“The prisoners in the Wilds have formed tribes,” a court officer said. “They don’t accept Linzens or Ketturans. He has the genes and the markings of both.”
“No Ketturan-trained warrior can be held for long in a walled prison. They escape or die trying. The Wilds is the only place for him,” Urcolin said.
“They’ll kill him in the Wilds,” the officer added with a grim expression. “His kind would interfere with the order that’s developed.”
The magistrate shrugged, and Zawri’s head swam. Not death! His sentence should’ve been light. She’d been willing to pay his fines. Her sister’s medical exam had proven he hadn’t raped her.
“This is wrong!” she said. “You can’t do this!”
Before she could say more, she was pulled indoors by her hired advisor.
“No! Let me go back out and speak. I want to change my statement.”
“No!” her counsel said, pushing her into a chair and physically preventing her from rising. “It’s too late. You did what you had to do to protect her. It’s over.”
She ducked under his arm and rushed out. But when she returned to the square, the accused was gone. On a distant glider, she spotted his friends.
“Wait,” she called to Urcolin, who was entering his bank.
“If your sister made a false accusation, please get her to correct it. Lying wayward girls need to be checked. Several of us have places in our households. I certainly do.”
Zawri felt the blood draining from her. The threat of an unwanted match was the reason her sister had been out past curfew in the first place. Changing a false statement would not only result in her being given immediately to the magistrate or a councilmember, but it would mean she would be subject to potentially extreme discipline. The banker magistrate was rumored to be very cruel to his slaves.
“I will speak to my sister about her statement to be certain it’s been worded exactly correct. A life is at stake, after all. Hold the young man in a cell until I can talk with her.”
He ignored her request, adding instead, “The council has called into question your ability to act as guardian. Several of us think you yourself should be under protection and guidance. Quicknon has started inquiry proceedings. If you want a quiet ending with the foreign warrior released now, then admit privately to her false statement and your own need for a guardian.”
This is what they’d been working toward. Getting control of the family’s financial and land resources and of her and her sister’s bodies. Becoming wards of Quicknon and Urcolin would be a sentence worse than death. She would have to find another way, aside from reneging on their statements, to save the young warrior.
