Chapter 16
THE AIR IN the palace was cold and damp. The cloying scent of stale smoke crept through the layers of Johanna’s shawl.
Thick layers of dust had accumulated on the floor in the garden room and spiders had covered walls, ceilings and furniture in their silky webs, as if the room had lain abandoned since that night. Glass from the broken windows littered the floor and crunched underfoot. Curtains were stained from being exposed to the weather and ripped to shreds from catching on the shards of glass. All the fine vases that had stood along both sides of the room had been smashed. Some of the doors into the hall had deep gouges, as if someone had taken to the wood with an axe. Johanna remembered hiding here while the people in the hall next door were ruthlessly murdered.
Shards o
