“Your Honour, ” the Ashcroft lawyer tried again.
“Overruled.” The dragon’s voice brooked no argument. “The evidence is admitted. Continue, Mr. Hawthorne.”
Marcus opened the first file. “Exhibit A: a contract between Viktor Blackwood and Cassandra Blackwood for the assassination of Tobias Ashford, fae informant. Dated September 28th, twelve days before the murder Ms. Wickwood witnessed. The contract specifies an obsidian blade, a forestlocation, and…” He let the silence stretch, the kind of pause that took a career to land. “…a disposal team to be dispatched afterward. The disposal team was cancelled. Presumably because the client didn’t anticipate a hedge witch gathering moonbell flowers fifty metres away.”
He let the courtroom absorb that. Then he continued.
“Exhibit B through Exhibit H: similar contracts for seven additional assassinations spanning the last five years. Exhibit I: the financial records of the Blackwood operation, including monthly payments to three members of the Willowbrook Shadow Council.”
Margaret Thornfield didn’t move. Didn’t flinch. Her hands, clasped in her lap, were perfectly still.
“Exhibit J: the murraue deployment file, detailing Viktor Blackwood’s plan to breach the dimensional barrier and deploy nightmare demons against a civilian population if his trial proceeded.”
The jury, seven supernatural beings selected from across New England’s supernatural community, shifted in their seats. A dryad forewoman pressed her bark-covered hand to her mouth.
“The prosecution’s position is simple.” Marcus stood, and Hazel watched the courtroom contract around him. This was what she’d been waiting for. Not the demon. Not the protector. The lawyer. “Viktor Blackwood has operated a criminal enterprise for six centuries. He has murdered witnesses, silenced communities, corrupted governing bodies, and deployed prohibited magical entities against civilian populations. The evidence before you is comprehensive, verified, and damning.”
He paused. Walked to the jury box. His movements were precise despite the wound, despite the obsidian still pulsing through his system. The pain was there. Hazel could see it inthe set of his jaw, the careful way he held his left side. But he’d buried it beneath five hundred years of professional discipline.
“But I don’t want to talk about the evidence. I want to talk about Tobias Ashford.”
The courtroom stilled.
“Tobias Ashford was a fae informant. He cooperated with the Inter-Dimensional Court because he believed that Viktor Blackwood’s operation was a danger to his community. He had twin daughters. They were six years old. He ran an apothecary two towns over and brewed protection charms for his own children because he was afraid for their safety.”
Marcus’s voice didn’t rise. It didn’t need to. It had the quiet, sustained force of water cutting stone.
“Tobias Ashford is dead because he did the right thing. He talked. He provided evidence. He trusted that the system would protect him. The system failed. Viktor Blackwood drove an obsidian blade through his chest in a moonlit forest, and two six-year-old girls lost their father.”
He turned to face Viktor. The patriarch sat rigid at the defence table, his composure a shell that was finally, visibly cracking.
“And then Viktor Blackwood turned that system against the one person who saw what he did.”
Marcus walked back to the prosecution table. His fingers brushed the evidence files.
“He burned Hazel Wickwood’s shop, three generations of a hedge-witch lineage, reduced to ash. He poisoned her clients’ protections. He deployed nightmare demons against a town of forty-three supernatural residents and three hundred humans who had done nothing except live in the wrong place. He turned a neighbour into an unwitting spy by threatening a fifteen-year-old girl’s medicine.”
He stopped. The courtroom was utterly silent.
“And when all of that failed,when Ms. Wickwood refused to be intimidated, refused to disappear, refused to pretend she hadn’t seen what she’d seen,Viktor Blackwood attempted to open a dimensional breach that would have driven every sleeping mind within a hundred miles permanently insane.”
Marcus let the silence hold for three seconds. Then he spoke directly to the jury.
“My client is not a hero. She’s a hedge witch who makes arthritis cream and moon-madness tonics and argues with her cat.” A ghost of something crossed his face, not a smile, but the architecture of one. “She didn’t ask for any of this. She was picking flowers illegally when she witnessed a murder, and instead of looking away, instead of pretending it didn’t happen, the way dozens of people in this town have pretended for thirty years—she told the truth.”
He placed both hands on the jury box railing.
“That’s not heroism. That’s decency. And if this court cannot protect decency—if a witness who tells the truth is burned out of her shop, terrorised in her home, and subjected to a campaign of violence designed to silence her—then every witness who comes after Hazel Wickwood will remember. They will remember that telling the truth cost everything and changed nothing. And they will stay silent.”
He straightened.
“Don’t let them stay silent.”
He sat down. The courtroom exhaled.
When the room had absorbed it, the prosecutor stood again. “The prosecution calls Mrs. Agnes Henderson.”
Mrs. Henderson walked to the stand like a woman approaching a gallows. Her hands shook so badly that she gripped the moonstone railing to steady them. The Truth Stone pulsed, waiting.
