I’d been in a courthouse before. Not for legal reasons; it was just a convenient place for Chelsea’s tracker. My first time, I’d been terrified that the blessed flooring and silver door latches would burn my cursed flesh, but I’d stopped expecting that years ago. Still, as I made my way past the rows of reporters, classmates, and various friends and family of Matt and myself towards the front of the room, I was careful not to touch anything. Casey had explained that there might be people on the jury who thought the traditional effects of the courtroom would protect them from my curse and there was no reason to flagrantly violate that belief and risk making them scared of me by touching anything.
Casey opened the little gate between the audience and the court proper for me, and we took our seats. The prosecutor hadn’t arrived yet, but there were several police sitting at the prosecution’s desk, watching me carefully. Behind them, in the front row of the audience, sat Matt’s parents and a stern-looking suited man whom I took to be their lawyer. The parents weren’t looking at me, but the lawyer’s eyes didn’t leave my face.
“What, exactly, happens if we do lose?” I whispered to Casey.
“We won’t.”
“But if we do?”
“If the jury finds you guilty then Judge Eagle will assign a penalty appropriate to the severity of your crime, taking into account intent, injury to Mr Parker, endangerment of the other people on school grounds and, of course, the precedent penalties applied to this sort of crime. This result would greatly support the Parkers in pursuing a civil suit against you.”
“Penalty like prison.”
“You are a minor, so…”
“Like juvie, then.”
“Our case is quite strong. There’s no need to worry.”
Just then, the prosecuting lawyer walked in. He was tall, serious-looking, and carried a large stack of papers. As he sat down, he turned to chat briefly to the Parkers’ lawyer sitting behind him.
“What are they doing?” I asked.
“Everything in their power to sabotage you, I have to assume.”
“Should we be worried about that?”
“It’s expected. Highly unethical, of course. But that lawyer can’t pursue his case and get paid unless that lawyer wins this case. They’re going to use the testimony of Mr Parker’s family to make you look as bad as possible.”
That definitely sounds like something we should be worried about, but before I could respond, I noticed something else – the mage mark tattooed on the back of the prosecuting judge’s hand. Before I could ask about it, the jury filed in and the bailiff announced, “All rise for the Honourable Greg Eagle!”
We stood. The judge swept in. He was a broad man of about sixty, with a square jaw and tired eyes that said he just wanted to get this over with so he could go and do more important things. He wore the traditional black robe, holly crown and silver rings like he’d been wearing them most of his life, which he probably had. He picked up the gavel, rapped it twice on the desk, and announced, “This is now a court!”
He sat. We sat.
“We are here to hear the case of the state versus Kelsie James on a charge of assault and criminal endangerment with a curse,” Judge Eagle intoned, already sounding bored. “Bailiff, swear in the parties.”
The bailiff approached me with a small bowl of holly water and a piece of paper helpfully containing the vow. I didn’t need it; Casey had coached me on this part. I dipped a finger into the water and touched it to each of my eyelids and my top lip, symbolically dispelling any evil influence over my sight or my words, before announcing, “I, Kelsie Marie James, do vow in this court to speak honestly, to make no intent to deceive judge or jury through lies, omission or other means, to pursue clarity and justice, and to submit to the judgement of judge and jury.” The vow felt like a lie, both because it was a lie (I had no intention of revealing that I’d lashed out at Matt on purpose) and because of the name I was swearing under. Maybe those two things cancelled out.
The bailiff moved on to swear in Casey and the prosecutor (whose name, I learned, was Gerald Spline), and then finally the judge, who vowed to run the case fairly and in accordance with the law. The jury swore in as a group, and finally, we were able to begin.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” Mr Spline began, striding purposefully across the room, “today I will demonstrate for you that on the twelfth of June this year, this young man lured a fellow student, Matthew Parker, up onto the roof of his school and attacked him with a curse, resulting in a long series of hospital stays and complications for Mr Parker who is, at this very moment, in serious condition. We allege that this attack is the latest and most serious in an ongoing string of attacks against members of Mr James’ community, resulting in dozens of victims. Thank you.”
What? That was new. I glanced at Casey, and what I saw was anything but reassuring – Casey’s eyes were narrow, their brow furrowed in confusion. It was perhaps the most expressive I’d ever seen Casey’s face.
Mr Spline sat down. Casey stood.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Mr James was cursed at six months old. Today you will see how he has managed that curse with the utmost care and responsibility his whole life, until Mr Parker chased him onto a roof and continually attempted to provoke his until he stimulated the curse outside of Mr James’ will or control. This is a clear example of the Kiera Exception, wherein a cursed person cannot be held responsible for the accidental consequences of unintentionally invoking their curse, should they exercise reasonable caution to account for known dangers. Thank you.”
“Have both parties concluded their opening arguments?” the judge asked.
“Yes, Your Honour.”
“Yes, Your Honour.”
“Then Mr Spline, please present your case.”
“I call the accused to the stand.”
With trembling legs, I made my way to the front of the room. Everyone was looking at me. Well, everyone had been looking at me since I’d walked in, but it sure felt a lot more intense when I had to face them. I tried to look neither nervous nor cocky as I took my seat.
“Mr James, could you please describe the events June twelfth? Starting from… oh, let’s say, starting from when you got to school.”
“Right.” I cleared my throat. “I got to school about ten minutes early, like I usually do. I happen to check my phone for the tracker – oh, I guess I should explain that. So there’s this game my friend and I play, right, where we take in turns hiding a tracker and retrieving it. I see she’s hidden it on the school roof, so I figure I can go get it and re-hide it before lunch. I get up on the school roof, and that’s when I see Matt.”
“Matthew Parker? The boy you attacked?”
“The one who fell off the roof. He follows me up, and starts yelling all this awful stuff at me.”
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“What sort of things?”
“Things about… well, he’d found out I was cursed, somehow. So he starts yelling these questions and accusations about that. I don’t want to repeat them, but they’re in the police report, I think. It was really awful stuff.” My hands were trembling. I swallowed, took a moment to compose myself, and kept going. “I ignored him, got the tracker, and was preparing to get back down when he starts throwing stuff at me.”
“He threw things at you?”
“Yeah. Really hard, right in my face, like he was trying to knock me down. They turned out to be holly berries. He was getting closer and closer to me, saying… all this awful stuff while he threw them at me.”
“And then?”
“I tossed a handful back, and screamed at him, and he – ”
“What did you scream at him?”
“Well, I don’t exactly remember. Later, the police told me I screamed that he should just die, but at the time I was just, you know, trying to get him to back off. And then the… the power poured out of me, and I tried to clamp down on it, but I couldn’t. It summoned a big gust of wind or force or something and knocked us both off the roof. And then there were the police and paramedics and… that’s basically how it happened.”
There. I was pretty sure I’d hit all the important notes just how we’d rehearsed them. I didn’t dare glance at Casey for confirmation, and they wouldn’t have given it if I had, but I was pretty sure that I’d done everything right.
“So, for clarification, you admit that your curse knocked Matthew Parker off the roof and put him in hospital, where he remains fighting for his life to this day, but claim that it did so outside of your control.”
“Y-yes.”
“And this tracker. What did you do with it?”
“What?”
“The tracker. That you and your friend play with. You went onto the roof to retrieve it, then what?”
“I hid it in the hospital for Chelsea to find.”
“What happened to it after that?”
“Uh, Chelsea must have found it, because she hid it for me again.”
“On the nineteenth of November last year, you were caught breaking into the kitchen of a local McDonald’s. Is this correct?”
What did that have to do with anything? “Probably? I mean, I remember that happening, but I’m not sure about the date.”
“Were you pursuing this tracker?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Did you know that three days after that incident, the fryer in that kitchen broke, resulting in severe hot oil burns to two employees?”
“I didn’t. I’m sorry to hear that.”
“And then, on the eighth of February, Mrs Andrea Delaney of seventeen Ashwood Lane suffered damage to her guttering as a result of you climbing on it. She knows it was you because you apologised and repaired the gutters the next day. Were you seeking the tracker this time, too?”
“Yes.”
“And on Thursday that very week, Mrs Delaney was admitted to hospital for pneumonia, with no obvious cause. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I have a list here of thirteen such cases of severe misfortune hitting civillians within three or four days of Mr James trespassing on their property in search of this tracker. What this demonstrates is that Mr Parker’s fate is not the result of a singular accident, but part of a pattern of Mr James inflicting deliberate harm upon his neighbourhood using the dark powers granted to him.”
“Objection!” Casey stood up. “Your Honour, not only is the prosecution using evidence that was not released to us, but coincidental misfortunes in Mr James’ neighbourhood bear no relevance on this case. This is about what happened to Mr Parker.”
“Overruled,” Judge Eagle said, sounding bored. “If Mr James does have a history of causing harm using his curse, it is relevant to this case.”
“Mr James,” Mr Spline continued, “on the third of February this year…”
One by one, we ran down the list of all thirteen cases. Most of them I vaguely remembered, although I could never be sure on dates. And after each one, the lawyer explained what had happened to someone in that vicinity shortly after.
“And might I remind the jury,” he said afterward, “that these are only the cases that we were able to uncover. The nature of this tracker game is such that records for most rounds of the game do not exist. The number of incidents could be much larger, and we would never know. They could – ”
“Objection,” Casey interrupted. “Speculation.”
“Sustained. Please stick to the evidence, Mr Spline.”
“Of course, Your Honour. These incidents indicate a pattern of deliberate harm, but no incident is as bad as the last, involving Mr Parker. I have here Mr Parker’s hospital records following the incident, provided with his family’s permission, as well as photographs taken two days ago. If I may…?”
Judge Eagle nodded. “Bailiff?”
The bailiff took a fat folder from Mr Spline and handed sheafs of paper to the judge, the jury, and Casey. Casey only glanced through them; presumably, they already had access to this evidence. But they hadn’t shared it with me, so when Mr Spline slid a photo in front of me, I couldn’t keep the shock off my face. Matt wasn’t the same jerk who’d swaggered around the schoolyard for years; he was thin, pale, and his face was half-hidden by an oxygen mask. He lay under a network of tubes and monitors, with at least two separate drips in his arm; possibly more, behind all the other equipment. They’d said there were complications, but…
“Mr Parker is currently suffering from a severe infection resulting from a botched operation on his knee, to correct a poorly healed break in a long chain of unfortunate events ultimately originating with his fall from that roof,” Mr Spline explained. “The details are in the records provided, but to simplify, it would seem that Mr James’ command to ‘just die!’ is being obeyed. The pattern of misfortune he has inflicted – ”
“But my curse doesn’t work that way!” I snapped. “It pushed him off the roof! It’s physical, not… not like that!”
“And what evidence do you have to support that claim? You claim that you’ve never used it before, and that you didn’t use it this time – that it lashed out without your control. So how do you have such detailed information on how it supposedly works, Mr James?”
I opened my mouth. I closed it again. I didn’t know how my curse worked, so how could I make such a claim? Even taking into account using it in Miratova’s lab, which I didn’t want to mention at the trial without Casey’s say-so, proved nothing. Maybe the lawyer was right. I hadn’t intentionally been hurting random people, but what if the curse had? What if I’d been causing misfortune to everyone for years, and hadn’t realised it?
“No further questions, Your Honour.”
It was Casey’s turn to question me. “Mr James, how long have you been cursed?”
“Since I was about six months old.”
“And in that time, have you made any attempt to suppress your curse or protect people from it?”
“Yes.”
“What did you do?”
“Everything we could think of. Salt on the windows and doors, sleeping with a silver knife in my crib as a baby, wearing a stone with a waterbored hole over my heart, reciting…” I went on for a while, listing every anti-curse measure I could remember. Casey didn’t interrupt me once. I kept an eye on the jury, but it was difficult to tell whether they were more swayed by my responsible victim image or Mr Spline’s characterisation of me as a malicious witch.
“When Matthew Parker followed you onto the roof that day, how did you feel?”
“Afraid, mostly.”
“Not angry?”
“A little. He was being very aggressive, and saying some pretty awful things, but I don’t let myself get angry, because I didn’t know if anger was a trigger for the curse. I knew I couldn’t let myself get angry under any circumstances, and I knew that if he hit me, I wouldn’t be able to fight back, because that might trigger the curse. I was essentially helpless, and he was pretty angry, since he’d just found out about the curse. I just wanted to get away from him as fast as possible.”
“And yet, you did fight back.”
“I didn’t mean to! I needed space. He’d cornered me, and I needed to get off the roof and calm down before something terrible happened and got somebody hurt. I tossed some of the berries back at him and yelled at him to get him to back off, just enough for me to get out of there, and… and that was enough, I guess, to lose control. Just like that, fourteen years of hard work down the drain. I’d kept the curse from hurting anyone for so long, and now…” My palms hurt where my own fingernails dug into them. I could feel the sting of tears in my eyes. We’d gone over how I should answer this question, but hadn’t rehearsed it, because it wasn’t supposed to sound rehearsed. I hadn’t expected it to be this difficult to say. Why had it been easier to admit to Casey that I’d attacked Matt on purpose, than it was to admit the reason now?
“Mr James had successfully imprisoned a curse for fourteen years, taking every possible precaution to keep it inactive. He went above and beyond, making more sacrifices and imposing more restrictions than we can reasonably expect of any cursed person, for the public good. And then Mr Parker, upon discovering the curse, willfully and deliberately tracked him down, willfully and deliberately provoked him, taunted him and physically attacked him. I see no possible motive for such behaviour except as a deliberate attempt to stimulate Mr James’ curse, and even if that was not the motive, Mr Parker knew the risks to his behaviour as much as Mr James. Mr Parker’s injuries, sad and terrible as they are, are self-inflicted; Mr James did everything within his power to protect his attacker. If you are a passenger in a car, and you assault the driver, running him off the road, is the driver responsible for your injuries?
“As for the history of injuries that Mr Spline has attempted to establish, he has provided no evidence whatsoever that Mr James is responsible for any of them. Mr James, as I’m sure you all noticed on the stand, was not even aware of them. Mr James has been playing this ‘tracker game’ for most of his life; a handful of coincidental injuries in locations he has visited are to be expected, on pure chance, and there is no reason to attribute the random misfortunes of life to somebody else’s curse.
“No further questions, Your Honour.”