Page 28 of The Frost Witch (The Covenants of Velora #1)

“You enter as one.”

That was all the direction Varian gave us before turning back toward the rear entrance of the temple. Unlike the Mercy Gate, she did not wait to see if we complied. Two guards—different faces but the same in every other measurable way—watched from a few feet behind the line of acolytes.

I avoided Tomin’s eyes as I turned back to face the gate. I could not risk seeing whatever emotion he allowed to seep into those big, golden eyes.

I’d have hung back, watching the others approach and assessing my chances, despite what Varian said. But Garrick did not allow that. He cupped my elbow. I shook him off, but either way, we started forward.

“I bet we get to pick one of us to hang,” Nash said as we passed beneath the portcullis.

“This isn’t the Sacrifice Gate,” Nimra bit back, but the rest of us remained silent.

Daylight brightened as we emerged into the courtyard of the fortress. Velora was lucky to get one day of sunshine in a month. It shone down on what we hadn’t been able to see before. Not one noose, but five. One for each of us.

“Care to take another guess?” Nimra prodded, glaring at Nash. He gnashed his teeth at her.

Something more had happened between them since the Mercy Gate.

But Nimra had not spoken directly to me since I’d revealed myself as a witch.

The enmity was still there between the two of them, but Nimra’s fear had transformed into something sharper.

I hoped Nash had a bruise or wound somewhere as evidence, even if I couldn’t see it.

The nooses dangled in an evenly spaced line. No platform was necessary. A wide trench cut into the ground on the other side of the wooden structure that held up the nooses. Beyond that, five chairs stood empty. Waiting.

Besides the five of us, not a single person was in the courtyard. No priest or priestess, no acolyte, no gods given form. Just us, five nooses, and five chairs.

Nooses or chairs. It was not a difficult choice.

Only when the last of us sat—Nash, unsurprisingly—did the courtyard spring to life.

Doors on either side of the inner bailey opened to a flood of people.

Women, men, children… dozens of children.

I had to stop counting, the number of people growing too fast. More than a hundred, maybe two or three times that number.

There were babes in arms, toddlers atop their parents’ shoulders, boisterous boys, and preening teenagers moving between the adults.

They filled the courtyard around us on all sides, their round faces smiling and laughing.

Round faces. Children. Mirth.

“They aren’t real,” I said softly, the realization twisting my breakfast inside my stomach.

“No, they couldn’t be,” Nimra said. For a brief second, our eyes met, sharing in the devastation of that realization. But that was it, all she gave me, and all I deserved before turning away.

“Be glad they aren’t real,” Garrick said from my other side.

I blinked, waiting for the others to react. But he’d said it quietly, for my ears alone. A private reassurance.

Because whatever the crowd had to do with the Justice Gate… it would not be kind.

A door I had not noticed before slammed open in answer to Garrick’s prediction. Directly across from our chairs, on the other side of the trench and line of nooses, we had an unobstructed view as a new group of humans appeared. None of them smiled.

I’d assumed the five nooses were for us. But the new arrivals disabused me of that notion. Ten people emerged, walking in two paired off lines of eerie similarity to the one we’d formed exiting the temple. Five prisoners. Five jailers.

The prisoners wore little more than rags despite the cold.

I counted off the other details, determined not to miss any more.

Three men, two women. They ranged in age, from an elderly man at the rear to an adolescent girl who looked no older than Kyrelle.

A middle-aged man bent in a terrible, hacking cough, his entire body spasming with the motion.

His jailer showed no mercy, driving him on with a thick whap of his baton across his back. This certainly was not the Mercy Gate.

This was about justice. As the scene fell into place, the hairs on the back of my neck rose.

They aren’t real, I told myself as the jailers positioned their prisoners, one behind each noose. But the longer I looked, the more horror dawned in my stomach.

Unlike the crowd of people around us, the prisoners were thin and ragged. I could count every one of the old man’s ribs through the shirt that hung off of him in shreds. The girl at the front of the line now stood directly in front of Alize, shivering violently.

Shivering. Unlike the crowd of people around us, now moving to fill in behind the prisoners so they could watch the spectacle from every angle, the five people awaiting justice were very real.

I looked to either side, trying to see if the other supplicants had come to the same conclusion.

On the far end, Alize’s face was impenetrable.

The sharp laughter from the corridor was completely gone, replaced by a mask of beautiful silence.

Anger rallied the ice in my veins. Of course, this would not faze her.

She was fae. Her kind had sentenced an entire continent to death. What were five more lowly humans?

Beside her, a slow smile grew on Nash’s face.

He realized what was about to happen and relished it.

I let the frost loose; couldn’t help it, didn’t want to.

I sent it crawling across the compacted dirt ground, wrapping around his ankles and snaking beneath his trousers.

He jerked violently, leaning down to rip at his pants and find the source of instantaneous pain.

“Do not antagonize him,” Garrick ordered from my other side in that harsh, low voice just for me.

I ignored him, and the slight tingle in my limbs in reaction to the way his voice scraped over those syllables.

Nash forgot himself, forgot the others around us. He tore at his boots, trying to undo the laces and rip them away to find the source of pain, those icy daggers of cold I drove into his ankles and calves.

“Koryn,” Garrick said. “You let him live. Now you must pay the price.”

My palms flattened, my power melting away. Nash cursed under his breath. On either side of him, Nimra and Alize stared at him like he was having a fit.

But my eyes met Garrick’s, could not resist lifting and finding that intensity that I was coming to expect. It had been a long time since I’d met someone who looked right into my eyes, knowing what I was, without a drop of fear. Maybe that was the reason I could not keep my mouth shut.

“He is enjoying this,” I hissed between my teeth.

“Aren’t you, wicked witch? Don’t your kind delight in torturing the unsuspecting humans who wander into your clutches? Those who seek your power but are unwilling to pay the price?”

Yes . The cost for crossing a witch or her coven was a painful death. But it was more nuanced than that. At least, it always had been for me.

I was spared having to explain myself by the first jailer, who banged his baton on the wooden structure beside him and called the crowd to attention.

An excited hush settled over the not-real-humans around us.

I turned forward with the rest of them. But beside me, Garrick was not so quick to move.

I felt that intensity, still focused upon me, for more seconds than seemed necessary.

Did he feel it too, the magnetic pull between us?

It could be the Lifebind, the goddess-made tether.

That was the safest explanation. The one that did not involve emotions and internal conflict and the tangible relief of finding someone who understood.

Relief eased through my muscles when he finally turned to join the rest of us.

It lasted mere seconds as the guard on the far left stepped forward, shoving his charge ahead of him. Last to enter, now first to face judgment.

He rammed his baton into the old man’s back, sending him stumbling forward. He reached for the noose by reflex, a withered hand closing around the loop like it was a lifeline, not a threat.

Nimra lurched forward in her seat as if she would intervene, but she stilled the impulse.

The guard spat on the ground, narrowly missing the old man, before turning to us.

“This man is convicted of raping a woman who took shelter in his stable. He demanded payment in gold and having none, she could not help but refuse. Instead of offering her mercy, he took his payment by force.”

In a few sentences, the prisoner before us was transformed.

I no longer saw a weak, suffering old man.

Instead, I noticed the deep scar that ran down the side of his face, still red and puckered and healing.

Had the woman left it behind as she clawed at him to protect herself?

He limped slightly, favoring his left leg.

Another wound his victim had managed to get in?

In front, behind, all around us the crowd yelled and jeered. Fathers screamed justice for their daughters, women for themselves. How many of these women had suffered similar abuse at some point in their lives? Too many, I knew. Too many women were the victims of men.

They are not real.

“Dispense justice. The majority will determine his fate.” The guard did not step back, but he lowered his head. A clear sign of deference to us, the decision-makers. Mere supplicants no longer.

Beside me, Nimra blinked in stunned silence.

She’d sunk back fully into her chair. On my other side, Garrick remained upright and unmoved.

His characteristic smirk was nowhere to be seen.

Something inside of me released. He was not enjoying this any more than I was.

Which did not quite fit—Garrick the Red was a bounty hunter renowned for his viciousness.

He would take any contract so long as it paid.

And I was a witch, who’d stood by as her coven tortured humans for no crime worse than wandering unbidden into the coven lands. But I’d hated every moment of it. I could recount every death I’d been party to over the past three hundred and seventy-seven years.

Did Garrick keep his own mental tally?

I wished I could hide the revulsion that built inside of me. Not because the old man did not deserve to see it, but just because I wondered what it would be like, just once, to be fully in control. If Garrick felt any of that internal conflict, he masked it brilliantly.

“He dies. That is my vote,” Alize said from the other end of the row of chairs. Her face, like Garrick’s, was a study in immovability.

“Do it,” Nash agreed. He kicked out his feet in front of him and crossed one ankle over the other. Regret turned my stomach. Maybe I should have let Garrick kill him. Not because I did not think the rapist deserved to die, but because Nash was so openly enjoying it.

But was I really any better? Because in the next second, I opened my mouth. “He hangs.”

The roar of the crowd pitched even higher at my decree.

I could have waited. With Alize and Nash’s decisions already made, I could have let Garrick or Nimra cast their votes.

Mine might not have mattered at all. But I wanted my word to be the one that sentenced this man to death.

He’d violated a woman. It was the next thing to murder, and I believed that he deserved to die. Even if I hated myself a little for it.

“Agreed,” Garrick said from beside me.

“Yes,” Nimra nodded.

Neither of them needed to say it. I knew neither of those votes had been cast for my sake, but I was thankful for them either way. The old man would have died, no matter what I had to say about it.

Before us, the old man transformed again, though this time it was not just in my imagination. His hateful face contorted with rage. “How dare you! You will all rot in the pits of hell?—”

He never got to finish the threat. The jailer slipped the noose around his neck and kicked him forward over the trench.

For a brief second, the crowd around us quieted.

The old man sputtered, jerked, clawed for his throat, and then died.

When that final spasm of life released, the people roared their approval.

His life force fled, a wisp of power that only I felt. The rotting pits of hell where his soul would dwell belonged to my Dark God. I could not see souls, but I felt their presence in the moment when they fled their fleshy bonds. For what was power, at its deepest definition, but life?

My heart did not beat, but I could still feel the rush of blood in my veins as the excitement of the moment ebbed.

The sounds of the crowd dulled to anticipatory whispers while the second jailer nudged his charge forward.

A pretty woman who appeared to be in her mid-twenties, her cheeks high with color despite the cold.

Her mass of hair was matted, but I could see that the clothes she wore had once been opulent. A woman who came from means.

“This woman is convicted of crippling her sister’s betrothed out of spite,” he said to the group. “She saw that her sister had happiness within her grasp, and she ripped it from her because she could not have it for herself.”

Tears spilled out of the woman’s eyes, but she did not stumble like the old man before her. She kept her chin high as she stared us down.

Something colder than ice overtook me—veins, organs, skin. I might as well have turned to a block of solid ice as the other supplicants began to talk around me. I could not hear them, trapped within my own mind.

Maybe the woman standing there facing judgment and death had committed that crime. But so had I.