The Trial (2)
It had been an exhausting day. In the span of a single day, countless people had come looking for me: elders claiming decades of easy friendship with my father, distant relatives I had met perhaps once in my life, and the assorted sons and daughters of high-ranking nobles.
Their reasons fell broadly into two camps. The first were those who had judged that the tide was turning toward me, the third son, and wanted to get in line early. There were not many of those yet.
The second kind were far more numerous: people hoping to leverage their positions and sway the trial.
"I believe in letting sleeping dogs lie, my lord. These are people who may yet become your assets. Make enemies of them rashly, and all you will earn for your trouble is a headache."
Without exaggeration, I heard some variation of that line more than a hundred times in a single day. No wonder Chief Judge Ollite had thrown up both hands and declared the trial beyond anything he could shoulder. The petitions were lining up thick enough to callus my ears even for me, the Lord Proxy; for a judge of humbler station, they must have been unbearable.
"Fairness—it sounds lovely, I will grant you. But the affairs of this world are never quite so simple."
"Ravenshade shoulders a considerable share of the duchy's logistics. If a guild that size suddenly disintegrates into thin air, what becomes of the economy? Who is going to absorb all the unemployed?"
A viscount had finished delivering exactly that speech and taken his leave only moments ago. They could feel it in their bones, it seemed—that this time, letting sleeping dogs lie might not be an option.
"Lily."
"Yes, Young Master."
Lily approached on light, silent steps.
"Turn away everyone who asks to see me from now on. My own people excepted."
"All of them?"
"Yes. All of them."
A troubled look settled over her face.
"As it happens, Young Lord Mabel is here at the ducal residence right now. I told him you would receive him shortly, but..."
"...I can hardly turn my own brother away. Show him in."
Why had Mabel come looking for me? Of all the timings in the world.
Since stepping down as Lord Proxy, Mabel had shut himself away in his own palace. With his little farm-based schemes now blocked, not a single public activity of his had been reported since.
A short while later, Mabel walked into my office. He had grown a beard in the time since we had last met, and he looked thinner than I remembered.
"Brother."
"Stay seated. Are you not standing in Father's place now?"
He waved me back down as I rose from my chair, and I sat again, feeling awkward. Not long ago it had been him sitting in this very chair, looking across it at me; in the space of a few months, our positions had completely reversed.
Lily brought in a tea set and refreshments. For a long while Mabel neither touched them nor spoke, only stared down at the table. I sipped my drink and waited in silence for him to begin.
I doubted he had come to share opinions on the trial. Chris had scorned him for years, so my best guess was that he might be pleased to see the man ruined. Speculation came easily enough—but Mabel remained as unreadable as ever. Until he spoke first, all I could do was keep guessing.
"...Daphne is struggling."
That was his opening line. I had no idea how to take it.
"Has something happened? If there is anything I can do for her as Lord Proxy, I will do it."
His fiancée was suffering, so I gave him the most helpful answer I could manage.
"You are always like this."
A deep sneer curled the corner of Mabel's mouth.
"Have I done something to sour your mood, Brother?"
"Daphne asked you for a favor before she left for the capital, didn't she? To look after her family while she was gone."
"Yes, she did."
But that request had never been honored. The aftermath of my battle with the demon Viscount Jepet had buried me in work.
"And instead, you honored it in reverse. You cannot mean to pretend you never noticed that Daphne's family was named in the documents you handed to Duke Kalman."
"Highcliff was in those documents?"
I pushed back, genuinely baffled.
Zargon, one of the great merchant lords of the capital, had turned his own floating castle into a stronghold for the demons. Enormous sums had been laundered through it under the tidy label of "castle maintenance costs." Adras, acting on my orders, had stripped Zargon's laundering routes to the bone—and Daphne's family had apparently been snagged in the haul.
Which meant Daphne's fears had been justified all along. Her family had been colluding with demons, walking a tightrope that could snap at any moment.
So when Kalman had trusted me enough to connect me with the Dris Merchant Guild... had that been part of a campaign to root out even my own future sister-in-law?
"Your acting has improved a great deal, Eden."
"Brother, I swear this is the first I am hearing of it. But that list names the traitors who helped the demons sink their roots into the capital. Anyone on it has to answer for what they did. That is only right."
It was news to me, true—but even if I had known in advance, my judgment would not have changed by a hair. No member of House Esterzy cuts deals over the demon problem.
"Dozens of high-ranking nobles were implicated. Looking the other way for one Highcliff among them would have cost us nothing. You could have given the Marquis of Highcliff a quiet warning on the side. This is the sort of thing that becomes a stain on the family name, and you could not manage even that much flexibility?"
"Are you serious right now, Brother?"
By this point my own blood was starting to heat.
"We are the legitimate sons of House Esterzy. Sons of the Shield of the North. As for 'flexibility'—I will pretend I never heard the word."
"And how can you pronounce on whether the Marquis of Highcliff stands with the demons without exchanging so much as a word with him? For all you know, he simply did business with Zargon."
"That is exactly what the investigation will determine. Duke Kalman is a capable man. You can trust him to see it through."
"Easy to say when it is not your family going down."
Mabel's mouth twisted. For once I could read him as plainly as an open palm. Where Daphne was concerned, one layer of his mask always came off.
"Enough. I have heard your position."
Mabel rose from his seat.
"It hardly bears repeating, but that seat is more than you deserve."
With that parting gift of wisdom, he left the office.
So that was his way of saying I had no business being Lord Proxy. I was sure he had exercised plenty of his own precious "flexibility" back when he held the post. And taken one step further, it meant I had no right to be Duke at all.
But did he know? I had never once been hungry for power. I was a Daoist, after all.
And yet thanks to the lot of them, my resolve to take this seat was hardening by the day. If I refused to watch this family rot before my eyes, then Duke was what I would have to become—by any means necessary.
The day of reckoning dawned. Opils and I had prepared for the trial right up until the moment the sky lightened, and the selection of witnesses and jurors in particular had gnawed at us to the very end.
A small commotion broke out in front of the courthouse.
"You are my son!"
Laszlo met Count Abaro's out-of-nowhere declaration of fatherhood with perfect composure. What had he said again—something about whether the Abaro line might as well be inherited by beasts instead of men?
Either way, it was a line that left me feeling thoroughly cleansed just from hearing it. If only the man had managed that back when it counted.
"Are you all right, Laszlo?"
I asked him, offhand, before we stepped into the courtroom. His face looked genuinely bright.
"I'm all right. Once the verdict is in, I imagine I'll feel even better."
The answer was so crisp and clean that I found myself thinking I had raised one fine disciple. What I ought to be doing was teaching him another Wind Spirit Art or two, not dawdling out here.
The moment I entered the courtroom, the clerk announced my arrival at the top of his lungs.
"His Lordship Iden Esterzy, Lord Proxy of the Duchy, enters!"
A hundred-odd people rose as one and bowed their heads, and only when they saw me take my seat did they sit back down.
Those taking part in the trial were as follows. First, Sir Ollite, Chief Judge of the High Court, seated as associate judge. At the defendant's table sat Lancaster, president of the Ravenshade Merchant Guild; at the plaintiff's table, Treasurer Opils, appearing for the merchants' guild. Twelve "upright and honest" jurors occupied the seats to my right, while the gallery held the council members headed by Count Abaro along with several dozen others who had a stake in the proceedings.
Stakeholders... Lucian Grey, for instance. When our eyes met, Lucian gave me a sly, knowing smile. Planning to enjoy his rival's destruction from a front-row seat, was he?
"I call this trial to order."
From the elevated presiding judge's seat that looked down on them all, I declared the court in session. The clerk rose and began to recite the outline of the case.
"The court will now hear Case Number A-653-340498. This is a suit brought by the Treasury and the Esterzy Merchants' Guild against the defendant Lancaster, president of the Ravenshade Merchant Guild. Lord Proxy Iden Esterzy presides as chief judge, and a jury of twelve will hear the case and deliver the verdict. Members of the jury, listen carefully to all evidence and testimony so that the truth of this matter may be brought to light, and render a rational and impartial judgment."
The hastily assembled jury nodded along. Then Treasurer Opils took the floor.
"Our Treasury has investigated every last one of the Ravenshade Merchant Guild's transgressions..."
In a clear, carrying voice, Opils began to recite Ravenshade's sins: fraud, collusion, tax evasion and cooked books, smuggling and illegal trade, forged and falsified documents—and, decisively, the assault on the Treasury and the attempted destruction of evidence.
Opils rattled off the charges one by one while handing the jury the evidence that would prove each of them. A wise move; jurors scraped together that hastily might have struggled to follow the case.
I received a set of the materials as well. Every page was damning beyond argument. Not even a Daluo Immortal could have defended this, I thought—and whether a Daluo Immortal would qualify as a legal expert was beside the point.
"In accordance with the solemn laws of the Esterzy Duchy, we seek a sentence of life imprisonment for Guild President Lancaster, and a seven-year suspension of operations for the Ravenshade Merchant Guild."
"Life imprisonment!"
The one enraged by the sentence was Lancaster, president of Ravenshade.
"A seven-year suspension? Outrageous!"
The one enraged by the suspension was Count Abaro, chairman of the Noble Council. Their interests, it turned out, pointed in very different directions.
Then came the defense for Ravenshade. To summarize the gist of it...
"If Ravenshade falls, the duchy falls with it."
"How do you plan to answer for a collapsed economy? Think you can handle the unemployed?"
"Your brothers, sisters, and cousins are our employees. We are one and the same body."
"We'll plead guilty—just shave a little off the sentence. A suspension of operations? Are you trying to kill us all?"
That was the shape of it. Rather than pressuring me, they had brought out a strategy aimed at the jury. If the jurors refused to endorse a reduced sentence, they would be painted as traitors who had ruined the duchy with their own two hands.
The jury then withdrew to deliberate on the verdict, and from the look of things, the talks intended to run long.
"The mood seems to be tilting. A reduced sentence looks unavoidable," whispered Sir Ollite, the associate judge.
"That man is the most expensive lawyer in the duchy. His win rate is so high that people suspect him of being a mental-type Awakened—but an Awoken Ability is easy enough to deny, so..."
An Awakened, all right. I could not tell what his ability was exactly, but his mana kept flickering back and forth.
"Let's watch and see how it goes."
I gave Ollite a smile.
"The verdict is in," the clerk announced a short while later. A single sheet of paper passed from the jury box into my hand. I unfolded it and read it out, slowly and clearly, for everyone to hear.
"Guilty, by unanimous verdict. With no reduction in the sentence."
"Impossible!"
"There's no way!"
The defense leaped up from their seats, shouting. I turned the paper around so they could see it for themselves.
"I merely read what was written. You are not accusing me of defiling this court, I trust."
Not a soul sat back down. They plainly could not bring themselves to believe it.
"But a unanimous verdict... there's no way it could be unanimous."
Why? Because the lawyer had been a mental-type Awakened, that's why.
"The jury!"
Count Abaro shouted, jabbing a finger at me.
"A jury thrown together in a single day! You must have rigged it somehow!"
With his family's ruin staring him in the face, he seemed to have decided to go down swinging.
"Remove him."
The knights dragged the count's bloated frame out of the courtroom.
"The verdict is confirmed. The defendant is sentenced to life imprisonment. The Ravenshade Merchant Guild is suspended from operations for seven years."
I rapped the gavel twice.
"This is a fraud! A con job!"
The uproar kept rolling long after the court was adjourned, and thanks to it the knights were kept nearly as busy as they had been dealing with Gulrok.
Just when it seemed order had finally been restored, Lucian came to find me.
"That was quite a show."
"Glad you enjoyed it."
"Oh, it was sweet. But entertainment is fleeting, my lord. Filling the hole Ravenshade leaves behind will take more than two of me."
For all his groaning, he was smiling.
"By the way—about that jury of yours."
"What about the jury?"
"Faces I have never seen in these parts. They might as well have sprung up out of the ground."
I flinched inwardly. What was with this man? Had he memorized the face of every soul living in the city?
"Well. I will take it as proof of just how firm your resolve is, Lord Iden."
In truth, Lucian had seen exactly right. The jurors really had sprung up out of the ground. If my master ever learned I had spent Daoist arts on something like this, he might pluck me bald—but this trial had never been about justice. It was an arena for deciding who would become Duke.
That was why the other side had come out in full force, bribing the jury and seating an Awakened among them as "counsel." So I had seated a few talismans of my own and called them a jury.
It was about time I settled my identity, I decided. Not a Daoist who had become a duke's third son, but a duke's third son who happened to know Daoist arts.
I meant it.
I do have to become Duke by any means necessary, after all.