“Yes.”
“And this relationship began during your protection period?”
“Yes.”
“So your testimony is given by a woman who is sleeping with the man who built the prosecution’s case. A woman who has every personal motivation to see the defendant convicted.”
The Truth Stone pulsed steadily white. Hazel let the silence stretch for exactly two beats, one of Marcus’s techniques, letting the accusation fill the room before she deflated it.
“Yes, I’m in a relationship with Mr. Hawthorne. I’m also in a relationship with the truth, and right now, both of those relationships are telling you the same thing: I watched your client kill Tobias Ashford.” She held the lawyer’s gaze. “Mr. Ashford had twin daughters. They were six years old. He bought protection charms from me every month because he was afraid for their safety. He was right to be afraid. And yes, I was gathering moonbell flowers without a permit, for a fifteen-year-old girl with moon-sickness whose grandmother couldn’t afford the licensed alternative. That doesn’t change what I saw.”
The defence counsel looked at his notes. Looked at the Truth Stone. Looked at his client.
“The defence requests a memory projection,” he said. “Pursuant to Section 47 of the Magical Evidence Act, we invoke the right to visual verification of the witness’s recollection.”
He thinks it will show inconsistencies, Hazel realised. He thinks my memory is contaminated by trauma or bias or the fact that I love the man who put this case together. He thinks the projection will reveal gaps.
“Granted.” Judge Ironfang gestured, and the bailiff wheeled out a sphere of polished crystal, three feet in diameter, that hummed with divination magic.
“Ms. Wickwood, place your hand on the sphere and focus on the night in question.”
Hazel pressed her palm to the crystal. The memory rose like a bubble, not summoned, not forced, but offered. The sphere took it and expanded it into three-dimensional projection that filled the centre of the courtroom.
The forest at night. Moonlight through birch trees. The soft crunch of her boots on fallen leaves. The silvery moonbell flowers glowing faintly in their cluster by the stream.
Voices. Viktor’s, recognisable even in the projection’s slightly flattened audio. And Tobias Ashford’s, higher, frightened, the voice of a man who knew he was in trouble.
“You’ve been talking, Tobias.”
“I haven’t,I wouldn’t,”
“The court received an anonymous filing last Tuesday. Financial records from our Portland operation. Records that only three people had access to.”A pause.“The other two are family.”
The obsidian blade appeared in Viktor’s hand. In the projection, every detail was precise: the way the black glasscaught the moonlight, the silver sigils etched along the edge, the practiced ease with which Viktor held it.
Tobias’s hands came up, a futile gesture against the inevitable.
The blade slid between his ribs with terrible ease. Tobias’s knees buckled. Silver blood, fae blood, bloomed across his white shirt and spilled across the forest floor. Viktor withdrew the blade, examined it, wiped it on Tobias’s jacket with the domestic care of a man cleaning a kitchen knife after dinner.
The courtroom was silent. The projection continued: Hazel’s panicked flight, the magical discharge from Tobias’s death, the branches whipping her face as she ran. Nobody was watching. They were still seeing the blade. The blood. The casual efficiency of a man who’d done this hundreds of times.
The sphere went dark. The courtroom remained silent for a long moment.
“No further questions,” the defence counsel said.
Hazel stepped down. By the time she’d reached her seat, Marcus was already moving, and he took the prosecution’s table like a general taking a hill. He’d been sitting in the gallery during Hazel’s testimony, one hand pressed to his wounded side, the other gripping the armrest hard enough to dent the wood. Now he was where he belonged: behind a table stacked with evidence, facing a jury, doing the thing he’d been born, or spawned, or whatever demons called it, to do.
He didn’t present himself as a witness first. He presented himself as a lawyer.
“The prosecution calls its evidence into the record.” His voice filled the courtroom without effort, five centuries of practice, the precise modulation of a man who’d argued before kings and councils and creatures that predated language. “Exhibit A through Exhibit R: contracts, financial records, andassassination orders recovered from the Blackwood estate two nights ago.”
The Ashcroft lawyers were on their feet immediately. “Objection. Chain of custody. These documents were obtained during an illegal break-in, ”
“The documents were obtained during an active self-defence operation against ongoing magical assault,” Marcus said, not looking at them. He addressed the judge. “Your Honour, I citeWickwood v. The Fae Courts, 1847, evidence recovered during a lawful defensive action against an aggressor’s own facility is admissible when the aggressor’s ongoing attacks create imminent threat to civilian life. The ruling was upheld inBlackstone v. Council of Shadows, 1923, and expanded inRivera v. Darkhollow Coven, 2019, to include evidence recovered during operations aimed at preventing deployment of prohibited magical entities.”
Judge Ironfang’s scales rippled. “I’m aware of the precedent, Mr. Hawthorne. Continue.”
“The Blackwood estate was the operational centre for a campaign of magical assault against Willowbrook’s civilian population. The murraue deployment, nightmare demons prohibited under Section 12 of the Inter-Dimensional Creatures Act, constituted an ongoing imminent threat. The recovery of these documents was incidental to a defensive operation to neutralise that threat.”
