Page 30 of The Frost Witch (The Covenants of Velora #1)

“Dispense justice. The majority will determine her fate.”

The crowd jeered, though the pitch was distinctly female. The men were persuaded by the woman’s beauty, convinced by the show of remorse.

I looked at her again, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. Maybe the prisoners were all illusions, created by Edravos, the God of Justice, just like the crowd. If that was true, there was no risk in assigning every one of the five to death.

But I’d felt the old man’s life force flee his body.

Or was that another clever bit of work from Edravos?

“Just kill her and be done with it,” Nash said, waving his hand over his still-crossed feet.

He looked like he ought to be drinking a glass of wine or a pint of ale.

Snacking on grapes. Casual, where Nimra’s posture was tense, Alize’s carefully upright, and Garrick… I avoided looking his way at all.

“Isn’t that excessive? She hurt someone. She did not murder them,” Nimra argued.

My eyes went back to the woman who’d been charged with my crime. Whether she’d actually committed it or not, we would have to judge her. That was what the Justice Gate required.

But if she’d been charged with my crime… who had committed the rape we’d just punished the old man for?

Nash .

Every muscle in my body tensed, ready to spring forward—when a hand landed on my arm.

“Do not move.”

The effort I’d made to avoid looking at Garrick evaporated. I swung back around, tried to rip my arm free from his grasp, and failed utterly. My power immediately flared in response, my skin turning cold enough to burn. But he did not even flinch.

“You do not command me.”

His hand was burning. I knew it was. It would start off pink, then deepen to red. If he was stubborn enough, the skin would turn black and start to flake away and die. He could lose his entire hand to his effort to keep me in that damn chair.

“If you want to survive the Justice Gate, you will stay in that chair.”

He wasn’t afraid of Nash, I realized. He worried about the wrath of the gods if I tried to walk away. A gate is always near. A god is always watching. Especially now.

Nimra raised her voice behind us. “I will not sentence her to death.”

“Hang her,” Alize’s cold voice said from Nash’s other side. All three of them turned their eyes to Garrick and me.

He made no rush to take back his hand. He let the others see how he held on to me, see that I did not push him away. Then he leaned back in his own seat and crossed his arms over his chest. He may as well have stamped the word ‘mine’ across my wrist along with that damn Lifebind.

If it kept that rapist away from me, then I wouldn’t even protest. Much.

He shifted his gaze to the woman standing beside the noose, awaiting her fate.

Behind us, the bystanders closest leaned in so they could hear every word we uttered.

It had felt so refreshing to see so much life when the crowd first flooded in.

Now, every face I saw felt like a needle jabbing into my skin.

They were a reminder, meant to make this worse as we judged others for the crimes we’d committed.

And made an irrevocable choice for justice.

If Garrick understood or suspected what was really going on, he gave no outward sign. Nash was reveling in the spectacle, Alize was above it, and Garrick looked like a man who was comfortable with it. At home with brutality. Not enjoying it, but unmoved.

That was all a part of the curse of Velora.

“Let her go,” he said.

Two votes for freedom. Two for death. A tie was impossible. Hundreds of pairs of eyes swung to me.

I’d had three hundred and seventy-six years to think about what I had done to my sister. There was no doubt in my mind what justice meant in that moment.

I balled my hands in my lap and prayed to the Dark God. “Hang her.”

The middle-aged man with the cough was next.

He was convicted of stealing bread when the baker stepped away to care for a sick child.

If Nash was the rapist, me the terrible sister, it was an easy guess that Nimra was the one who was guilty of this crime.

In comparison to the first two, it barely registered.

Everyone but Nash voted to release the prisoner.

Which left Alize and Garrick. The crimes were too specific to be coincidental, which meant that Nash, Nimra, and I all understood that each of the crimes belonged to one of the five supplicants sitting in judgment.

I stared straight forward, trying my best not to look at the others, to ignore the crowd, to not remember what the weight of Garrick’s hand on my arm had felt like.

I hated the commands he issued with such pugnacity.

But for the minutes his hand had laid on my arm, holding me in place, I had not felt alone.

A guard urged forward the adolescent girl. Her face had turned an indelicate shade of green. I braced my hands against my thighs.

“She is convicted of attempting to murder her infant sibling in their cradle.”

Nimra choked. Everyone around us screamed for the young woman’s death. At my side, Garrick gave nothing. He did not reach for me, he did not smirk, his eyes did not take on that strange glow I’d noticed from time to time. On the opposite end of our row of chairs, Alize was as aloof as ever.

I’d crippled my sister’s betrothed in a fit of jealous power. But this…

The crime was particularly heinous given the nearly non-existent birth rate in Velora. But it was only an attempt. No actual murder had been committed.

Nash voted for death. Nimra did, as well.

They both looked to me, expecting the two possible perpetrators on either end to keep their silence. But before I could speak, Garrick did.

“Release her,” he said. His eyes were not on the girl who’d committed the crime, but on Alize. That heavy gaze meant something, but his face gave no clue as to what.

Alize lifted her chin. “Release her,” she echoed.

Again, the vote came to me.

What did Edravos want in this moment? I had not spent much time paying homage to the God of Justice, in life nor in death. It was possible that my task had already been completed when I passed judgment on the prisoner accused of my own crime. But maybe this decision was just as important.

But Edravos was not what swayed my vote.

It was Nimra. She watched me, as did all the others, but her eyes held more.

I sat in judgment of the young girl, but Nimra sat in judgment of me.

She was trying to decide if I was as wicked of a witch as every story she’d been raised on…

or if the kindness she showed me before the Mercy Gate had not been misplaced, after all.

That made my decision. “Release her.”

Disappointment pulled Nimra’s brows together, tugging down the corners of her lips.

I did not need friends. I was already saddled with Garrick. Proximity to me would just get Nimra killed sooner. I did not need that on my conscience, whatever was left of it.

I told myself I would not look in either direction during the next vote.

The last prisoner dragged forward was tall and slight, not unlike Rilk had been. It was the first thought I’d had for the supplicant who’d tried to kill me not once, but twice. Thankfully, it did not elicit any emotion that I would have struggled to hide.

The convicted looked left to right, eyes widening as he took in the crowd and his jurors.

The not-really-humans around us had become restless with the whole spectacle.

They hadn’t appreciated our release of the young girl.

They began to jeer before the man’s crime had even been stated. They wanted to end on blood.

The black-clad jailer elbowed his charge forward. The man swerved to the side, trying to avoid touching the noose. But his jailer jerked him back into place, so that the loop of rope circled his face, resting against his chin in ominous promise.

“This man is convicted of the death of a family of seven. He poisoned two parents, a grandfather, and their three adult children, one of whom was with child. All died.”

The roar of the crowd turned deafening.

I resisted the urge to look to either side. Neither Alize nor Garrick would show any clues. I wondered if the others had narrowed down the possibilities for the perpetrator among us, as well. Maybe that was part of the challenge. We would carry this knowledge with us beyond the Justice Gate.

I kept my gaze carefully trained on the man. His throat bobbed up and down, his jaw working, eye twitching. I could easily imagine him as a poisoner.

Gender was not a clue. The man we’d let go free had committed Nimra’s crime. So it truly could have been either of them. Neither spoke to motive, not really, not in a way that fit with what I’d experienced of either of them so far.

But Garrick had to be the poisoner. He was a bounty hunter.

We all knew it. He must have committed all kinds of sins in his jobs for hire.

Though maybe that was a trick from Edravos, as well, to assign a crime that we would all naturally attribute to one supplicant but that truly belonged to another.

None of that changed the crime of the man before us. An entire family was dead by his hand. The members of the crowd were not the only ones desperate to conclude the ordeal.

Nimra— “Hang.”

Nash— “Hang.”

Alize was already halfway to her feet. “Hang.”

My vote was immaterial.

In the space of an exhale, the guard tugged the noose tight and shoved the man out over the trench. My hands balled into fists, bracing for the scream of the crowd.

But none came. In a blink, the crowd had disappeared. The jailers, too. The courtyard of the fortress was entirely empty except for the three bodies dangling over the trench, and the five of us that had condemned them.

I could not help looking around at the others. Nash was already halfway to the gate, an open portcullis that had appeared in the solid stone wall behind us.

Alize stood, peering down into the trench as if checking that nothing was going to leap out at us when we tried to walk away. Garrick had taken a similar stance, though he scanned the perimeter and the crenulations on the curtain wall, checking for a last-minute twist.

“None of us died. We weren’t even injured or in any real danger. I do not understand,” Nimra said, now avoiding my eyes, speaking to no one and everyone.

Her crime was stealing bread. Of course, she did not understand. The person convicted of her crime was released. It was an easy decision.

But for the rest of us, the Justice Gate was meant to inspire terror. To force us to reckon with the darkest parts of ourselves and pass judgment that would be inflicted not on us, but on another?—

Guilt washed through me, so powerful I nearly fell from my chair as the true gravity of what I’d done hit me. I had not sentenced a woman justly to death.

I’d punished her for my crime. Not her own.

I had no idea what context surrounded her actions.

I could have shown mercy. But this was not the Mercy Gate, and I’d shown none.

I’d sentenced her for the crime that I committed, to the fate I believed that I deserved—but had been too cowardly to bestow upon myself.

I deserved to be punished for the happiness I’d stolen from my sister. Instead, I’d lived for nearly four hundred years. Instead, I’d sentenced a woman to death to assuage my own guilt.

I turned my head and emptied my stomach into the dirt.

I left my head hanging there, accosted by the scent of my own sick. Waiting, hoping that there was some twist of fate. That there was a final punishment the gods would inflict for the crimes we had all committed. But they’d already played their game, and now I understood just how truly I’d lost.

Death was too good a punishment for me. Living with the guilt was what I deserved.

“Not all wounds are physical,” Alize said.

Nimra did not have the same scars on her soul as the rest of us. For her, the Justice Gate had been unpleasant. For me, it was devastating.