Page 48 of This Monster of Mine

“Petitor Sarai, you’ll sit at the other end.” A familiar vigile with deep lines marring his forehead indicated a chair at the opposite corner of the table from Kadra’s.

The one at the main gates when I arrived. He’d also been at the Robing. “Thank you. Gaius, isn’t it?”

He gave her a stiff nod, and her smile drooped.Harion was right.These people would never forgive her for publicly disobeying Kadra. Sighting thedisapproval souring many a face in the audience, she sat down, feeling small without anger to buoy her.

Kadra unrolled a petition. The crowd fell quiet as he read out the plaintiff’s name. An irritated man elbowed his way to the front and sat in the plaintiff’s chair. And the strangest court session she’d ever heard of began.

Withzostaactive, she focused on the plaintiff and outraged defendant as they made their cases. At the plaintiff’s first lie, she turned to Kadra, unsure of how to bring it to his attention. She found him already watching her, silently asking how she wanted to do this.

She steeled her nerves and spoke to the crowd. “He’s lying.”

Some spectators gave her dubious looks but most gasped, riveted. She released a breath. At least they weren’t throwing tomatoes.

When it came time for judgment, she was a bundle of nerves. The plaintiff, guilty of theft of an astronomical sum of denarii, and now perjury, fell to his knees before Kadra, pleading for mercy.

She winced.Dear Lord Fortune, please let him take a finger.She couldn’t stomach a repeat of Ennius’s pyre.

“A year in the mines,” Kadra announced pleasantly.

What?She stared when two vigiles seized the struggling man and dragged him away. Turning back to Kadra, she stiffened at the cruel edge to his smile, like a knife catching sunlight, telling her that he knew what she’d expected. Swallowing, she reached for the next petition, feeling rather like he’d taken a knife to her insides.

She kept up with the first ten trials, transcribing judgments as quickly and legibly as she could. Then, they started to blur. Plaintiff, defendant, her Examination of both while they spoke, Kadra’s verdict, repeat. Barely registering the hundreds squeezed into the bazaar, she only broke focus from writing to interject when she’d caught a lie. But that didn’t stop the whispers.

“That’s the northerner who defied Tetrarch Kadra,” she caught a particularly loud one. But even more concerning than the dirty looks and tsking were the sly glances flicking quickly from her to Kadra as thoughmanifesting some sort of …connection. Every time she caught Kadra’s gaze and gave her answer, a buzz ran through the crowd like she’d committed a crime.

Impervious to it all, Kadra threw her for a loop with every judgment. Be it estate management or negligence, he was suddenly following the very letter of the Corpus. Shaking her head as he handed out yet another reasonable verdict, Sarai wondered if two souls inhabited his body, one being Ruin’s spawn, and the other the soul of justice.

By noon, she’d Examined so many people that she had half-forgotten who she was and had a splitting headache to boot. A quick check ofnihumbandzostaexplained the latter. They glowed an ugly crimson, warning her that she was running low on magic. Passing Kadra a completed judgment, she closed her eyes in relief at the empty expanse of table between them.Praise the Elsar, we’re done.

“Wait!” A man stumbled out of the crowd, covered in bruises. An cut on his forehead bled down the side of his face. “Tetrarch Kadra! Please hear one more!”

Without thinking, she started to her feet when two well-dressed men emerged from the hubbub and seized the wounded man. Blood marred their knuckles.

“Ignore him,” one in a red tunic called to Kadra. “This is a private matter.”

“And this ismyQuarter,” Kadra said in the too-calm tone she’d come to recognize meant danger.

The audience knew it too, because the bazaar fell silent. Seemingly realizing that he was out of luck, Red Tunic let the plaintiff go. Kadra nodded to a vigile who retrieved the man’s petition just as someone cleared their throat pointedly.

Behind her, Gaius groaned. “Fortune’s ass, not again.”

The onlookers parted for a stocky, pale-haired man in robes that made her suddenly very grateful that Kadra’s colors made them look like Death’s ferrymen. Gold, green, and blue, with bejeweled rings coagulated on every finger, the newcomer was the human embodiment of wealth.

“Why is he dressed like a bruise?” she muttered under her breath.

Gaius snorted, looking less antagonistic. “That’s Helvus, Metals Guildmaster. They’re Ur Dinyé’s most prominent Guild. A bit of a criminal group, too, the past few years.”

The Metals Guild again.Squinting at Helvus, she couldn’t imagine her younger self agreeing to go anywhere with him. “I thought people waited months for a scutum. Why would a Guild producing Ur Dinyé’s most in-demand commodity resort to crime?”

“Because they can. Forging scuta is slow, precise work, so supply is scarce. But need is always high, so the Guild sets what prices they want. They have the south at their mercy, so they’re untouchable.”

“Even by Ka—Tetrarch Kadra?”

“Without a Petitor, Tetrarch Kadra wasn’t allowed to hear any case against a favored Guild.” Gaius sounded outraged. “Helvus accused him of jailing people on baseless assumptions in other Guild cases.”

So there’s no love lost here. “Who are the favored Guilds favored by?”

Gaius began to respond when Helvus cleared his throat again.

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