I was standing at the back and most of the attendees were half-turned in their chairs to look, waiting for my explanation. I tried to drown them out, focusing on the man who’d set me up twice so far.

  “I was being chased by two other dabblers,” I chose the word on purpose, and looked at the Wickermen from my peripheral vision to see if I got a rise out of them.

  Nothing. Fuck. There went my plan to pull them in and get them to say something.

  “There was a chance that they might take some students hostage in order to get to me. So I decided to trigger a delayed fire alarm to get everyone out.”

  “You couldn’t simply pull a fire alarm?” Assad asked.

  “No, then it’d be a drill. I needed a real threat, something that the school would take seriously.” I avoid rolling my eyes, though it was a close call. “So I started a fire.”

  “That was not the right thing to say,” Wol muttered.

  “One could argue that you could have used mortal fire. Or avoid the use of fire altogether,” Assad pointed out. “A bomb threat perhaps? Something that avoided the use of your practice.”

  I felt my jaw clench. “There was the chance that I wouldn’t be believed with a false threat. It had to be real. There were two dabblers after me, one of them in full raiment with his staff, and another with her familiar trinkets. The night before, they trapped me in a warehouse with a feet-fetishist,” That earned a grin full of teeth from Assad “and was nearly killed. I was not taking any chances.”

  “It seems to me like you are trying to shift the blame,” Assad said. “But do you have proof that they would have exercised power and endanger others?”

  “The woman,” I said, “Sarah and her familiar, a fae named Exanguin. They hurt a girl. Not only that, she used an illusion in the hallway full of evacuating students.”

  Assad raised an eyebrow and then looked at Gamma.

  Gamma had his back to me, so I couldn’t see his expression. But the small kid was hunched over with his hands still in his pockets. “Truth,” Gamma said at last.

  “And the other guy is up there.” I pointed.

  God it sucked to be a tattletale but it felt so good to suckerpunch the guy who’d been after me since day one.

  “That’s one of yours,” Assad said to the Wickerman.

  The Wickerman leaned down, wrapping around his practitioner and began the damned whispering again. The practitioner's eyes went blank, as his head nodded along, like a robot programmed to do just that. “I shall tend to it, inside my own keeping.”

  “Since this has become a Table matter, Alpha, Beta, Gamma, you will follow through?”

  The warrior woman and Beta gave a curt nod. Gamma shivered in his seat but I assumed he said yes.

  “And this Exanguin–”

  The butterfly woman stood up from her seat. Tall, colorful, and slender, she reminded of what a flower would be like if it was turned human. Perhaps that’s what she was. “The practitioner and Exanguin are currently being educated.”

  Some of the kids giggled.

  When the Wickerman spoke up, I was of the mind that he’d do nothing about the matter. That’s how things worked. But somehow, I got the feeling that with the three stooges involved, the Wickerman couldn’t try anything funny.

  And the Fae…

  I had a feeling no one wanted to know what ‘being educated’ really meant.

  “Hm,” Assad said. “Their relation to the matter does not justify the excessive force with which you retaliated but the extenuating circumstances are more than understandable. All in favor of overlooking the incident?”

  Only one person abstained and the rest voted in favor.

  “That returns us to the other two practitioners,” He said after the vote passed.

  “Wait, I see how Hallow is implicated, but not us,” Mina hissed. “That was Hallow’s decision, not ours.”

  “Oh yes, but you aided him in his efforts, did you not? You had a chance to stop him. And you, little Valentine,” Assad pointed at Victor, “You actively took advantage of the situation to empower your familiar. Do you deny it?”

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Victor shrugged. “No.”

  “And you, Ms. Baek?”

  She clenched her fists at her side. “I aided the rescue, not the fire.”

  “Point stands, you were aiding Mr. Hallow in his attempts to use the fire to distract his pursuers. Hence, you are complicit in his actions,” Assad said, leaning forward.

  “You can contact my family. They will make the proper reparations,” Victor said. He promptly sat down without waiting for an answer.

  Mina glared daggers at Assad, then at Victor, then me. Her silence let Victor’s words quietly hang in the air, pointing out the obvious choice. For some reason or other, it took her a while to take it.

  “You’ll call them anyways even if I say no,” She said at last.

  “Point, we are aware of Society practices. So yes, we will be contacting your family, most likely Elder Baek,” Assad confirmed.

  “Do what you will,” Mina said and sank into her seat. “Slimy prick.”

  Assad didn’t so much as bat an eye at the insult. If anything, he enjoyed the futility of her effort. “We can move onto the final topic at hand. Hudson Witch? If you will?”

  I shared a look with Wol and knew that he was thinking the same thing. If that had been a trap meant to fuck with the trial in some way, that had been way too easy. Nothing ever happened without resistance, and they accepted my excuse without resistance. Mina and Victor too, it seemed like they were being punished, but they weren’t. I had no illusions about what kind of family they came from. Mina and Victor were cut from the same cloth as the well-to-do kids from my school. Any slap on the wrist that happened through their family would never be felt by the individuals themselves.

  The Hudson Witch took her time to stand. Placing her hands on the table to support herself, leaning forward and pushing the chair back, tucking a stray strand of graying hair behind her ears, smoothing the wrinkles in her gray garbs; every movement was deliberate, and lent a certain gravitas to her words.

  “I do not bring up a new matter, merely carrying forward the matter of these young practitioners,” She said, words slightly tinged with what I think was Scottish. “In their deliberation of the new Shin Heir, the Lawyer, Elder Baek, and Councillor Charlotte reached out to me, asking me to sit as judge.”

  Mina stood up again, popping off like a firecracker. “You know where my harabeoji is? You–”

  One of the practitioners stood and grabbed her before the sentence could be finished, forcing her to sit.

  “Peace, girl. The Elder is well enough, as are the rest of them. They are already at the place of trial,” the Witch said. “I deliver word to the people. Until sundown two days hence, no one is to approach the Mother Tree in Westchester. Are we agreed?”

  No one disagreed, but I didn’t see anyone strongly agree either.

  “This was a trap,” I said.

  Wol looked up, confusion apparent in his feline features.

  “We’ve been looking at it all wrong. I kept thinking they were setting this trap for me, but that wasn’t it all all,” I said, growing excited. “Think about it. Emyrith, the Elder, and the Councilor are all kept at the trial grounds without a way to contact us. Who does this benefit?”

  “No one, Practitioner,” Wol said, frowning. But not even a second after, his eyes widened in surprise.

  “That’s right. No one,” I said. “What’s my advantage over Victor and Mina? Skill in practice? Experience? Knowledge? Nothing. But that’s exactly how this is an advantage. I’m walking into this blind, but now they are too. This was a trap for them.”

  “But they still retain their other advantages,” Wol said. “Namely, being able to walk. This is not a big advantage, Practitioner, if it is at all.”

  “No, it is,” I became more sure as I explained. “They’ll make mistakes. Mistakes we can capitalize on. And there’s more.”

  “What?”

  “The factions, Wol,” I said, shaking my head. “What Abigail said. Look bigger.”

  I saw Wol turn his head, trying to see what I was getting at.

  Wol knew a lot of things. But this was perhaps one area where I excelled in more than him.

  Navigating the petty ways that people try to one-up each other. I saw it often enough at school among the students. I imagined that real life was not too different. Maybe some people outgrew it. Maybe some people didn’t. But the fact that there were factions here in the first place meant that there were internal politics and drama.

  It was a small, nearly insignificant trap, but the Table –the Hudson Witch– had done something to hurt the practitioners. Maybe it would be inconsequential, depending on how I played it, but it wasn’t about the result but the fact that she had done it which was important. That meant she wasn’t with them, and maybe by association I could assume that not a lot of the Table members had love for the members of Society. At the very least, they were neutral.

  The same probably went for the preternaturals that belonged to neither group. The Fae, the yokai, the numerous other unidentifiable beings.

  “You want to play them against–”

  “Ix-nay on the lan-pay,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “What? I do not understand.”

  I reset the crutch, getting ready to move as soon as the Hudson Witch called an end to the meeting. “Wol, who do you think we should talk to first?”

  “...the detritus girl. She will know better than I,” Wol said.

  “Let’s do that.”

  The Hudson Witch finished talking. “We’re all in agreement then,” She said, “As for the little ones, meet me here with your seconds within the hour after the meeting is adjourned. If you will all excuse me, I have preparations to make.”

  I stopped. “Seconds?

  The Hudson Witch stopped mid-way on her way out, almost as if she heard me. But there was no way she could have from this distance.

  “If you have no second, I advise you to secure one at once. Without a second, I have no choice but to remove you from the proceeding. Remember, within the hour, young ones.”