Woah, talk about leading the vote. By revealing my face and allowing the mob time to absorb my identity, Calchas ensured the result would not be fractured by any reflex of mercy that a late revelation of my well-known face and name might grant me, as it had for Marcus the previous day. Denying me anonymity as a privilege of which I was no longer worthy, he was making sure that the very fact that I was known to these people was proof that I had thrown all the privileges of my station and their good wishes in their faces.
He turned to gaze down his nose at me where I stood on the sands before him.
“Cassandra Shelton, you are accused of crimes across the spectrum, of aiding the Codebreaker Oban, assisting in his escape and that of his sister, a magic user. You have also betrayed your handfast by having sex outside of wedlock. You concealed and aided a hunted Codebreaker and, with him, attempted to escape justice, not once but twice. You persuaded an innocent citizen to aid you, for which they lost their life. And through the wilful use of magic, you destroyed citizen property in Richmond. How do you plead?”
I reeled from the list of offences of which I was accused. The crowd had reacted with increasing volume as Calchas dropped each one into the silence on which he insisted before continuing. By the end, the crowd were a seething morass of jeers with vile names being thrown down upon me from all sides. Calchas had staged it well; there was no need to go to a public vote. I was already judged. I was no longer the pretty girl on the arm of their golden boy. I was reviled, beyond redemption in the eyes of the crowd.
I would not throw myself on their mercy. There would be none for me. I smiled defiantly at Calchas, not breaking his gaze. I refused to sink to my knees. I lifted my chin. I was guilty. And proud of it.
The din of the crowd heightened as the mob screeched its anger at being denied the pleasure of informing me of their belief in my guilt. I did not doubt that if it went to the public vote, I would be convicted at one of the highest rates the city had ever seen. Many like me preferred to abstain from the capital cases. I’m sure even those people would make an exception for me. In truth, a part of me was shocked at the depth of the hate that was raining down upon me.
In moments, I ceased to be an obedient daughter of the city with a bright future who was matched to the city’s most eligible bachelor. Calchas was right; I had been given so much. I was an elite, matched to a veritable prince of the city. Many of the populace wouldn’t even aspire to a fraction of all I had thrown away. I had broken all levels of the Code, and they hadn’t even been informed of my fraternisation with a Briton. Calchas had refrained from using that one; he hadn’t needed to. But that was the crime of which I was proudest.
It was only now, as I stood awaiting the sentence that Calchas was about to pronounce, that I realised how unjust the system truly was. How unfair. I was offered no chance to defend myself. Despite its supposed transparency – the way justice appeared to be in the hands of the citizenry – it actually never left the hands of the praetor and the rest of the council. It was they who decided who should appear on the sands, they who edited the evidentiary reel to show unmitigated guilt or justifications for offences against the Code on which they chose not to frown for their own reasons. Calchas played his audience like a fiddle. Crimes that when punished would fill the council’s coffers inevitably resulted in scant mercy. Crimes that didn’t benefit them one way or the other were an offering spread beneath the feet of the city to condemn or not as they framed it, the final judgement of little concern to them. At the Mete I had attended, the sea captain who had evaded taxes had lost everything and would spend the rest of his life working to enrich the council further. Meanwhile, Oban, the apprentice tailor who had stolen from his master, was portrayed doing it because of undeniable talent and to aid his impoverished family; he had been duly raised up thanks to the wisdom of the manipulated mob. All hail the great people of Londinium. They were too blind to see that they merely participated in their own imprisonment inside the punishment and reward system of their prison guards.
“Cassandra Shelton, you stand guilty, ready to accept the sentence you so richly deserve. In doing so, I fear you seek merely to avoid having your shame witnessed before the city. You have broken the Code again and again in the most heinous of manners. You are a disgrace to this city. You have debased yourself by betraying your match and all that we stand for. You have offended the Code in ways that go against the very fabric of our society, employing magic to bring destruction upon the property of citzens. You are a threat to the wellbeing of everyone in the city. There can be no mercy for you. Death by fire.”
I closed my eyes, unable to hold Calchas’s malicious gaze any longer as the manner of my death was named. My stomach dropped. Fire. So I was to burn. No trace of me but ash and smoke would remain
