The Princess lay in her chains, her horn wrapped in lead and iron, her beaten head bowed. She and her chains sat at the back of the square, on a little raised platform covered in filthy hay, and the occasional pony spat at her from the ordered crowds filling the cobblestones below her perch. Their orderly lines barely held their formation, and if it were only they and their hate, the crowd would have degenerated into a mob, a princess-shredding, howling mob.

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