The Verdict

The pinch of ashbloom had been in her hair for twenty-six days.

Mrs. Hatch had smuggled it in. It had come on the second of December, in the false bottom of a jar of pomatum, by way of Pike's bag and a young nun with a weakness for hot cider. It was no more than a thimbleful, dried and crumbled, wrapped in a twist of paper the size of a thumbnail. Ixara had pushed it into the thick of her braids, under the cord, where the searching women could not find it without taking down all her hair.

She had not touched it. She had told herself that she was saving it. That one day there would be a moment when it was needed, and she would know.

On the morning of the eighteenth of December, as the women came to wash her and put her into a plain gray gown for the Court, she knew.

…

The Great Hall of Lanternhold had been a refectory once. It was a long high room with a timbered roof and a gallery at one end, and on this morning it was packed to the walls.

She had not known there would be so many. They filled the benches, three hundred or more, and stood three deep at the back: shopkeepers, apprentices, laundresses, sailors, grave men in the black of the City, women in shawls with children at their skirts. They were quiet. They turned as she was led in, between two gray brothers, with her wrists in iron, and a sound rose from them, a long low breath, like wind through a field of barley.

She kept her chin up.

Do not look at them, she thought. Do not see them.

But she did see. She saw the lamplighter from Cheapside, shrunk in on himself in the second row with his hat in his hands. She saw a woman in a faded blue cloak holding a pale baby, and she thought, That one has been told I made it ill. She saw a boy of about ten on his father's shoulders, wide-eyed, with a stick of sugar in his fist.

At the far end, on a dais hung in gray, sat three men in the cassocks of the Order.

The middle seat was the Magister's.

He did not look at her. He sat quite still, with his long hands folded on a table covered in black cloth, and his head bent a little to one side. Before him lay a single sheet of paper. On his right, an old priest with a face like a dried apple. On his left, a younger one, round and pink, who kept wiping his brow.

Behind them, on the wall, hung a great black crucifix, and above it, on a bracket of iron, a lantern, lit.

The bolt of the door dropped. A bell tolled once.

"In the name of the Father," said Osmund Crale, "and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. This Court is convened."

…

It took four hours.

She had thought she would be afraid. She was not. She was only very tired. She sat on a stool in the middle of the floor, with her hands in her lap and her shackles clinking whenever she moved, and listened to the case against her as if it were a story told about someone else.

They called the lamplighter first. He stood with his cap crushed in his hands and described what he had seen in Cheapside, in the fog, on the thirty-first of October: a blue light, a ghost-light, rising from the lady like steam from a kettle, so bright that the very drops in the air had burned. He wept as he told it. He had made the sign of the Lantern, he said, to ward off the Evil One, and the lady had looked at him and said, Run.

A murmur went through the hall.

They called a Fellow of the Meridian Society, who had since taken orders, and was thin and shaking and wild about the eyes. He described the vault. He described the glass, and the stone, and the light. He described the sound that had come out of her mouth. "It was not a human voice," he said. "It was like a choir of the damned. I have not slept since."

They called the woman in the blue cloak, who said that her baby had sickened on the twenty-sixth of October, three days after the lady had passed the end of her street, and had not taken the breast since.

"Is that true?" Ixara said, before she could stop herself. "Is the child still ill?"

"Silence," said the old priest, sharply.

"I can help her. If she will let me. I know a leaf that—"

"Silence!"

The woman in blue shrank back and clutched the baby to her breast. Her eyes were frightened and hostile. A hiss went round the hall, low and ugly, and a man's voice at the back muttered a word that Ixara knew, because she had heard it in the Pool, and it meant witch.

You see, she thought. You see what he is doing.

She understood it then, with a cold clarity, as she had never understood anything. The trial was not for her. There was no need of her at all. It was a play, and the Magister was its author, and the crowd was its audience, and the pyre was the fifth act. Every witness had been chosen. Every word had been rehearsed. They did not want to know what she was. They wanted to be afraid of her, thoroughly, in a way that would make them feel clean afterward, and Osmund Crale was giving them what they came for, one spoonful at a time.

He is very good, she thought.

…

At noon they called Lady Perpetua Strand.

She came in with a rustle of dove-colored satin and a hat with two white plumes. She was very pale, beneath the rice powder. She was rigid as a pillar. She did not look at the dais, or at the gallery, or at the prisoner. She walked to the witness stand with her gloved hands clasped before her and her eyes fixed on a point exactly six feet above the heads of the crowd.

"Your name?"

"Perpetua Anne Strand."

"You are a widow, I believe. Of Berkeley Square."

"I am."

"You have been, for some years, a friend of this Court." Crale's voice was kindly. "You have often assisted us, with your good sense and your acquaintance in the town. We are grateful. I will not detain you long." He turned a page. "On the thirty-first of October last, you were passing through Cheapside in a hired carriage."

"I was."

"In the fog."

"Yes."

"Did you see the prisoner?"

Silence.

It lasted less than a heartbeat. Ixara saw the white plumes tremble. She saw the gloved fingers tighten on one another until the kid went taut across the knuckles. The woman's lips parted, closed, parted again.

"I saw a lady in the street," said Perpetua Strand.

"Yes?"

"There was a light." She spoke very quietly. "I could not say what it was. It was a foggy day. There were lamps."

"A blue light?"

"There may have been. The fog was yellow. It is difficult to judge."

"Did you hear anything? Any words?"

"No."

"Did the lady speak to you?"

"No."

"Did you speak to her?"

"I did not." The voice was perfectly level. "I closed the window, and drove on."

"Why?"

A long pause. Then, in a sudden bright brittle voice, as if it were a joke, as if she were making conversation at a party: "Because I am a coward, Magister. As you know."

The hall rustled. The old priest frowned. But Crale only smiled, a thin faint indulgent smile, and bowed.

"The Court thanks you, Lady Strand. That will be all."

She turned from the stand.

She had to pass before the prisoner's stool. It was the only way to the door. She came down the three steps and across the floor, with her skirts whispering and her head high, and for the length of two paces she was within arm's reach of Ixara, close enough for the lavender scent to reach her.

Ixara looked up.

Their eyes met. She saw the hazel irises, rimmed with red. She saw the mouth that had once been so quick with a joke, held in a hard line, and the tiny muscle jumping in the throat. She saw the whole raw wretched hopeless shame of a woman who had done a thing she could not live with, and would do it again.

I understand, Ixara tried to say, with her face. I do. It is all right.

Perpetua turned her head away.

She did it sharply, with a jerk, like a person slapped. She fixed her gaze on the opposite wall and walked on, and the door at the back of the hall swung open and let in a draft of cold air, and shut behind her.

…

At the close of the afternoon, the Magister rose.

He did not make a speech. She had half expected one: a thunder of rhetoric, a flourish of Latin. Instead he stood for a moment in silence with the paper in his hands, and the hall hushed, and a pale bar of winter sun slanted through the high window and fell on his long gray face.

"The prisoner has been given every opportunity to speak," he said. "She has been questioned in a spirit of charity. She has refused to name her master. She has refused to explain her arts. She has refused to repent." He lifted his eyes. "I would ask her now, before this Court and before God, if she has anything to say."

Ixara stood.

It was the moment she had been waiting for. She had known it was coming. She had spent the last twenty-six days preparing for it, in the long hours of the night, lying with her hands on her belly and running over the words. She had thought of a speech. A plea. An appeal to the heart.

She put her hand to her hair.

Her fingers found the cord, and the twist of paper beneath it. She drew it out and unfolded it in her palm, a pinch of dried purple dust, hardly more than nothing, and a gasp ran through the benches.

"Seize her!" cried the pink priest. "She has a charm—"

"Wait," said Crale.

He had not moved. His face was perfectly calm.

"Let her do it," he said. "Let the Court see."

She walked to the lantern.

It stood on a tall iron stand beside the dais, lit, the flame no larger than her thumb. She held the paper above it. She looked out across the hall, at the three hundred faces, white and frightened and avid, and she raised her voice, and for the first time since she had landed in England she spoke in the old tongue, loud and clear, the language of the priestesses, the language of the dead.

"Mother of leaves. Mother of roots. I am your daughter. I am the voice of the Gate. Show them."

She tipped the paper into the flame.

The ashbloom caught with a little sigh. A thread of purple smoke rose, silky, languid, from the lantern's mouth. It coiled in the air in a lazy spiral. She breathed it in, and the old sweetness filled her lungs, and for a moment she thought, It will work. She thought the room swayed. She thought she heard, very far, a murmur like wind in the high canopy.

Show them, she begged. Show them the island. Show them the Duke. Show them what he is.

She waited for the vision.

It did not come.

The smoke hung in the air above her. It thinned. It turned a dirty, dishwater gray. It did not curl or climb or carry a single image; it simply drooped and spread and dwindled, like breath on a cold pane, and was gone. The Heart was too far. Miles of stone and brick and river lay between her and the vault, and the thread was frayed to a hair, and she was only a woman in a gray gown with a little purple dust.

She stood with her hands out, empty, in the silence.

Then someone began to laugh.

It was a boy, high and shrill and horrified, the child on his father's shoulders. A woman said, "There. You see?" A man cried, "Fraud!" and another cried, "Witch!" and someone threw an orange, which struck her on the cheek and rolled across the floor. The whole hall had risen. The noise broke over her like a wave.

"Order!" shouted the old priest. "Order!"

Crale lifted a hand.

The sound died. In the stillness he looked down at Ixara, standing there with her cheek bleeding and her fists clenched, and his expression was one of immense, grave, almost loving sorrow.

"You see," he said softly, to the hall. "She calls on her gods. They do not answer. They never do."

…

They did not deliberate.

The three judges rose. The younger priest read the verdict from a paper, in a high tremulous voice, hurrying over the Latin. It said that Calla Merrow, otherwise unknown, was found guilty of heresy, sorcery, the corruption of a Christian nobleman, and the practice of unlawful and diabolical arts. It said that she was to be delivered to the secular arm. It said that she should be burned, on the feast of the Lantern, at dusk, in the square before the priory, in the sight of the faithful; and that the fruit of her womb, being conceived in sin and in the shadow of the Evil One, should perish with her.

Three days.

She heard it. She heard it quite clearly. She stood with the iron on her wrists and the orange pulp on her face and the three hundred eyes on her back, and a great calm settled on her.

So, she thought. It is as I saw.

The pyre. The stake. The December dusk.

She was not afraid. That was what astonished her. She had expected to scream, or faint, or beg. Instead she felt only a very large stillness, like the stillness at the center of a storm, and in it a single thought, clear and bright as a star.

Not yet.

They led her out.

Down the hall, between the benches, past the faces. She did not look at them. She looked straight ahead, at the door. She did not see the tall figure standing in the gallery, in white satin and a white mask, with his hands folded and a faint pleased smile on his long pale mouth. She did not see the gray-haired woman in black, wedged between a pillar and the wall, with her hands pressed to her lips. She did not see the thin young man in the brown coat at the back, who held a boy's shoulder so hard that the boy cried out, and whose gray eyes had gone black and terrible with a promise.

She saw only the door.

…

They put her back in the cell.

The bolt dropped. The footsteps died. She stood in the dark, in the middle of the whitewashed floor, and listened to the silence for a long time.

Then she sat on the cot, and drew her knees up, and put both hands on the hard round swell of her belly. The child was awake. It had been awake all day, beating like a drum, but now it quieted under her palms and lay still. Along the thread, from the far side of the river, a faint warm pulse came and went.

Mama, said the child.

"I am here."

Mama. Afraid.

"I know, little one. I am afraid too." Her voice cracked. She was crying again, quietly, without a sound, the tears sliding down her cheeks and into the gray wool at her collar. "But we must not be. We must be very brave. We are the daughter of the Mother, you and I. We are the voice of the Gate."

Mother?

"Mother. The Great Forest. The one who sings." She rocked, a little, back and forth. "She has been with us always. She was with me when I was small and lost in the trees. She was with my mother when she died. She is with us now, even here, even in the dark. She is in the roots under this floor and in the rain on the roof and in the stone across the river." She drew a breath. "I do not know how. I only know that she does not let her daughters burn in the dark."

The child pressed its fist against her palm.

"Mother will not let you die," said Ixara.

She said it aloud, in the whitewashed room, in the old tongue, like a vow. She said it three times. Then she lay down on the narrow cot, and drew the gray blanket over herself, and waited for whatever the dawn would bring.