Whichwood(58)

She hadn’t finished thinking it all through before the silence was interrupted again. Alice, Benyamin, Oliver, and Madarjoon had pushed through the front doors of the courtroom with great fanfare, making no effort to hide their presence. Her friends had needed to take a separate train into town to catch the proceedings but, after elbowing their way through the mass of people crowding the exterior doors, Oliver had easily persuaded their way into the main hall and secured their seats up front. In fact, they were just settling into said seats when one of Laylee’s ghosts blew a gust of wind so strong it knocked the wig off the magistrate’s head. Furious, he slammed his gavel down several times, shouting for someone to fetch his hair from the floor and then, impossibly angrier, he pointed one sausage-y finger at Laylee and demanded she explain herself. She was somehow causing all this commotion, he said, and he didn’t know why or how, but he simply knew it to be true, and if she didn’t stop this nonsense right this instant, he would throw the entire case out and sentence her himself.

Laylee blanched.

“What does he mean, Mordeshoor?” asked a twentysomething-year-old. He’d stopped in the middle of an attempt to push over a table. “Why did he say he would sentence you? For what?”

“What’s going on?” said the tiny girl, who was beginning to cry. She stomped her feet along the ceiling so hard the entire room began to shake. “Why can’t we go home?”

“YOUNG LADY,” said the magistrate. “Did you hear what I said? If you don’t stop this right now, I’ll pass through a judgment to dissolve your mordeshoor magic immediately—”

“What—no!” cried the curly-haired woman, spinning circles around the angry judge.

“This is an outrage!” The elderly gentleman whooshed up to Laylee’s face so fast she had to sit back in her chair. “What would we do without a mordeshoor?”

Please, Laylee begged them again with her eyes, but her ghosts wouldn’t take the hint. The teenage spirit began shouting obscenities and rattling the remaining windows and the magistrate went so red in the face that Laylee was sure everything was about to fall apart. Desperate, she turned to her friends in a sudden panic, and in the time it took her to spin around, Oliver had already handled the situation. Not a moment later, the magistrate was sitting calmly in his seat, reading slowly from an official document. Laylee visibly exhaled.

She would find a way to deal with the ghosts later—for now, things needed to go according to the original plan.





The first half of the day dragged on.

Oliver administered persuasion where necessary in dealing with outbursts from the ghosts, while the counsel representing the interests of “The People of Whichwood” put forth what seemed like an endless stream of withering arguments against Laylee and the legacy of the mordeshoor. The ghosts, who were listening closely the whole time, were only growing more hostile. Their outbursts grew more violent as the day wore on, and it was all Laylee could do to keep from flinching at their angry cries, spontaneous tears, and rage-induced epithets. It was hard enough trying to ignore her ghosts’ fuming—

“Who do they think they are,” said the curly-haired lady, “telling our mordeshoor she can’t do her job?” She flew past a set of doors so aggressively they nearly came off their hinges.

“Threatening to take away her magic—”

“We can never let that happen!”

“They propose using those vile, modern methods,” said the older-gentleman ghost, “as if there’s any replacement for a mordeshoor! Modern magic would just throw us in the ground!”

“There’s no decency in it!”

But it was even harder for Laylee to sit through the accusations of incompetence from the prosecution. The arguments against her were so effortlessly dismissive—

“She’s just a child who has no idea what she’s doing!”

“She should be playing with dolls, not dead people!”

—that Laylee found it hard to imagine anyone would disagree. Every time one of the solicitors would shout some flippant nonsense about the obvious need to “put this infant on a playground, not a cemetery,” the jury nodded their heads in eager assent. Laylee looked away, heartbroken.

In the end, the mordeshoor was left feeling terribly demoralized.

The prosecution comprised seven attorneys, all angry and impassioned. On Laylee’s side, however, it was just her and a young, uninspired lawyer who’d been assigned to her that very morning. Meanwhile, the robust prosecution had presented hours of painful, genuinely thoughtful rhetoric compounded by another hour of rigorous questioning that succeeded in making Laylee feel small and inconsequential.

From the transcript:

“Do you go to school, young lady?”

“No.”

“Do you have any toys?”

“No.”

“Is that blood on your clothes?”

“I—yes, but—”

“Do you have any parents?”

Silence.

From the judge: “Please answer the question, Ms. Fenjoon.”

“No,” said Laylee quietly. “I do not have any parents.”

“So you live alone?”

“Yes.”

“In an old, drafty castle, where you spend your days by yourself washing the bodies of dead pe—”