“‘Where are the soldiers of Lannesite?’ you have asked,” she declared, and Lyn shuffled uneasily, because that was plainly what a lot of them were indeed asking. “Where is the gleaming armour and the Firebird banner?” Jerevesse went on, and held her hands up to forestall the growing murmur of discontent. “I ask you, if the ranks of Lannesite had come across the river to us, how glad would you truly have been, to see them? How long before you would have asked your neighbour, ‘When will they leave, do you think?’ And every court and nation has its ill-thinkers. I know that if our own army was within the walls of Lannesite Urban then some would ask, ‘Why must we leave?’”
She even managed to spur a little murmur of humour with that barb, and Lyn decided that the Third Daughter had been left behind because of her skills and not her deficiencies. Not like me at all, then.
“Instead, Lannesite brings to our aid something of more worth than swords or arrows,” Jerevesse continued. “More even than the silver blood of their royal house who stands before you. Stand forth, petitioners; bring Lynesse Fourth Daughter your complaints.”
For a moment Lyn expected everyone to just rush forwards, all shouting at once, but Jerevesse’s people had done their work well, and three people shuffled forwards from the throng, fewer than might be expected even for a dispute over the taxation of melons. The first was an old man, stooped but still broad across the shoulders, his face leathered by a life out of doors.
“The demon came to my orchards and turned my livelihood against me,” he declared, looking from Lyn to the people around him. “Many here’ll tell the same story. When the fruit began to show on the bough, it was unnatural, wrong shape, wrong colours. Before harvest time, we could see it moving. Thought it was some pest got inside it. We burned the worst, but it was everywhere.” He was calm, saying all this: words spoken a dozen times already, become rote. “Then it was moving, like it was gone from plant to beast, crawling down the trunks. Then the trees that had borne such fruit, they withered and died where the things had fed off them. And then all the things the demon devoured came to feed off us, and we had nothing left, and we fled.” He nodded once, his job done, and stepped back a pace.
The next petitioner was a broad woman, looking haggard from lack of sleep. She had to croak a few times before she could get the words out strongly enough to be heard, and even then one of the court stood at the foot of the scaffold to relay everything.
“The demon came to our village,” Lyn heard. “At first it was the cerkitts and the other beasts. The demon got into them, from what they ate, or from the bites they got when they went into the trees. Things grew on them, like eyes, like crystals. They went feral, and whoever was bitten by them, or just was too long near them, they got it, too. My own sons went to cull the herds of the rot, but some never came back, and some came back but weren’t themselves. The demon had taken them for its own.”
There was more to be said there, but her nerve broke and she, too, stepped back, which left a thin, scarred man standing out from the crowd. His left hand was wrapped in rags, and when he moved to free it, Lyn thought she would see the mark of the demon the woman had spoken of. Instead, though, he raised a hand short all its fingers and marked with the broken tree brand, meaning he was a criminal cast out from his home.
“Some of you know me.” His voice was surprisingly strong. “I am Allwerith Exiled, and in any other season it’d be death for me to stand here.” Indeed, there were plenty of bleak looks at him from his neighbours. “The Third Daughter’s people chose me to speak here because no others here saw what I saw. Because I had fled to Farbourand to get from under the shadow of my judgment here at Watacha.”
Lyn consulted her inner map and reckoned Farbourand was a frontier sort of place, one of the lawless outposts where trappers and prospectors came to resupply before heading out into the wilds again.
“I saw where the demon came first,” Allwerith declared. “A certain clearing near that place, where all the trees were overrun with its spawn, where all the beasts, great and small, had been slaved to it, and made into its bricks and timbers, for the things it was building there. I saw circles and great cords growing from the earth, and all of it set over with spines and black eyes. And men, too, all part of it, doing its will or being pieces of its creation. And none at Farbourand believed me, and then the demon came, with men and beasts all made to do its will, and none got out but I. And I came to Birchari and warned them, and they beat me out with switches for the lies they said I told. And there are some here who escaped Birchari who will give the truth of my words. And I came here, and I praise Elhevesse Regent and I praise Jenevesse Third Daughter and all their servants, for here I was believed.”