Chapter 9
The inquest is today.
I know it before I open my eyes. My magic knows it too—already hot under my sternum, already pressing outward, the way it does when my body registers a threat before my brain catches up.
The cellar is dark. A little grayer than I remember it. The resonance stone is warm in my fist—I fell asleep holding it again, copper veins pressed into my palm hard enough to leave marks.
Nobody told me when the inquest starts. Nobody told me anything—format, charges, terms, whether I get to speak or just sit there while strangers decide what the hell happens to me.
I haven't heard from Kage either.
It’s been a week since I sent him out to watch Leopold.
No word through Nellie. No pulse through the blood bond—I've been pressing my awareness toward that low pull compulsively, finding it distant and steady and useless.
He's alive. I can feel that much. Alive and silent, which is somehow worse than the alternative.
I sit up. Swing my legs off the cot. Pull on dark pants, the fitted black top with long sleeves that Nellie dropped off for me with a note that said for when you need armor. I drag my hair back and tie it off and open the door to the common room.
Aamon is at the slate slab. Two cups of something steaming, papers spread in front of him, already in all black with his hair slicked back and that severe part. He looks up when I come in and his eyes do a quick sweep—checking. Not checking me out. Checking me for cracks.
"Two hours," he says. "Sit down."
I sit. He pushes one of the cups toward me. I wrap my hands around it because they're slightly shaking and it gives them something to do.
"Three adjudicators on a raised platform. You'll be seated at the center of the room. Witnesses are called individually." He watches my face while he talks, gauging how much I can take. "House Vane has entered a claim. I don't know the terms yet."
"What kind of claim?"
"I don't know." His jaw does the centimeter thing. "But I need you to hear me on this: whatever they say in that room, whatever language they use, you do not react. You answer what they ask. You don't volunteer. And you do not let them see the heat."
"The heat."
"If your magic flares—even once, even small—it confirms every fear they brought in with them. You are not a bomb, Calypso. Don't give them permission to treat you like one."
My name. Not Miss Dellaby. The sound of it in his mouth settles something in my chest that I didn't know was rattling.
I tap my fingers on the cup, the nervous energy like a coiled spring inside me. "What if they ask me about Emric?"
"Tell the truth."
I meet his gaze. "The truth is I killed him."
"The truth is more complicated than that and you know it." His voice drops. "Tell them who he was. Tell them what he did. Don't beg—you're not on trial for who you are, you're on trial for what your magic did under conditions that were engineered to make it fail."
I stare at the cup. The steam curls up between my hands. "I'm… scared."
I don't plan to say it. It just falls out, and once it's in the air between us I can't pick it back up. I wait for him to give me the professional response—the measured reassurance, the clinical distance. The Aamon I’ve come to expect.
He reaches across the slab and takes my hand.
His fingers close around mine—firm, warm, deliberate. Not a brush, not an accident. A decision. I feel my own pulse against his palm, like a jackhammer, and my magic does something strange: it quiets. Like his touch is a hand on the back of a spooked horse. Easy. Easy.
"I will be in that room," he says. Low. Just for me. "With you. I’ll be in your sightline the entire time. If it gets bad, you look at me. That's all. Just look at me."
I look at him now. The hazel is warm—greener than usual, the way it goes when something gets past the mask. His thumb moves once across my knuckles. Once. Then he lets go and the professional distance slides back into place, but slower this time. Like he's not in a rush to put it on.
"Have you heard from Kage?" I ask.
Something shifts behind his eyes. Quick, controlled. "No."
A week of silence. I don't know if he found anything. I don't know if he's okay. I don't know what House Vane's claim looks like or what Leopold has been doing for two weeks while I've been underground, and in an hour I'm walking into a room where all of it lands on me at once.
Corvin's boots hit the top of the stairs, and the quiet morning is over.
∞∞∞
Sunlight.
It hits my face at the top of the stairwell and I flinch from it—two weeks underground, and my eyes aren't ready. I blink against the glare, waiting for the world to fill in, and when it does I stop moving.
There are six vampires waiting for me.
Corvin and Zeva I expected. The two enforcers behind them I didn't—big, stone-faced, in council blacks with their hands clasped at their waists. And behind them, two more I've never seen, flanking the corridor like bookends.
Six escorts for one witch.
Zeva steps forward. She's holding something—metal, glinting in the corridor light, and my stomach lurches.
Two thin bands of black iron connected by a short chain, inscribed with ward-script so fine I can barely read it.
The inside of each band is lined with rows of tiny thorns—not sharp enough to break skin on contact, but positioned so that any movement, any twist of the wrist, will drive them deeper.
My magic recoils from the metal before Zeva even touches me.
Aamon's hand finds my elbow. His mouth drops close to my ear—close enough that I feel the words more than I hear them.
"Witch irons. Don't channel. Don't flare. The wards will burn and the thorns will dig. Hold still and breathe."
His hand drops. Zeva locks them around my wrists with the slightest look of pity.
"Standard procedure for tribunal transport," Corvin says. He doesn't look at me when he says it.
Zeva locks them around my wrists. The thorns press into my skin—light, a warning, not yet drawing blood. My magic flares against the ward-script and the iron heats instantly, a sharp sting that races up both arms and makes my jaw clench. I breathe through it.
Don't react. Don't give them a reason.
Aamon is behind me. I can't see his face but I hear his breathing change—one controlled inhale, held a beat too long.
"Let's go," Corvin says.
The courtyard is blinding. I squint against it, hunched slightly, the cuffs heavy on my wrists and the thorns pressing every time my arms swing with my stride.
The campus unfolds around me—slate-grey buildings, Spanish moss gone brown at the edges, the November air thinner and cooler than I remember.
The magnolias are prepping for winter. Everything looks stripped back, exposed.
The worst part… students line the path.
Not just a handful. Dozens. They've come out to watch—lining the walkway to the administrative building in loose clusters, some sitting on the low stone walls, some standing in the grass.
The whisper current starts before I'm ten steps away from the watchtower.
I don't hear words. I don't need to. The sound is its own language: suspicion, curiosity, fear, the particular buzzing hostility of a crowd that's already made up its mind.
I keep my chin level. Keep walking. The thorns dig with every step and I feel a thin line of blood start down my left wrist, warm and slow.
Something hits my shoulder.
I flinch before I process it—an apple core, half-rotten, bouncing off my collarbone and landing on the path in front of me.
I stare at it. My magic surges so hard the cuffs blaze hot against my skin and I gasp, the ward-script flaring white for a half-second before I choke it back down.
The thorns drive in. More blood. My vision goes narrow and bright at the edges before I can get my breathing back under control.
Corvin doesn't stop walking. Nobody stops walking.
I hear a shout from somewhere behind us—a voice I don't recognize, raw and ugly: "Murderer." Just the one word. Just once. It hangs in the air and nobody contradicts it.
I think about Emric. I think about his hands reaching for me at the Revel. I think about the fact that the word is accurate, and that's the worst part—it's not a lie, it's not slander, it's just the truth in someone else's mouth and it sounds different from the outside.
The administrative building looks different when you're walking into it in chains. I met Leyonna here on my first day—her office is on the ground floor, warm wood and books, the closest thing to welcoming this campus has. We walk inside and I’m instantly thankful to be out of the public eye, away from all the students who would condemn me right now if they could.
Corvin turns left past the main corridor instead of right toward Leyonna's office, and the ward-lines in the floor get thicker, denser, pressing against my feet through my shoes until my teeth ache. I've never been down this hall.
The doors to the courtroom are already open.
It's bigger than I expected—high ceilings, no windows, stone walls lined with old portraits I don't look at. A curved table on a raised platform at the far end, three empty chairs behind it. Ward-lines in the floor forming concentric circles radiating from a single point at the room's center.
That point is a chair.
My chair.
Wooden. Alone. No table, no barrier. Sitting at the center of overlapping containment wards like something placed inside a cage that's been drawn instead of built.
My posse of enforcers walk me to it. The gallery behind us is already filling—three rows of seating along the left wall, bodies shuffling in, the low murmur of people arranging themselves for a spectacle. I scan for faces while Corvin guides me to the chair and—
Nellie.