Trial by Fire by Josephine Angelini
“Because she believes they’re going to destroy the world,” Rowan replied, not looking up from his task. “She says science is corrupt.”
“But that man. The one the soldiers killed in the woods,” she said haltingly. “You said he was a teacher. Why lump him in with the scientists?”
“Because she’s a power-hungry bitch who wants to rule the world with an iron fist?” Tristan offered. “A bitch we need to overthrow,” he added, dart-like, at Rowan’s back.
“That’s an oversimplification, Tristan,” Rowan countered calmly. He took the pancakes off the skillet and put them on a plate. “Lillian is killing teachers because most teachers teach their students critical thinking. And doctors, her other target, have to use the scientific method to diagnose and heal their patients. Both of these things promote free inquiry and, ultimately, science. Which she thinks is the devil. Do you want maple syrup?”
“Yeah, thanks,” Lily said, taking her plate and the fork Rowan handed to her. There was so much going on in the room, so many hidden conversations that she could almost hear, but not quite, that she was getting dizzy. “But why does she think that? I’ve been noticing that magic is kind of like science. No—it is science. It’s just a different way of manipulating the natural world. We use machines; you use magic.”
“Magic is a science only people who are born with a particular talent can do,” Rowan said. He poured maple syrup on Lily’s pancakes. “Actual science can be done by anyone. Repeated by anyone. And there’s no way for Lillian to control what people do with it or how far it spreads.”
Caleb guffawed. “Like Tristan said. She’s a power-hungry bitch who wants to rule the world with an iron fist.”
Rowan rolled his eyes. “She’s much more than that.”
Lily wondered why Rowan would defend Lillian if he wouldn’t defend her. Her throat stung. She didn’t much feel like eating his pancakes and left them on the counter.
* * *
Juliet helped Lillian dress. The bodice hung loosely around her sister’s wasted frame.
“We’ll have to take this in. I’ve pulled the laces as tight as they’ll go,” Juliet said, with a hint of scolding in her tone.
“No. We’ll have my tailor add padding,” Lillian replied.
“Or you could eat more.” Juliet waited, but her sister didn’t comment. After a long pause, she continued. “I understand why you wouldn’t want Gideon to touch you, but have you thought about what I suggested? About claiming another mechanic to help heal you? You’ve kept whatever this sickness is at bay for nearly a year now, but obviously you can’t do it on your own anymore.”
Lillian pulled away from Juliet’s fussing and sat down at her makeup table. “I don’t want another mechanic.”
Juliet watched her sister dab blush on her bleached cheeks. She’d long suspected that the only reason Lillian allowed her and only her to touch her was because, as a latent crucible with almost no magic, Juliet was the only person close to Lillian who wouldn’t be able to tell exactly how sick she was.
“People know you’re sick now,” Juliet said.
“I know they do.”
“Then why not claim a mechanic—a good one—who can help heal you?”
As usual, Juliet got no answer. She tried for what must have been the thousandth time to reach out and share mindspeak with her sister. Again, she hit up against a wall around Lillian’s mind.
Lillian sighed. “My sickness isn’t the only thing I’m keeping to myself, Juliet. Please understand. I shut you out because I’m trying to protect you.”
It was the same answer Lillian had been giving her since she came back from her mysterious disappearance, and Juliet knew she would get no more out of her. She glossed and smoothed her sister’s curls in silence before helping her down to the main hall to hear the newest prisoner—a doctor.
There was a fever sweeping through the Outlanders. Citizens of the Thirteen Cities were entitled to free medicine from the Covens during a public health crisis such as this and they had nothing to fear from the fever, but the outbreak was killing Outlanders at an alarming rate. Children were the most vulnerable. Lillian had seized several Outlander doctors who had been feeding bread mold to the afflicted children. It was an open and shut case of child abuse as far as Juliet could see, but Lillian had insisted that the Coven and the Council hear the leader out before she sentenced them all.
Juliet still couldn’t believe that anyone would be so inhumane as to feed mold to a sick child, but the Outlanders were brutish like that. Juliet had heard that they even sewed wounds together. Just the thought made her queasy. She had never condoned her sister’s harsh punishments—she didn’t agree with capital punishment for any reason—but she did agree that the Outlanders needed to accept magic as the one and only way. Sure, it was expensive to hire a healing crucible and her mechanic, but giving mold to children and calling it a cure? That was downright barbaric.
When they arrived in the main hall, Council Leader Thomas Danforth greeted Juliet and Lillian with an oily smile. Juliet returned it, not because she liked Gideon’s rat-faced father, but because she knew her sister wouldn’t, and the last thing they needed was to slight Danforth at the moment. Not when her sister’s other self was running around stars know where, wreaking havoc everywhere she went. Juliet felt a surge of worry at the thought of Lily. She recalled Lily’s frightened eyes and how they’d melted with relief at the first sight of Juliet at the top of the stairs. Her sister needed her, and … Juliet stopped herself. Lily wasn’t her real sister, even though it felt like she was. Juliet shook her head to clear her confusion and focused on Lillian instead.
“Lady,” Danforth said. The assembled hosts stood up from their seats behind one side of a long table that spanned the length of one end of the great hall. Danforth led the dignitaries in a respectful bow.
“You may be seated,” Lillian said in a perfunctory way. She had never enjoyed the pomp and circumstance of being the Lady of Salem, and now that she was ill she barely tolerated it.
Juliet stayed close to Lillian, but she didn’t help her into her grand chair at the center of the long table. She knew better than to make Lillian look like an invalid. Once Lillian was situated, Juliet took a seat on an unobtrusive velvet-cushioned stool that had been set up for her behind her sister’s right elbow. Although seated in her imposing chair with the all-female Coven members on her right and the all-male Council members to her left, Lillian didn’t need Juliet’s cosseting to make her look like an invalid. Her giant chair seemed to swallow her frail body. It did not, however, swallow her voice or the authority it conveyed.
“Bring in the prisoner,” Lillian commanded.
A tall, thin man was brought in. He didn’t look overtly Outlander. He had brown hair and eyes, but he wasn’t quite as dark as most of them were. Outlanders were a mix of many races. Some had even been citizens once and been expelled from one of the Thirteen Cities for one reason or another—usually for something criminal. It could be hard to tell where exactly someone came from. But Juliet saw streaks of red and black on the backs of the doctor’s hands and on his cheek. He stood tall in front of the long table, facing the line of judges. Proud. He was definitely one of Alaric’s painted savages.
“Michael Snowshower. You have been charged with practicing science,” Danforth said, beginning the proceedings. “How do you plead?”
Snowshower spared Danforth one disdainful glace, and then looked at Lillian. “How do I plead?” he repeated quietly. “I plead for the lives of my people.”
Juliet heard Nina, one of the senior witches of the Coven, make an exasperated sound and saw her roll her eyes. “After feeding them something that will only make the fever worse?” Nina asked sarcastically.
“The mold is an antibiotic. It saves some,” Snowshower replied defensively. Juliet looked at him carefully and saw truth in his eyes. This was no charlatan. He truly believed the mold helped.
“But what you don’t know is that the mold only
“Yes, but we’ve learned that if the mold is taken at a higher dosage for a full two weeks, it does kill all the infection,” Snowshower argued back, if a bit uncertainly. “We’ve saved thousands—”
“And while you’ve been running your little scientific experiments about how long the mold should be taken and in what concentration, you’ve created a biological monster,” Lillian said, silencing him. “Because of you—meddling in things you don’t understand—the fever has become so deadly that half the Outlander children probably won’t survive the winter. Like all scientists, you promise a cure but you deliver greater hazards and more death. You are a murderer, Michael Snowshower.”
Snowshower dropped his head, nodding to himself as if he were accepting responsibility for all that Lillian had said.
“But what other choice do we have?” he asked, raising blazing eyes to meet Lillian’s. “The Covens will sell us spells, but few of us can afford them. Even if a whole family starved for it, most can’t pay what a witch asks for one tab of your magic-made antibiotics. Should the Outlanders do nothing just because they’re poor? Lay their sick down and let the weakest ones die?”
Lillian leaned forward in her chair, an angry red flush burning through the pink makeup on her cheeks.
“Yes.” Her eyes matched his for fire and her voice grated in her throat with passion. “Better a few die than to do what you have done. You have admitted your crime freely. No trial is necessary. Michael Snowshower, you will hang.”
While the court clerks scribbled down the judgment and punishment in their little books, Juliet stared at her sister in disbelief. Snowshower was only trying to help as many of his people as he could. He was a good man, albeit misguided. She looked up and down the row of dignitaries, sitting in their plush chairs, nodding their heads in agreement with Lillian’s decree. Not one of them tried to make a plea for the man.
Snowshower barely flinched. He’d known all along that he would die, and hearing it firsthand made little difference to him. Carefully, deliberately, Michael Snowshower got down on his knees in front of Lillian.
“Lady of Salem, I beg you to save the children of my people,” he said, holding his painted hands out to her, palms up. “Please, Great Lady. Make a gift of your magic. Don’t let them suffer and die.”
Juliet’s gaze flew to her sister’s face. Surely, Lillian would do something to help. Juliet knew her sister was strict, harsh even, but Lillian would never allow thousands of innocent children to die. But instead of finding compassion in Lillian’s expression as she expected, Juliet saw triumph.
“I want names, Michael. Three names in particular,” Lillian said, a small smile on her dry lips.
Snowshower’s outstretched arms dropped in defeat. “I don’t have them,” he said weakly. Even Juliet could tell he was lying.
“Then I don’t have the spell.” Lillian sat back in her giant chair, completely at ease. She looked down the row to her right at her Coven, her voice light. “Does anyone in my Coven have a spell to cure the Outlanders?”
They laughed. Juliet felt her heart shrivel at the sound. She looked at Michael Snowshower, still on his knees, as he realized that his fate was going to be worse than the death he’d already accepted.
“I’m sorry, My Lady,” Nina answered with an obsequious smile. “It appears that the tithe for this particular spell is three names. The Coven can’t work without a tithe.”
“You have a choice, Michael Snowshower,” Lillian said, her tone suddenly shifting from false gaiety to deadly serious. “It’s not unlike the choice you made when you decided to use science. You see, when you chose to start meddling in things that you don’t understand, you were choosing to save a few lives over the thousands who would suffer from the consequences of your actions. You are exactly where you put yourself, Michael Snowshower. Now you have the choice to protect three dangerous scientists who, like yourself, offer the world nothing but false promises and death, or save—what is it, Thomas? Twenty thousand?” Lillian asked Danforth, leaning to her left.
“If it’s as bad a winter as we think it will be, estimates place the death toll at twenty-one thousand, Lady,” Danforth replied with a sanctimonious frown.
“Twenty-one thousand dead,” Lillian said slowly. She leaned forward, genuinely pleading with Snowshower. “You ask me to save the children, but it’s in your power, Michael. I need three names. Three lives for twenty-one thousand. Please. Please save them.”
CHAPTER
10
“No. Keep your eyes closed,” Rowan ordered. “Use your stones to see inside the leaf, stage by stage. You have to learn how to control this, Lily. Go easy. Don’t just rush in.”
Lily closed her eyes and tried to ignore her pounding head—and the faint sense of him there in her mind with her, watching her as she tried to complete the simple task of zooming in on a fern frond. How was she supposed to calm down and focus if Rowan was essentially breathing down her spinal cord? Especially since she enjoyed being close to him and feeling the touch of his presence in her mind.
Today’s lesson was about controlling her power, and Lily’s continuing problem was an excess of strength. All Tristan and Rowan wanted her to do was look at a fern and increase her ability to see into it, as with a microscope, using slow, measured increments of magnification until she was down to the atomic level. To Lily, this was like trying to hold a glass doll with a vice. Her problem wasn’t ability. She could look so closely that not only could she see into the atom, but she could see down to the quarks and beyond to the squiggly, almost alive-looking strings that jigged enchantingly through a dozen dimensions. She just had a slight problem doing it slowly.
“No,” Rowan scolded when she skipped a magnification level. “I told you to stop before you could differentiate the cell walls. You’re looking at a single cell’s mitochondria. That’s deeper than I asked.” Lily groaned, but Rowan had no pity for her. “Stop there and observe it,” he said. “Then draw for me, in all the exact stages, how the mitochondria turn sugar into energy by passing the spare electron around in a circle.”
That would take forever. For a second, Lily thought she might start crying.
“Ro,” Tristan objected. “She’s exhausted. You can’t expect her to observe a whole cycle.”
“How else is she supposed to learn?” Rowan snapped.
“But I already learned this,” Lily whined. “Mr. Carnello taught me this in eighth grade. It’s the citric acid cycle discovered by Hans Krebs, like, seventy years ago.”
“Try about two hundred and seventy years ago. Here anyway,” Tristan said with a sympathetic smile. “And we’ve never heard of any Hans Krebs. The cellular energy cycle was first observed, understood, and manipulated by witches.”
Lily threw up her hands in defeat. One of the things she was trying to absorb was that here, in this version of the world, magic had made all of what Lily knew of as scientific discoveries, and no wonder. With her willstones, Lily didn’t need microscopes or chemicals or centrifuges to see and manipulate cells or—for example—unzip and recombine DNA. All she needed was a willstone and a deep understanding of the way DNA worked and she could do it.
Here, in this universe, what differentiated science from witchcraft was that scientists had fewer resources and couldn’t magically manipulate the natural world by will alone. They had to fumble around until they found a chemical or developed a machine that achieved the same results. There weren’t many people who called themselves scientists here, and not just because Lillian persecuted them. Witches were much more efficient at tackling the challenges of biology, chemistry, and physics, so why even try to be a scientist? That is, unless you were either in love with the profession or because you were desperate and
Witchcraft had done amazing thing in this world because manipulating the natural world was second nature to witches. It was, quite simply, what a crucible’s body was meant to do. Because of that they’d achieved just about every scientific milestone a couple of hundred years before the scientists of Lily’s world had. Witches had harnessed electricity, cloned animals, cured congenital diseases like cystic fibrosis and Down syndrome—and they’d being doing this for centuries. When witches needed a machine—like the trains, elepods, or lamps that lit the rich neighborhoods—they had their mechanics build them. Witches supplied the discoveries, and their mechanics made the gadgets they needed.
Scientists had always lagged behind. They had access to the knowledge that the witches supplied, but they had to come up with different methods for reaching the same goal. A scientist had to dream up a microscope and build it first, only to see something that a half-grown crucible could look at without even trying. Not a lot of glory in that job.
The one thing that the witches didn’t have, but Lily’s world did, was the driving curiosity that came built in to the culture of a well-respected scientific community. In Lily’s world, scientists had the need to figure out for themselves how things worked, precisely because it did not come naturally. For some reason, Lily was strangely proud of the clumsy, sometimes downright destructive path of progress that her world had traveled as they fumbled toward the understanding that came maybe a little too easily to witches.
“Yeah? Well, you and your snooty, all-knowing witches have never been to the moon. My people have, because it was there and it was a good thing to do,” Lily said in her best Boston accent. “So bite my scientist-loving ass.”
Rowan and Tristan just stared at Lily for a while. The two young men looked nothing alike physically, but they’d spent so much of their lives together that they shared similar gestures and facial expressions. Right now the perplexed looks they gave her were practically identical.