuring grew louder.
"You are not charged—"
"I thought about killing Tilney last year," Griggs blurted. "I dreamed of it."
The gallery leaned forward as one body.
Above them, the balcony groaned faintly.
No one looked up.
"I think about hurting people when they cross me," Griggs continued, voice climbing. "I think about pushing men into the canal. I think about—"
A sharp crack split the air overhead.
It sounded like a pistol shot.
Several heads turned.
Dust drifted down from the ceiling beams.
Griggs kept speaking.
"I thought about strangling my brother. I thought—"
The balcony railing bowed forward.
Another crack — louder this time.
The sound of nails tearing from wood.
Someone screamed.
Then the front third of the balcony dropped.
It did not collapse cleanly.
It folded.
Bodies tipped forward first, then the entire section of timber tore loose and fell.
The sound was not a crash.
It was a detonation of wood and bone.
People struck the lower benches with sickening force.
One woman hit face-first against the iron railing; her skull split open and she slid down in a smear of red.
A man landed headfirst against the floor beside the dock — his neck snapped at a wrong angle, head hanging backward unnaturally.
The railing tore free and swung down like a scythe.
A sharpened length of splintered beam punched through a clerk's torso and pinned him upright against the wall. His mouth opened in a silent scream before blood poured down his waistcoat.
A falling timber struck a man at the neck against the iron post — there was a wet, abrupt sound — and his head separated cleanly, tumbling down the aisle and coming to rest against the base of the bench.
Screaming erupted.
The remaining balcony section shifted under sudden imbalance.
People scrambled.
Weight shifted.
The rest gave way.
Another wave of bodies fell.
A beam drove through a woman's abdomen and into the floorboards beneath her, lifting her slightly off the ground as she struggled, feet kicking uselessly.
Someone's arm was torn from its socket in the crush, sleeve twisting free in a spray of blood.
A juror fell directly onto the edge of a bench — ribs caving inward with a hollow crack.
The room filled with splintered wood and human sound.
Harrow was thrown forward as the bench beneath him lurched.
He caught the edge of the desk, but the platform beneath it split.
Wood gave way.
He fell hard against the lower steps.
Behind him, part of the execution staging stored against the rear wall broke loose.
A length of heavy rope whipped downward.
Before he could regain his footing, the rope caught beneath his jaw and jerked tight.
He felt his body lift violently.
One foot left the ground.
The other scraped across broken wood slick with blood.
His head snapped sideways.
There was a crack in his neck — sharp, wrong — but not enough.
Pain exploded down his spine.
The rope tightened.
His collar tore.
He tried to draw breath and inhaled nothing.
Around him, chaos continued.
A man pinned through the shoulder was gasping, blood bubbling from his mouth.
"I took money—" the man choked. "From my mother—"
A woman with half her face torn open whispered, "I poisoned him— I did—"
Griggs was still in the dock, half buried beneath debris.
"I thought about killing him," he sobbed. "I thought—"
Harrow clawed at the rope.
His fingers slipped.
His vision blurred at the edges.
He heard wood splinter again somewhere above.
Boots pounded.
Someone tripped and fell across his legs.
Blood ran warm down his sleeve.
The rope twisted.
His jaw shifted painfully.
His tongue forced forward against his teeth.
He tried to speak.
Nothing came.
The confessions did not stop.
They layered over one another.
"I lied—"
"I stole—"
"I beat her—"
"I thought—"
Dust thickened in the air.
Then—
The temperature dropped.
It was not gradual.
It was sudden.
Breath fogged from the mouths of the wounded.
White vapor coiled upward from blood-slicked floorboards.
Frost crept across shattered beams, thin and sharp, spreading over red-streaked wood.
The screaming dulled.
Sound felt muffled, as though buried beneath earth.
A man whose chest no longer moved whispered, "I killed—" though no breath lifted him.
A juror pinned beneath debris confessed to a murder that had never occurred.
Harrow's eyes bulged.
His vision narrowed to a tunnel of white vapor and red-streaked wood.
He did not feel regret.
He did not feel doubt.
He believed they deserved it.
The rope tightened once more.
Something shifted in his neck.
The world contracted.
Then—
Stillness.
The frost thickened.
The voices stopped.
And in the wreckage of the courtroom, beneath broken beams and scattered bodies, the cold settled in.