Trial by Fire

As usual, Juliet got no answer. She tried for what must have been the thousandth time to reach out and share mindspeak with her sister. Again, she hit up against a wall around Lillian’s mind.

Lillian sighed. “My sickness isn’t the only thing I’m keeping to myself, Juliet. Please understand. I shut you out because I’m trying to protect you.”

It was the same answer Lillian had been giving her since she came back from her mysterious disappearance, and Juliet knew she would get no more out of her. She glossed and smoothed her sister’s curls in silence before helping her down to the main hall to hear the newest prisoner—a doctor.

There was a fever sweeping through the Outlanders. Citizens of the Thirteen Cities were entitled to free medicine from the Covens during a public health crisis such as this and they had nothing to fear from the fever, but the outbreak was killing Outlanders at an alarming rate. Children were the most vulnerable. Lillian had seized several Outlander doctors who had been feeding bread mold to the afflicted children. It was an open and shut case of child abuse as far as Juliet could see, but Lillian had insisted that the Coven and the Council hear the leader out before she sentenced them all.

Juliet still couldn’t believe that anyone would be so inhumane as to feed mold to a sick child, but the Outlanders were brutish like that. Juliet had heard that they even sewed wounds together. Just the thought made her queasy. She had never condoned her sister’s harsh punishments—she didn’t agree with capital punishment for any reason—but she did agree that the Outlanders needed to accept magic as the one and only way. Sure, it was expensive to hire a healing crucible and her mechanic, but giving mold to children and calling it a cure? That was downright barbaric.

When they arrived in the main hall, Council Leader Thomas Danforth greeted Juliet and Lillian with an oily smile. Juliet returned it, not because she liked Gideon’s rat-faced father, but because she knew her sister wouldn’t, and the last thing they needed was to slight Danforth at the moment. Not when her sister’s other self was running around stars know where, wreaking havoc everywhere she went. Juliet felt a surge of worry at the thought of Lily. She recalled Lily’s frightened eyes and how they’d melted with relief at the first sight of Juliet at the top of the stairs. Her sister needed her, and … Juliet stopped herself. Lily wasn’t her real sister, even though it felt like she was. Juliet shook her head to clear her confusion and focused on Lillian instead.

“Lady,” Danforth said. The assembled hosts stood up from their seats behind one side of a long table that spanned the length of one end of the great hall. Danforth led the dignitaries in a respectful bow.

“You may be seated,” Lillian said in a perfunctory way. She had never enjoyed the pomp and circumstance of being the Lady of Salem, and now that she was ill she barely tolerated it.

Juliet stayed close to Lillian, but she didn’t help her into her grand chair at the center of the long table. She knew better than to make Lillian look like an invalid. Once Lillian was situated, Juliet took a seat on an unobtrusive velvet-cushioned stool that had been set up for her behind her sister’s right elbow. Although seated in her imposing chair with the all-female Coven members on her right and the all-male Council members to her left, Lillian didn’t need Juliet’s cosseting to make her look like an invalid. Her giant chair seemed to swallow her frail body. It did not, however, swallow her voice or the authority it conveyed.