I looked at the flask. I could not read the sigils on the surface of the glass, but the water inside it had a color, a thickness, that was not right. It was not blue, not clear. It was a kind of reddish gold, the color of blood let out into honey.
I said, “It’s not water.”
The room went still.
Envy let the silence sit.
“Correct,” he said, and the gold along his jaw went brighter. “It is a distilled appetite, harvested under the moon. Not a stream, but a ferment. The evidence is fraudulent.”
He looked down the aisle to the Gluttony man, who had not moved.
“Court finds against the petitioner. The claim is void. Should you offer another false sample, you will be tried for contempt.”
The Gluttony man bowed, lower this time, and backed away without another word.
The gallery came alive, a subtle but unmistakable shift: now they watched me.
The next petition was from Lust’s domain.
The woman who stepped forward had the kind of presence that makes you think, for a second, that the floor is tilted toward her. Her skin was like polished bronze, her lips the color of some forbidden fruit, and her hair—piled high and held with long pins—caught the light like fire trapped in silk. Her eyes were dark, but not with malice; she looked at Envy the way a person looks at a valuable rival, one who is nonetheless sometimes necessary.
She made no bow.
“Sovereign,” she said, “my house seeks safe passage for a visitor through the river wards. The visitor is human. We wish to study her wants.”
A ripple of laughter in the left gallery. The twins from Wrath’s house leaned in as if the whole thing was a sporting event.
Envy did not smile.
“Human passage is restricted by the treaty,” he said. “Study is permitted only if consented to in writing by the subject.”
The Lust woman shrugged, a roll of her bare shoulders. “We were told your new Kept is a learned woman. Perhaps she could explain the clause.”
This was open, direct, the kind of move that courts in the human world would have censured as inappropriate but which, here, seemed to be a kind of polite violence.
Envy did not look at me, but his hand at my waist pressed, gently, as if to say: Go ahead.
I flicked my eyes over it. The sigils, the bond, guided me.
I said, “The clause in the third annex says consent must be ‘expressed and uncoerced.’ If your house would like to study a human want, you have to make them want to be studied. Not just sign a paper.”
The Lust woman smiled, slow and wide. “Expressed and uncoerced,” she said, and I saw her memorize it.
Envy nodded, once, to the Lust woman.
“Petition denied, but the Sovereign’s Kept will author a supplemental opinion to clarify the clause. Your visitor may have a copy. In the meantime, safe passage is granted as long as the consent is proper.”
The Lust woman bowed her head, not low, but in a way that read as honest respect.
The hand at my waist relaxed.
Next, a debt dispute: two petitioners, both from the house of Greed, both dressed in gradients of gold so dense that it looked as if the suits themselves were made from foil. Their hair was slicked back in a style that said wealth but also combat-readiness, the kind of look favored by men who want to be both respected and feared.
They argued, and it was a fast, technical argument, full of numbers and sigils and the kinds of arcane terms that would have made my high school math teacher weep with envy.
Envy let them go for two minutes, then held up a single hand.
“Enough,” he said, and the sound of it was final.
