Only when the last of us sat—Nash, unsurprisingly—did the courtyard spring to life. Doors on either side of the inner bailey opened to a flood of people. Women, men, children… dozens of children. I had to stop counting, the number of people growing too fast. More than a hundred, maybe two or three times that number. There were babes in arms, toddlers atop their parents’ shoulders, boisterous boys, and preening teenagers moving between the adults. They filled the courtyard around us on all sides, their round faces smiling and laughing.
Round faces. Children. Mirth.
“They aren’t real,” I said softly, the realization twisting my breakfast inside my stomach.
“No, they couldn’t be,” Nimra said. For a brief second, our eyes met, sharing in the devastation of that realization. But that was it, all she gave me, and all I deserved before turning away.
“Be glad they aren’t real,” Garrick said from my other side.
I blinked, waiting for the others to react. But he’d said it quietly, for my ears alone. A private reassurance.
Because whatever the crowd had to do with the Justice Gate… it would not be kind.
A door I had not noticed before slammed open in answer to Garrick’s prediction. Directly across from our chairs, on the other side of the trench and line of nooses, we had an unobstructed view as a new group of humans appeared. None of them smiled.
I’d assumed the five nooses were for us. But the new arrivals disabused me of that notion. Ten people emerged, walking in two paired off lines of eerie similarity to the one we’d formed exiting the temple. Five prisoners. Five jailers.
The prisoners wore little more than rags despite the cold. I counted off the other details, determined not to miss any more. Three men, two women. They ranged in age, from an elderly man at the rear to an adolescent girl who looked no older than Kyrelle. A middle-aged man bent in a terrible, hacking cough, his entire body spasming with the motion. His jailer showed no mercy, driving him on with a thick whap of his baton across his back. This certainly was not the Mercy Gate.
This was about justice. As the scene fell into place, the hairs on the back of my neck rose.
They aren’t real, I told myself as the jailers positioned their prisoners, one behind each noose. But the longer I looked, the more horror dawned in my stomach.
Unlike the crowd of people around us, the prisoners were thin and ragged. I could count every one of the old man’s ribs through the shirt that hung off of him in shreds. The girl at the front of the line now stood directly in front of Alize, shivering violently.
Shivering. Unlike the crowd of people around us, now moving to fill in behind the prisoners so they could watch thespectacle from every angle, the five people awaiting justice were very real.
I looked to either side, trying to see if the other supplicants had come to the same conclusion. On the far end, Alize’s face was impenetrable. The sharp laughter from the corridor was completely gone, replaced by a mask of beautiful silence. Anger rallied the ice in my veins. Of course, this would not faze her. She was fae. Her kind had sentenced an entire continent to death. What were five more lowly humans?
Beside her, a slow smile grew on Nash’s face. He realized what was about to happen and relished it. I let the frost loose; couldn’t help it, didn’t want to. I sent it crawling across the compacted dirt ground, wrapping around his ankles and snaking beneath his trousers. He jerked violently, leaning down to rip at his pants and find the source of instantaneous pain.
“Do not antagonize him,” Garrick ordered from my other side in that harsh, low voice just for me.
I ignored him, and the slight tingle in my limbs in reaction to the way his voice scraped over those syllables.
Nash forgot himself, forgot the others around us. He tore at his boots, trying to undo the laces and rip them away to find the source of pain, those icy daggers of cold I drove into his ankles and calves.
“Koryn,” Garrick said. “You let him live. Now you must pay the price.”
My palms flattened, my power melting away. Nash cursed under his breath. On either side of him, Nimra and Alize stared at him like he was having a fit.
But my eyes met Garrick’s, could not resist lifting and finding that intensity that I was coming to expect. It had been a long time since I’d met someone who looked right into my eyes, knowing what I was, without a drop of fear. Maybe that was the reason I could not keep my mouth shut.
“He is enjoying this,” I hissed between my teeth.
“Aren’t you, wicked witch? Don’t your kind delight in torturing the unsuspecting humans who wander into your clutches? Those who seek your power but are unwilling to pay the price?”
Yes. The cost for crossing a witch or her coven was a painful death. But it was more nuanced than that. At least, it always had been for me.
I was spared having to explain myself by the first jailer, who banged his baton on the wooden structure beside him and called the crowd to attention. An excited hush settled over the not-real-humans around us. I turned forward with the rest of them. But beside me, Garrick was not so quick to move. I felt that intensity, still focused upon me, for more seconds than seemed necessary. Did he feel it too, the magnetic pull between us? It could be the Lifebind, the goddess-made tether. That was the safest explanation. The one that did not involve emotions and internal conflict and the tangible relief of finding someone who understood.
Relief eased through my muscles when he finally turned to join the rest of us.
It lasted mere seconds as the guard on the far left stepped forward, shoving his charge ahead of him. Last to enter, now first to face judgment.
He rammed his baton into the old man’s back, sending him stumbling forward. He reached for the noose by reflex, a withered hand closing around the loop like it was a lifeline, not a threat.
Nimra lurched forward in her seat as if she would intervene, but she stilled the impulse.
