SUMMARY HEARING

They dressed her in gray for the occasion, and Tamsin, who had spent a lifetime being told what she was, found it almost restful to be told by a piece of cloth.

The prison shift had been exchanged for a long shapeless gown of coarse gray wool, with a high collar and no pockets. It smelled of the laundry vats and had been made for a taller woman. No one had given her a comb since she arrived, and her hair hung down her back in a matted rope, and the matron who unlocked her manacles for the journey had looked at it with a certain unwilling sympathy and said nothing. The wagon rattled through the cold streets of Highmark in the white light of a winter morning. Through the grating she saw people on the pavement hurrying to work, with scarves wound round their faces and steaming breath, and a newsboy on the corner holding up a placard that read BLIGHTED TUTOR TO STAND TRIAL.

Open court, she thought. That's the doing of someone who has read the Charter.

She did not need to be told who. She knew in her bones. She had lain on the cot in the Glasshouse for six nights, with the hum of the Sunwell in the walls and the dry whisper of Mother Agnes's snores in the dark, and she had told herself that she would not hope. Hope was a luxury, like salt in a stew or a first-class ticket, and she had never been able to afford it. But when the Magistrate's clerk came to the cell with a paper and a bored face, and read out a notice that began with the words by virtue of a Writ of Open Court, she had felt something stir under her ribs like a seed breaking its coat.

He read the footnote, she thought. He found it. He found the footnote.

…

The Council chamber was crowded to the doors.

She saw it first from the gallery stair, between two guardsmen, with the chain clinking at her ankles. The ivory room had been transformed. The horseshoe table had been drawn into a half circle and a dais erected before it, with a high carved chair for the presiding Magistrate, and to either side stood long benches filled with spectators. They were all Gilded. They sat in furs and silks, with fans and opera glasses and little leather notebooks, and the sound of their murmuring rose to the painted ceiling like the hum of a hive. A row of newspapermen crouched in the front with pencils poised. In the corner, two clerks in black had set up a stenographic machine, a clacking brass contrivance that looked like a sewing machine crossed with a typewriter.

She was brought down the center aisle and placed in a small railed enclosure facing the dais. A guard stood at either side. The chain was fastened to a ring in the floor. She lifted her head and looked at the room, and as she did, the murmur dropped and rose again in a different key, a sort of rustling disgusted fascination, as of a crowd confronted with a curiosity in a jar.

She found the faces she was looking for.

Finch was in the third row of the gallery, small and rumpled in his plum waistcoat, clutching a leather folio to his chest. He gave her the smallest nod. Beyond him, near the doors, stood Dorian Pike, in full dress uniform, with his arms folded and his jaw set so tightly that a muscle stood out in his cheek. He did not smile. He only looked at her, steadily, as if to say, we are here.

At the head of the table, there was an empty chair.

It was a tall black chair of walnut, with a sunburst carved on the back, and it stood a little apart from the rest, with a pair of white gloves lying on its arm. Nobody sat in it. Tamsin looked at it for a long moment, and she understood. The Heir of the Crown had demanded the hearing, and the Quorum had ruled that he could not be present at it, since he was a party in interest, and on the grounds of a conflict of the most delicate kind. They had given him the right to open the door, and then they had barred him from walking through it.

She looked away, because her eyes had begun to sting, and she would not weep in front of the press.

…

The Magistrate presided, with the gold spectacles low on his nose, and the Crown Prosecutor was a heavy, purple-faced man named Sir Aldous Penn who spoke as though he were reading a menu. He read the indictment in a monotone that lasted twelve minutes. Tamsin listened to the whole of it, standing straight, with her hands folded before her. It was a masterpiece of its kind. It included the bottle in her trunk and the book of formulae in her hand, the unregistered herbs in her room, and an account of her many private interviews with the Princess, which the prosecution described as an insidious course of influence upon a vulnerable child. It noted her frequent absences from the schoolroom. It noted her attendance at the Founders' Gala, where she had made a public spectacle of herself. It noted her presence at the Emperor's bedside on the night of his collapse.

It was all true, in its way. That was the beauty of it. Every statement could have been proved with a witness, and every fact was twisted like a wire until it fitted.

"The Crown calls Lady Delphine Sterling," said Sir Aldous.

A hush fell. Delphine rose from a front bench in a gown of dove-gray velvet with a black ribbon at the throat, and walked slowly to the witness stand, holding herself with a fragile composure that made the whole room lean forward. She took the oath in a low clear voice and sat down, folding her gloved hands in her lap, and for a moment her eyes met Tamsin's across the width of the chamber, and Tamsin saw behind the practiced tears a small hard cold glint of satisfaction.

"My lady," said Penn, gently, "will you tell the court how you came to know the accused?"

"I met her in the first weeks of her employment." Delphine's voice trembled. "I thought her a pleasant young woman. A little ambitious, perhaps, but very intelligent, and so devoted to her pupil. I confess that I was touched by it." She pressed a handkerchief to her lips. "I was to be Lila's sister, you see. In a few weeks. I thought it so right that she should have someone who cared. I trusted her with my future sister."

A small sob rippled along the benches.

"And what did you observe, my lady, of the accused's conduct toward the Princess?"

"I observed that Lila was growing worse." Delphine's eyes brimmed. "Every week she was paler, and more nervous, and more strange. She cried in her sleep. She had her first convulsions in the nursery, after the accused had been alone with her for several days. I begged Dr. Pell to find the cause. I never dreamed." The handkerchief went to her eyes. "I never dreamed that someone I had trusted could do such a thing."

Tamsin watched her. She watched the beautifully modulated voice, the trembling lip, the well-timed pause, and she felt, to her own astonishment, a thread of something very like pity. Delphine's eyes were dim and cloudy, and a sheen of sweat lay along her hairline. She was not a woman telling a lie she enjoyed. She was a woman clinging to a story because she could see no way off the road that she was on.

You are afraid, thought Tamsin. Whatever it is you are protecting, it frightens you more than I do.

…

"The accused may address the court," said the Magistrate at last, in tones of bored indulgence, "should she wish to make a statement in her own defense."

She had known it would come. She had spent three nights composing it in the dark, and she had learned it as she had once learned the six thresholds of Bloodroot healing, by heart, in order, with her fingers pressed to her scar. But as she opened her mouth, the great ivory room seemed to swing away from her, and she stood for an instant in the silence with her heart hammering and nothing in her head at all.

Footnotes, she thought. Begin with the footnotes.

"May it please the court," said Tamsin Reed, and her voice came out low and clear and steady, with a faint ring in it that she did not recognize. "I will be brief. The Crown alleges that I poisoned the Princess with a concentrated essence of Bloodroot. I deny it. The vial found in my trunk was placed there by a person unknown, and I can prove, with the court's permission, that it contains no such essence."

"The court has examined the vial," said Penn.

"The court has looked at it. It has not tested it. I ask for a basin of water and a candle." She held up her hands, in their iron cuffs. "If I may be allowed to take a single drop from that bottle, I will show you in front of three hundred witnesses that the blue shimmer in the liquid is no part of Bloodroot. It is the effect of a copper salt. Anyone who has ever made a verdigris could tell you so."

A murmur went round the room.

"The request is irregular, and the court sees no need for theatrics," said Blythe coldly. "It is denied."

"Then I shall make the argument without the demonstration." She turned to the benches. "The Princess's illness was not caused by Bloodroot, my lords and ladies. It was caused by a tonic, administered to her three times a day for eight years, which contained silverweed and mercury in a concentration that would poison a grown man. The records of the Imperial Dispensary show the purchases. They are signed in the hand of Dr. Mortimer Pell. The doses were increased on his orders every time she showed signs of recovery, and he reported on her condition to the Chancellor's office once a month." She drew a breath. "The old pharmacopoeias describe the effect of that mixture in detail. It is called the damping of the sap. It was used in the Quarantine Wards, in the early centuries, upon children of the Blighted line."

There was an uneasy silence. In the third row, a lord in plum velvet had stopped fanning himself. An elderly woman near the front pressed her fingers to her lips. In the gallery, Tamsin caught a glimpse of Finch's face, shining with fierce encouragement, and she lifted her voice.

"I do not know why anyone would give such a preparation to a Gilded child. That is a question for the court, not for me. But I know what it did. I know that when I took the bottle from the nurse's hand on the morning of the seizure, and the Princess began to recover, it was because the poison had stopped. Not because of any art of mine." She looked straight at the dais. "If the court wishes to know who is hurting Her Highness, it should ask who is paying for the silverweed."

…

"This is slander!" shouted a voice from the benches. "The girl is a Blightborn witch, and she's trying to throw the blame..."

"The court will come to order," said the Magistrate.

"Order in the court, order, I say!" cried the clerks.

The chamber broke into uproar. Lords rose in their places. Ladies waved fans. A reporter in the front row was scribbling like a madman. Sir Aldous Penn was on his feet, red to the roots of his hair, shouting something about the dignity of the court, and under the noise Tamsin heard, with a leap of her heart, the thin dry voice of an elderly lord near the door saying clearly, "Wait a moment, because I should like to hear more about those invoices."

Then a hand was raised at the far end of the table, and the room fell silent.

Harlan Sterling had not stirred during the whole of her speech. He sat in his place at the end of the dais with his fingers laced, in a black coat with a white rose in the lapel, and his face wore the same expression of grave and courteous attention that it always wore. Now he rose, slowly, and the whole chamber turned to him as flowers turn toward the sun.

"The accused," said the Chancellor, "has made a most interesting speech."

His voice was soft, and it filled the room.

"She is a clever young woman. I have always said so. I chose her myself, for her intelligence, and I am sorry now that I did not choose more carefully." A flicker of sadness crossed his face. "But the court will observe that she has said nothing to address the central charge. She has argued about chemistry. She has not denied that on the night of the seizure she placed her hands upon the Princess and employed, in the presence of witnesses, the art which the law forbids."

Tamsin went cold.

"The Crown has two witnesses to the act." Sterling lifted a hand, and a Palace Watchman in blue uniform came forward, a thin young man who was plainly terrified. "Corporal Bell, will you please tell the court what you saw that night?"

"I was at the door, my lord. I heard a crash. I looked in." The young man's voice shook. "She was kneeling over the Princess, my lord. And there was a light coming from her hands. A green light. Like fire, only it didn't burn. It went all up her arms." He swallowed hard and then said, "I thought she was a witch."

"And a second exhibit." The Chancellor nodded to a clerk, who unrolled a large photographic print and held it high. "A plate made in the district called Ash Row, on the day the accused took the Princess there. The figure is somewhat indistinct, but I think the light about her hands is clear."

There it was, a ghostly gray image in the flash, a kneeling woman and a boy, and about her hands a faint, unmistakable halo.

"Unlawful use of Blighted power within the precincts of an Imperial residence," said Sterling quietly, "is itself a capital offense, Miss Reed. It requires no poison. It requires no motive. It requires only the testimony of the witnesses, which you have not denied. I regret it. I regret it more than I can say."

…

The Magistrate did not retire.

He conferred for four minutes with the two lords on his right, in whispers, and then he sat back, adjusted his spectacles, and cleared his throat. The room was so quiet that she could hear the stenographer's machine ticking in the corner. Blythe looked at the paper in his hand. Then he looked at Tamsin, and for a fleeting moment she saw something in his dry yellow face that might have been unease.

"The court finds the accused guilty as charged," he said, "on the capital counts of unlawful Blighted practice and of attempted harm to a member of the Imperial family. The court is mindful of the youth of the accused and of the representations made on her behalf. It has therefore resolved to exercise clemency in the matter of the penalty."

A murmur of approval ran through the benches.

"The accused is hereby sentenced to Committal. She shall be taken to the Cistern of the Founders at dawn on the day of Midwinter, there to be received into the care of the Crown, and may God have mercy upon her soul."

The gavel fell.

A great shuddering sigh swept the room. She heard it, a vast, soft, collective exhalation of relief, the sound of three hundred people who had been afraid, and who now felt safe. Ladies unclenched their fans. Men settled back into their seats. The reporter in the front row snapped his notebook shut and ran for the doors. She did not look at them. She looked at the dais, at the Chancellor, who had resumed his seat and was calmly adjusting the white rose in his lapel, and then at the witness stand, where Dr. Pell, who had been called to rebut her, sat huddled in his black coat with his small bright eyes fixed upon his hands.

He did not lift them. Not once, through the whole of the verdict, did he look at her face.

…

"Committal ain't a punishment, cher," said Mother Agnes.

It was late, past the hour of the second bell. The cell was dark except for the cold green glow in the walls, and the old woman sat on the cot with her blanket round her shoulders and her gnarled hands folded in her lap. She had heard the sentence from the guard who brought Tamsin back, and she had said nothing at first, but had sat quite still with her black eyes fixed on the floor.

"What is it, then?" said Tamsin hoarsely. She was lying on her side with her face to the wall. Her whole body ached with weariness, and she had not wept, although she felt that she would never be dry again.

"It's a harvest."

The word fell into the dark like a stone into a well. Tamsin turned her head.

"They call it the Cistern, and the Founders' care, and a hundred pretty names. I've heard them all. But I've been in this place six years, child, and I've watched them take the ones that go down. One a month, thereabouts, and sometimes two in a bad season. They go in the night, with a guard on either side, and they do not come back." The old woman's voice was very low. "The Rootkin, always. Never a Gilded. The ones with the strong green in their blood. They go down to the Sunwell, and the Sunwell takes what it needs."

"What does it need?"

"Everything, cher," said Agnes. "Everything we have."

There was a sound in the corridor. A tread of boots on glass, coming down the spiral stair, slow and heavy and measured. Tamsin sat up. The old woman did not move. The footsteps stopped outside the cell, and a key scraped in the lock, and the door swung open on a lantern, and three guardsmen in gray-blue uniforms stood framed in the doorway with their faces in shadow.

The nearest one did not look at Tamsin. He looked at the old woman on the cot. He spoke in a flat dead voice, like a man reading from a card.

"Agnes Thibodeaux, get up from there, because your turn has come and it is tonight."