Page 33 of Deathless
Diego translated without turning his head. "He's calling for a kris. A tribunal. The elders decide what to do with him."
"A trial?" I said.
"More or less. The good news is, they'll wait until after the kris to kill him."
Two men pulled Lorenzo off Rhadamanthys. He let them. His face was wet, and he wiped it with his sleeve and stood with his fists at his sides.
Valentina's nephews hauled Rhadamanthys to his feet. He put his weight on the good leg and let them take his arms. At the edge of the courtyard, he turned his head back and looked at me. His Stetson was gone, knocked off during the fight. Without it, he looked younger, less ridiculous, more like what he actually was: a man who had bet everything on a room full of strangers and waited to find out if it would kill him.
The kitchen door closed behind them.
The yard went quiet. Diego let go of my wrist. The skin where his thumb had been went cold.
Eight slipped her hand into mine.
Her fingers were cold and small, and she gripped tight. I closed my hand around hers and squeezed once. She'd stabbed a Judge for me tonight. She'd writtenI knowin the dirt and then held on. I was still learning what that meant, and the learning hurt in a way I had no training for.
The SUVs at the end of the road sat where they'd been all night, headlights burning inward. I counted the ones I could see from here and came up short of comfortable.
I squeezed Eight's hand once more and let go.
"Come on," I said to Diego. "We need to hear what the Judge has to say."
I walked toward the house with my daughter on my left and Diego on my right, and for the first time in a decade, the weight on both sides was something I wanted to carry.
Jasper stood at thekitchen window with his back to me, watching the tree line. I stopped in the doorway and let myself have one second of him before I went down into the cellar. He held his coffee like he'd already forgotten it was there, steam curling past his jaw, and my knuckles ached against the doorframe. He didn't even turn around.
I was about to walk downstairs and argue for his life in front of people who wanted him gone. I almost said something, almost crossed the kitchen and put my mouth on the back of his neck where the hair was short and he always ran warm. Instead, I turned toward the cellar stairs because the Kris didn't wait, and neither did the men who wanted to vote a Pantheon Judge into a shallow grave.
The Kris convened in my grandmother's root cellar because apparently we couldn't have important conversations anywhere with actual heat.
Six chairs waited on stone that had been cold since before my grandfather was born, which meant my ass was going numb inabout thirty seconds. A brazier sat in the center with coals that weren't doing shit for the temperature. Six tin ingots lined up at the edge were already starting to glow.
Amparo took the good chair at the head. I sat and the cold shot straight through my jeans into my tailbone. My lip had scabbed over from the mountain, but I kept splitting the crust. I planted my boots and let the cold work its way up through my knees because that was the deal. You came to the Kris, you froze your ass off, you didn't complain.
Nicu Dracovici sat across from me with his hands on his knees like he was posing for a painting. He'd argued against sanctuary when Valentina granted it. He'd argued against the mountain challenge. He'd lost every single argument, and it hadn't changed his mind about jack shit, which made him dangerous in the specific way that patient, stubborn bastards are always dangerous.
Two of Danior's men walked Rhadamanthys in through the back entrance. The Judge put his weight on his good leg and dragged the bad one across the stone, leaving a line of blood. They'd stripped him of the Stetson, the guns, and all the gold rings. Without the costume, he was just a tall guy with a busted leg, hands visible on his knees, waiting to find out if we were going to kill him.
He looked at my grandmother and kept his mouth shut, which was the smartest thing he'd done all week.
Amparo picked up the tongs. She lifted the first ingot from the coals and held it up, bright copper lighting her face from below. She set it in the little clay tray in front of Nicu's chair with a click.
Nicu stood up and buttoned his jacket, which told me everything about the bullshit I had to sit through. A man who buttons his jacket before talking to family has already decided he's giving a speech.
"Brothers." He put his hands behind his back. "We buried a man this week. A man who kept this family together for twenty years. A man who never asked the gadje for help, never invited their wars through our doors." He turned to look at Rhadamanthys. "And now we sit here deciding what to do with a Pantheon Judge. A man who serves the same machine that's been grinding people like us into dust since forever."
He looked at me. I kept my hands on my knees and my mouth shut. My lip split again, and I tasted copper and swallowed it.
"I'm not disrespecting Diego. He won the mountain. He earned his seat." Nicu spread his hands. "But earning a seat and earning the right to fill this cellar with Pantheon problems are two different things. My grandfather died in a camp. Yours did too, Beni. We know what happens when we trust the gadje with our lives. Emilio knew. Emilio spent twenty years keeping them out of this valley. And now his nephew wants us to keep one alive under the same roof where we buried him."
He turned back to the circle.
"And if we join this fight, we don't just risk bodies. We risk every route, every safe house, every contact we've spent decades building. The gadje see our network and they'll map it, use it, and burn it when they're done with us. Emilio built something invisible. Diego's asking us to make it visible to people who've never once given a damn whether we survived."
The ingot went dull. Amparo reached for the tongs.
"I'm not finished," Nicu said.
