The Worth of Iron

There are times in a man’s life when he must look back down the path he has taken and recall each crossroad where a simple, seemingly inconsequential choice led him to his present circumstance. The man in question was me, and the circumstance was, of course, my trial for murder.

It wasn’t going well.

I had lost the thread of the tediously droning arguments that had taken both the morning and the better part of the afternoon. A pair of dour-faced solicitors in gray robes strode back and forth across the floor, regaling the judge with a list of my imagined virtues and understated flaws. I was finding it harder and harder to tell the difference. Nor could I distinguish which of the two men at the podium was meant to be arguing my case. Whoever he was, I certainly hadn’t made things easy for him.

The evidence was as straightforward as it was damning. On the night Duke Edvar Dashski had wound up with a knife in his back, I had been found hiding in a closet in Lyekeep, the small castle where I had grown up and which had become his holding. Happenstance such as that was not all too rare in my life, though from the way people were acting, you’d think no one in this court had heard of a coincidence before.

Not that it mattered, but I was innocent—if only because delays on the road to revenge had let someone else get there first. I considered saying as much, just in case there was anyone in the courtroom who had not yet made up their mind. I feared they all had. Though a verdict had not yet been reached, the gallows had been mentioned more than once, which was more than I liked.

I tried to catch the judge’s attention. Perhaps I would see something in her gaze to lend me a small measure of hope. But behind a pair of owlish spectacles, her eyes were inscrutable. I could read nothing there but professional, detached interest. She played very well the part of an elderly judge. Perhaps I was the only one in this courtroom who knew she was not what she seemed.

Even with her red hair tucked beneath a powdered wig and her face concealed by layers of heavy cosmetics, my childhood friend Bruni was so clearly herself that I wondered how no one else could see it. Her movements were too quick, her smile too bright, to belong to an old woman. It was sloppy work, the kind that would have earned her a reprimand during our shared training in the art of subterfuge. It galled me how I had once prided myself on my careful effort, thinking it was artistry to fool the unsuspecting when the less flattering truth was that no one ever cared to look that closely.

Worse yet, I was beginning to think she wasn’t here to save me.

I had been hopeful when I walked into the courtroom and saw Bruni. That hope had dwindled as the long hours of the trial progressed with no intervention. It seemed increasingly likely that I might die here.