They Wrote Me Fat and Doomed, So the Judge Paid My Fine novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Six Counts

The Lord Justice reads six counts to her face, then tells her plainly that he has wanted her for six years, just as her father's carriage arrives.

The summons came the next morning, in a box, with a black ribbon on it.

Hall of Records, the eleventh bell.

I went in my own carriage with the Ardaval crest on the door.

A maid sat across from me twisting her apron the whole way.

She had told me at breakfast, very politely, that the household had been told to expect me to be taken from it.

I had eaten three eggs anyway.

[+5. Ate breakfast.]

The Hall of Records was a long cool room under the palace, full of shelves and clerks.

The clerks left when I came in.

Bastian Orrelo stood at the far end beside a table piled with paper, in his black robe, with a pen in his hand.

He did not look up until the door shut.

"Sit, my lady."

I sat.

The chair was too narrow for me. I took it anyway and it creaked.

He looked at the chair, and then at me, and I saw his jaw move.

"I'll have a wider one sent in," he said. "Forgive me. I did not think."

"I've sat in worse."

"Not in this hall."

He sent a clerk's stool away with one finger and came round the table, and stood in front of me.

"Six counts," he said. "I will read them. You will hear them to the end."

"All right."

He read from a paper without glancing at it.

"One. On the third of the month, at the Orange Court, you cut Inés Lorca's gown to ribbons with a pair of embroidery scissors."

"I did that."

I said it before I knew I would.

I had no memory of it. But the body knew, and my stomach turned over at how it had felt.

He looked up.

"Two. On the orchard stair, you pushed her," he read.

"I did that too," I said. "Once. On the second step. She wasn't hurt."

"Three. You gave poison to a dog belonging to the Queen."

"I never touched a dog," I said.

"Four. You struck a maid. Five. You put nightshade in the Prince's cup at the hunt."

"Six," he read. "You said, before witnesses, that the Queen is a thief."

I laughed.

I couldn't help it.

"Is that last one a crime?"

"It is the worst one," he said, perfectly serious.

Then he put the paper down.

"I read all six," he said, "so that you know what the plaza will hear. You admit two. I believe you about the rest."

"Why?"

"Because you said I did that, plainly, the way you've never said anything. Lying people hide the true counts in the false ones."

I sat there with my hands in my lap.

I had read his chapters on a bus.

He was cold, cruel, relishing, a man who dropped his gaze on a woman and made her small.

He was looking at me now, and I did not feel small.

"Lord Justice," I said. "Why did you seat me at the Queen's table?"

"Because you were standing in the sun," he said.

"That is not an answer."

"No."

He came a step closer.

He stopped when his boots were against the hem of my skirt.

He smelled of ink and clean wool and, under that, some dark warm spice I couldn't name.

"You want it plainly," he said.

"Yes."

"I have wanted you for six years."

Everything in the hall went quiet, even my own head.

"At the Hollin Ball," he said, "you were twenty-two."

He went on without blinking.

"You walked up to me in front of forty people and told me I was a cold fish who ought to be warmed."

"I said that?" I asked.

"Three balls running. Three years. I had no answer to it any of the three times," he said.

He breathed in.

"I laughed that night, alone, in my carriage. I hadn't laughed in a year."

My mouth had gone dry.

"The sentence is mine to write, my lady. The Queen decided that there would be an Assize."

He kept his eyes on mine.

"I decide what the Assize says. I wanted you to hear first what I feel."

"I do not stand in that plaza hating you," he said.

"You can't mean that."

"I mean every word of it. I have never said a word I didn't."

He lifted one hand.

I watched it come.

He did not touch my face.

He straightened my collar, where the silk had folded under, with two long fingers.

The tips of them brushed the skin above my collarbone.

I felt it in my knees.

[+10. Took what you wanted.]

I had not even done anything.

"Cold fish," I said, to say something.

His mouth moved, very slightly, at one corner.

"Warm me," he said, "and we'll see."

I stood up too fast, and the chair scraped.

We were closer than we had been.

I could see the grey of his eyes was ringed in darker grey, and that he had not slept.

"I don't understand what you want from me."

"You," he said. "All of it."

"And I will not fight for it in the dark. You may as well know I intend to do it in front of everybody."

Outside, boots rang on the stone of the passage.

A clerk scratched at the door.

"Lord Justice," he said, with real fear. "Count Ardaval's carriage is in the court. He says he is here for his daughter."

Bastian did not move.

His hand had dropped to his side, and I saw it close into a fist.

"Let him wait," he said.

"He won't."

"No," Bastian agreed, quietly. "He never does."

I put my shoulders back.

I had a father.

I had seen him in Chapter Three of the book, a big red man at a table, saying a daughter's name like a stain.

"I'll go to him," I said.

"Ximena."

It was the first time he had used my name.

"Eat something first," he said. "Whatever he says, eat it."

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