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“Don’t you have questions for these Witches?” Linh asked, pointedly.

“I do have a question,” she said, so softly her voice was barely audible.

When she looked at them all, Fey recognized the emotion in her eyes.

Hatred.

“Which of you did it?” Amalia asked, softly. “Which one of you killed my mother? Which of you dishonored your vows and killed the Queen you were sworn to protect?”

“I did,” said Joy in a pain-laced voice at the same time Fey stepped forward and said, loudly, “That was me.”

Amalia blinked, looking between the two of them and frowning.

Leaning on her hand, elbow propped on the table, Kallista’s smile widened. “Interesting,” she cooed softly. Shadows danced in her eyes as she looked at Fey.

“I killed the Queen,” Fey insisted.

“Fey, don’t,” Joy hissed, but Fey ignored her.

The council brought them here for this, no matter what Sana had assured them. They didn’t want to know what happened. They didn’t need any questions answered. Someone had committed the ultimate treason and murdered their Faction’s ruler. Someone needed to pay for it.

And so long as she was standing, Fey wasn’t going to let it be Joy

“I killed her,” Fey insisted. “Don’t listen to my sister. She’s only trying to protect me.”

Joy opened her mouth to argue, but Alice reached out and placed a hand on her arm, shaking her head. She knew what Fey was doing. And if the choice was losing Fey or losing Joy, she would choose to save Joy. Fey couldn’t blame her. They deserved their happiness.

Even if they would get it over her dead body.

Linh was shaking her head. “There were witnesses, you forget. Servants, and guards, and friends of the Crown, all of whom have testified to us that they saw that Witch”—she pointed at Joy, and Fey bristled at the thought that she might not even know her name—“behead our Queen.”

“No,” Fey argued. “What they saw was a blade of Air behead the Queen.”

“Yes,” Linh insisted. “And before us stands a Wind Witch who?—”

Wind whipped through the room, cutting her off.

Fey let it dance around them all, let it touch each and every council member, let it hit against Linh, jostling her, before calling it back to herself, where it swirled around her.

“No one present that night could tell you who killed the Queen,” Fey insisted, letting them see the air around her dance and spin, catching dust motes in its wake. “Only that someone used Air to do it. Joy and I were the only Air Witches there that night, but the blade came from me. I am responsible for the Queen’s death.”

“Then the Witch Faction asks the council to sentence this Witch for her crimes,” Linh said with a snarl. “The Witch Faction calls for her death.”

Sana spun around, “What?” she gasped. Leandra paled, putting a hand on Linh’s shoulder, and hissing in a low whisper, “Sister, this is not what we discussed…”.

“You heard it from her own mouth,” Linh snapped. She straightened her back to stand as tall as she could, though age had taken much of the height from her. “She murdered our Queen. That is treason. And treason is punishable by death.”

“It was punishable by death,” Kellos said in a soft, amused voice. “When there was a Queen. But if there is no Queen, how can there be a rule against killing one?”

Linh and the other High Priestesses were arguing, ignoring him entirely.

“How can you do this?” Sana hissed. “You promised me they would be safe here, they saved us, Linh!”

“They have doomed us,” Linh hissed back.

Amidst their arguing, Amalia stood.

“I am the representative of the Witches,” she said, enough of her mother’s strength in her voice that Sana and Linh stopped to listen. “And the vote is mine, and mine alone to cast.”