Aldric Thornmoor's Arc

Chapter 14 of 16

The eldest councilor held the page close to his eyes and began to read. His voice was thin. He stumbled on the second line, then the third. He said the guilty councilor's name wrong. He skipped a clause about the cursed broach entirely. Aldric stood in his herald's robe and could not correct him. The clerk at the bench looked pleased. If the reading garbled the accusation, the record would show nonsense, and the compact would call the matter closed. A side door opened. Wanda came through first, her charred hands empty and her white dress dust-stained from the market. Behind her slid Lyra, carried in a shallow copper basin of seawater on a serving cart. The mermaid's scales caught the lamplight. Behind them both drifted the void chef, its starry body coiled low so the guards would not swing at it. Aldric had not asked them to come. They had come anyway. "Witnesses," Wanda said flatly to the bench. "The compact allows them. Check your own book." The clerk fumbled through a ledger and went pale a second time. The compact did allow it. Any sealed proclamation could be witnessed aloud by three parties who swore to its contents. Lyra spoke from the basin without lifting her head. "I saw him bleed into the obelisk. I heard the words then. I will say them again now." The void chef's star-eyes fixed on the guilty councilor. "I tasted the curse on his broach. Wax. Thumbprint. Left hand, missing tip. Two winters old." Wanda stepped up beside the eldest councilor and set one blackened hand on the edge of the page. "Read it again. From the top. I will say the words with you so you don't lose them." The eldest councilor looked at her hand and did not move it away. He began again. Wanda spoke each line a breath before he did, steady and plain. Lyra repeated the councilor's name when it came. The void chef named the thumbprint into the record. The chamber went quiet around the three voices. The guilty councilor stood. "This is theater." "It is testimony," the clerk said, and did not look up from the ledger. He was writing fast now. The reading finished clean. Every clause landed. The accusation entered the record whole: the curse, the thumbprint, the ambush at the well, the criers paid to name Aldric a traitor. The eldest councilor set the page down and folded his hands. "The record stands," he said. "The council will convene on the charge." The guilty councilor sat down. Two guards moved to the ends of his bench, not Aldric's. Aldric felt the weight of the robe settle differently on his shoulders. He had not won his title back. Not yet. But the accusation was law now, and the council could not unhear it. Across the chamber, the clerk dipped his pen and asked, quietly, who would speak for the accused.