“Seventy years.”
“Thank you.” He looked smug, totally satisfied with himself.
The Defender took his place. He seemed even more confused than before.
“I have nothing to ask you.”
She stood down, glancing at the Judge’s pinched, unhappy face, and for an instant seeing her own future in it, old and alone, eaten by bitterness and self-disgust. Then she drove it from her mind and returned to her seat beside Enella, but a coldness remained in the pit of her stomach.
The Prosecutor called Timour, who confirmed all that Korah had said. He looked trustingly at the Defender as he approached. He felt sorry for all of them, especially Anaya. He had liked her, as he knew Bertil had. She had seemed funny and kind and brave. He had had no idea that she had any harm in her, still less that she had knowledge of the black arts. He still found it hard to believe. But he did know barns, and he knew oxen. He said as much when the Defender asked him.
“Oh yes. It’s my trade,” he agreed.
“Did you see this barn after it had fallen in?”
“Yes. I wanted to know what had happened. It’s important, in case it should happen again.” He looked at the Judge to see if he understood. He seemed to. He had the air of a brave man, not only a strength in his face but a gentleness as well, as if he expected the best in people. He was the sort of man Timour liked, wise without arrogance, kind without sentiment. “I saw it before, you see,” he explained. “They had been keeping oxen in it for a long time, my lord. Big beasts, and very heavy, very powerful. They like to lean against the posts and rub their backs, scratch them, as it were. If you don’t keep an eye on them, sooner or later they’ll dislodge the pole from its base. I warned Bertil about it. He was a good man, and my friend, but he did put things off.” He glanced at Stroban an apology. “I’m sorry, but that’s true. Anaya saw it, and she warned him too. But he was always going to do it tomorrow. I suppose when tomorrow finally came, it was too late.”
There was silence for a moment, a realisation, a wakening from a dream both good and bad. It was the Judge who asked the question, not the Defender. “Could the ox have pushed against it while Bertil was there, and knocked it over when it was at the most vulnerable?”
“I suppose it must have done,” Timour answered. “I ran out just as the roof buckled and caved in. I got bruised by some of the falling timbers. He should have put it out before he began to work, but he can’t have.”
“Witchcraft!” Stroban cried out, rising to his feet, his face flushed. “It’s still her fault!”
“No!” the Defender said with sudden strength, whirling round, his robe flying, his arm outstretched. “A man delayed mending his barn until the post was seriously weakened. It is a tragedy. It is not a crime.” He looked to the Judge, raising his eyes to the high seat, the dark runes carried in the wood. “My lord, I ask that you pronounce Anaya innocent of this poor man’s death, free these people of the fear of sorcery, and allow them to grieve for their loss without fear or blame. She did not threaten him, she warned him. And tragically, he did not listen. If he had done, we should not be here today mourning him, seeing witchcraft where there is only jealousy.”
Stroban looked desperately at the Judge and saw a man filtered by the details of the law and unable to see the greater spirit of it, a man who understood loss but not love. He was a small man, who could in the end become a hollow man.
Enella looked at the Judge and saw a man who kept to the safe path, always, wherever it led, upward or down, and there was an emptiness in it that nothing would fill.
Korah saw what she had recognised before, only this time it was not for an instant. It would always be there, whether she looked at it or not.
The Prosecutor was angry. He saw a Judge whose arrogance had allowed him to lose control of the court. He did not know how it had happened, or why victory had inexplicably become defeat.
Timour and the Defender both saw an upsurge of optimism. Hope had come out of nowhere, and vanquished the error and despair.
The Judge pronounced Anaya innocent. The court was dismissed, and people poured out into the dark, gulping the sweet air, leaving the room empty except for Anaya and the Judge.
He moved his right hand very slightly, just two fingers from the surface of the bench. The chains fell away. She stood free, rubbing her wrists and stretching her aching shoulders.
“You did well,” he said quietly. He was smiling.
“I doubted,” she answered. It was a confession.
“Of course you did,” he agreed, and as he spoke his face changed, it became wiser, stronger, passion and laughter burned in it, and an indescribable gentleness. “If it were easy, it would be worth little. You have not yet perfected faith. Do not expect so much of yourself. For lessons learned hastily or without pain are worthless.”
“Will they understand?” she asked.
“That they were the ones on trial, and that the judgement was your own? Oh yes. In time. Whether they will pay the cost of change is another thing. But there is love, and there is hope. We are far from the end.” His cloak shimmered and began to dissolve. She could no longer see his shoulders, only his strong, slender hands and his face. “Now I have another charge for you.”
She looked at him, at the white fire around him. All she could distinguish was his smile, and his voice, and a great peace shone within her. “Yes?”
The Sorcerer’s Assassin by SHARON SHINN
When you work at a school for mages, I’ve learned, it’s wise never to leave your room unless you’ve cloaked yourself in a reflecting spell. That way, as you walk the long, high corridors of arched stone and stained glass, you can feel relatively safe in the knowledge that rancorous or embarrassing spells aimed your way (accidentally or otherwise) will simply bounce off your own enchantment and go sticking onto the perpetrator instead. I can’t tell you the number of students I’ve passed in these halls who have suddenly bloomed into a seven-foot-tall lotus or shrunk to an agitated frog. Yes, of course, I could with little effort reverse any such hex cast on me, but it’s so much easier to saunter out into the world knowing I am immune from ill-trained apprentices or maliciously inclined pranksters.
Professor Morben, it was clear, had come to class that morning garbed in no such protection.
I stopped at the doorway of the wide, clean room where he taught Illusions and Transmogrification. Ten or twelve students were huddled against the back wall, wearing their lilac apprentice’s robes and looking totally devoid of magic. Professors Dernwerd and Audra were standing over a shape that looked very much like a man who had crumpled to the floor. Dernwerd’s thin gray hair was standing up any old which way, as if he had been summoned from the mirror before completing his personal grooming. Audra, of course, looked perfect as always, her dark red hair wound into a tight bun, her gold robes hanging precisely over her sharp, narrow shoulders.
They both looked up at me when I stepped into the room. “He’s dead, Camalyn,” Dernwerd said in a shaky voice.
I was briefly annoyed. How many times had I told the other teachers to address me as “Headmistress,” at least in front of the students? Then the words registered. “Dead?” I repeated. “Morben? Is dead? That’s not possible!”
Audra looked at me with her cool green eyes. She’s only a couple of decades younger than I am, but she looks at least fifty years my junior, and that’s only one of the many things I can’t stand about her. “Take a look for yourself,” she invited. “But I wouldn’t advise you to get too close until we’ve ascertained what happened.”
I crossed the room in the stately way I’ve cultivated and came to a halt a few feet away from the corpse. Yes, there could be no doubt about it. Morben was dead. His face had a riven, petrified look, his mouth gaped in a silent scream, and his eyes gazed up at some unbearable horror. His hands were clenched around his throat as if to choke out his own life or claw at spectral hands bent on that very task. He did not move or breathe or radiate any life heat at all.