Chapter 159 The Trial of Katherine Wilmot
POV: Katherine Wilmot | Supernatural Court, Old Bailey Sub-level
The courtroom beneath the Old Bailey had been built to intimidate, which it did effectively even when you knew that was the point.
Katherine Wilmot sat in the defendant's chair with her wrists bound in iron cuffs etched with suppression runes and looked at the panel of seven judges, four of whom were vampires and three of whom were Hermetic Order members, and understood with the clarity that came from having no more illusions left to lose that this had been over before it started.
She was thirty-four years old. She had been practicing magic for twenty years, trained in the old tradition her grandmother had passed down, a line of hedge witches who had navigated the supernatural world's edges without formal affiliation for four generations. She had never sought Hermetic Order membership. She had never wanted it. The Order's methods had always struck her as the methods of people who had decided that knowledge justified anything you did to obtain it.
She had been right about that, as it turned out.
The charge read by the court clerk was unauthorized practice of supernatural magic without valid registration, which was a real offense under the code and carried a real sentence. The actual reason she was sitting in this chair was that eight months ago she had witnessed a Hermetic Order operative removing a child from a care home in Hackney at two in the morning, and she had documented it, and she had attempted to bring that documentation to a supernatural journalist with the contacts to do something with it.
The journalist had been visited by Hermetic representatives the following day and had declined the story.
The documentation had been confiscated when Katherine was arrested three weeks later on the registration charge.
The Hermetic Order prosecutor was a thin man in his fifties named Vance who delivered his case with the professional efficiency of someone who had done this before and expected the same outcome he had achieved before. Her magic had been practiced without registration. The registration requirement existed for public safety. She had chosen to operate outside the system that governed her kind, and the system now governed her accordingly.
Her own counsel, a witch from the northern territories who had taken the case on principle, argued that the registration system was selectively enforced, that dozens of unregistered practitioners operated without prosecution, and that the timing of this particular prosecution relative to her client's journalistic activities was worth the court's consideration.
The panel considered it for approximately four minutes.
Guilty on all counts.
The sentence was delivered without ceremony. Magical binding, permanent, administered by Order specialists in a procedure that would take forty-eight hours and leave her with the ability to live a normal human life and nothing else. Every channel through which magic moved in a person's body, closed. Permanently.
She had known this was coming. She had known it since the arrest. She had still hoped, which was the particular cruelty of hope in situations like this, that knowing the outcome wouldn't stop it from hurting when it arrived.
They moved her to a holding cell on the sub-level to await the binding specialists, who were traveling from the Order's northern facility and would arrive in two days. The cell was stone and cold and the runes on the walls suppressed everything she had, which meant she sat in the bare quiet of someone who had always had a second sense and had just been shown what it felt like to have it taken away early.
She thought about the children.
The child she had seen being taken from the Hackney care home. The ones her documentation had listed before it was confiscated. The ones she had heard about from other unregistered practitioners who had disappeared after asking too many questions about sub-basement operations at St. Thomas Hospital.
She had tried. She had tried the right way, through channels, through documentation and journalism and legal process, and every channel had closed in front of her.
The wolf crew in the Rookeries had not tried the right way. They had tried the way that people tried things when the right way was owned by the people doing the harm. She had heard about the battle. Everyone in the supernatural community had heard about the battle. She had not thought, at the time, that it had anything to do with her.
She understood now that it had everything to do with her. The same system. The same machinery. Different faces on the same mechanism.
The guard who brought her evening meal was young, barely twenty, and had the look of someone who was performing certainty about the job they were doing and not quite achieving it. She waited until he had set the tray down and was turning to leave.
"If anyone from the Rookeries comes looking," she said, "tell them something for me."
He stopped. He didn't turn around, but he stopped.
"Tell them I was trying to warn people about the facilities," she said. "Tell them that what they found under St. Thomas, that's not the only one." She kept her voice even, because even was the only register she had left that didn't sound like desperation. "There are six facilities. Not just one. Six, in different locations across the country, each one running the same program." She paused. "Tell the wolf pack. If they find the children, tell them there are six facilities."
The guard left without responding.
She sat in the dark and the quiet and what had been her magic and was now just absence, and she hoped the guard had been one of the ones who wasn't quite certain.