If it kept that rapist away from me, then I wouldn’t even protest. Much.
He shifted his gaze to the woman standing beside the noose, awaiting her fate. Behind us, the bystanders closest leaned in sothey could hear every word we uttered. It had felt so refreshing to see so much life when the crowd first flooded in. Now, every face I saw felt like a needle jabbing into my skin. They were a reminder, meant to make this worse as we judged others for the crimes we’d committed. And made an irrevocable choice for justice.
If Garrick understood or suspected what was really going on, he gave no outward sign. Nash was reveling in the spectacle, Alize was above it, and Garrick looked like a man who was comfortable with it. At home with brutality. Not enjoying it, but unmoved.
That was all a part of the curse of Velora.
“Let her go,” he said.
Two votes for freedom. Two for death. A tie was impossible. Hundreds of pairs of eyes swung to me.
I’d had three hundred and seventy-six years to think about what I had done to my sister. There was no doubt in my mind what justice meant in that moment.
I balled my hands in my lap and prayed to the Dark God. “Hang her.”
The middle-aged manwith the cough was next. He was convicted of stealing bread when the baker stepped away to care for a sick child. If Nash was the rapist, me the terrible sister, it was an easy guess that Nimra was the one who was guilty of this crime. In comparison to the first two, it barely registered. Everyone but Nash voted to release the prisoner.
Which left Alize and Garrick. The crimes were too specific to be coincidental, which meant that Nash, Nimra, and I allunderstood that each of the crimes belonged to one of the five supplicants sitting in judgment.
I stared straight forward, trying my best not to look at the others, to ignore the crowd, to not remember what the weight of Garrick’s hand on my arm had felt like. I hated the commands he issued with such pugnacity. But for the minutes his hand had laid on my arm, holding me in place, I had not felt alone.
A guard urged forward the adolescent girl. Her face had turned an indelicate shade of green. I braced my hands against my thighs.
“She is convicted of attempting to murder her infant sibling in their cradle.”
Nimra choked. Everyone around us screamed for the young woman’s death. At my side, Garrick gave nothing. He did not reach for me, he did not smirk, his eyes did not take on that strange glow I’d noticed from time to time. On the opposite end of our row of chairs, Alize was as aloof as ever.
I’d crippled my sister’s betrothed in a fit of jealous power. But this…
The crime was particularly heinous given the nearly non-existent birth rate in Velora. But it was only an attempt. No actual murder had been committed.
Nash voted for death. Nimra did, as well.
They both looked to me, expecting the two possible perpetrators on either end to keep their silence. But before I could speak, Garrick did.
“Release her,” he said. His eyes were not on the girl who’d committed the crime, but on Alize. That heavy gaze meant something, but his face gave no clue as to what.
Alize lifted her chin. “Release her,” she echoed.
Again, the vote came to me.
What did Edravos want in this moment? I had not spent much time paying homage to the God of Justice, in life nor indeath. It was possible that my task had already been completed when I passed judgment on the prisoner accused of my own crime. But maybe this decision was just as important.
But Edravos was not what swayed my vote. It was Nimra. She watched me, as did all the others, but her eyes held more. I sat in judgment of the young girl, but Nimra sat in judgment of me. She was trying to decide if I was as wicked of a witch as every story she’d been raised on… or if the kindness she showed me before the Mercy Gate had not been misplaced, after all.
That made my decision. “Release her.”
Disappointment pulled Nimra’s brows together, tugging down the corners of her lips.
I did not need friends. I was already saddled with Garrick. Proximity to me would just get Nimra killed sooner. I did not need that on my conscience, whatever was left of it.
I told myself I would not look in either direction during the next vote.
The last prisoner dragged forward was tall and slight, not unlike Rilk had been. It was the first thought I’d had for the supplicant who’d tried to kill me not once, but twice. Thankfully, it did not elicit any emotion that I would have struggled to hide.
The convicted looked left to right, eyes widening as he took in the crowd and his jurors. The not-really-humans around us had become restless with the whole spectacle. They hadn’t appreciated our release of the young girl. They began to jeer before the man’s crime had even been stated. They wanted to end on blood.
The black-clad jailer elbowed his charge forward. The man swerved to the side, trying to avoid touching the noose. But his jailer jerked him back into place, so that the loop of rope circled his face, resting against his chin in ominous promise.
