Chương 229: Chapter 250: Harassment

The opening motions have been argued all day long. But, as I have pointed out to Thumper and Jurrux, I love to argue when I know I'm right. Unless I'm going through a lot of other stuff at the same time, or unless I'm arguing against someone that I don't want to be arguing against.. well okay lots of very understandable reasons not to enjoy specific arguments. But against some hireling from the magisters who doesn't care that she's trying to take away my life and freedom? I can give it my all.

She wanted to put in a whole construction of clauses restricting my ability to use sorcery. She even filed to require me to use another attorney instead of representing myself. She filed to have us move this to a private conference instead of open-air trial, which is basically never done. She's been firing off one demand after another at this judge, and we're still in opening remarks. She's doing everything she can to shove wedges into the trial process and force disadvantages onto me.

I think she's allergic to a level playing field. I have, so far, destroyed her notes, muffled her voice, forced her to start coughing, and untied her bodice lacing. I've put a squeak in her shoes, and fluctuated the temperature around her. Periodically when she stands at her podium she can see a rat scampering near her feet but she can never see it when she looks again. Anyone that knows me well knows that I'm playing softball against her. I'm giving her about five percent of the grief I could serve up.

I know that the judge knows I'm doing something, but if 'what we know to be true' mattered in these halls, we wouldn't even be having a trial. Counselor Nuur is very frustrated and not only for these reasons. In addition, I keep filing return motions. Every time she throws more demands at the judge, I counter the exact same way. First, I object to their demands and refuse to back down from that, and second I demand that no magister's staff be allowed in the courtroom during proceedings.

The first few times I brought it up, it was fairly low-key, I put it forth and the judge added it to the list of motions under consideration. But right after I used a nudge of air against Nuue's airway to provoke a coughing fit, I stepped up to follow up.

"Your honor, sirs and madams, officers of the court, and to the good citizens of Hearstcliff: mere weeks ago, the representatives of the magister's guild that is responsible for the plaintiff's own Exhibit A assaulted me in front of hundreds of witnesses. During the process of strong-arming my brother into signing me away, she disabled me, battered me, and threatened to do worse. The magisters have been aggressively warding their staffs to disable me, specifically, this is a known issue among them.

This time last year one of their members tried three times to murder me in cold blood. If any magister approaches this floor with a staff in hand, I will be through my portal and gone with all haste and no explanations. I have no choice but to consider a magister's staff to be a naked threat against my life and a precursor to another attempt to murder me. If you deny every motion I make upon this issue, then I will press suit against this court and its officers for conspiracy to commit murder."

Obviously I can't do that. But the crowd does not know that. They're starting to get really interested. Accusations of attempted murder levied against the court itself is something to stir a crowd. There's not many of them here, but I am pretty sure that every one of them is going to tell everyone they know about this. And more important still, I see people writing in shorthand. Reporters. The story-shark I chatted with this morning must have sent runners to get some of his colleagues here.

Well, "Princess accuses judge of murder conspiracy" makes a damn fine headline if your tabloid is tacky enough. Here's hoping that I've found a straight-up gutter-rag. From the gleeful faces they're making, I guess these are people used to dredging a shameless scandal out of musings and mutters, so having my antics and over-the-top accusations is candy to them. Now obviously I don't want the magisters to bring their staffs because they could kill me. Or just cage me again.

But also because it would stop me from subtly fucking with the opposing counsel in a hundred semi-subtle ways. By the time of our first recess for lunch, Counselor Nuur is definitely wishing that they had some wards here that would shut off all my sorcerous shenanigans. She has no doubt that she knows why I keep making this demand: I'm going to keep using these pranks for the whole trial, keeping her off-balance and ensuring I always get the last word.

We're never going to make any progress on this case because we're going to be constantly battling on whether her team gets to bring their magic or whether I get to use my magic. This is not a fight I can afford to lose. And I'm pulling out all the stops to take control of this. Every single time I have let someone take my spells away from me it has bitten me in the ass, hard. There has never been a time that brushing against some wards that limited my magic was just a casual accident that didn't mean anything.

It has, without fail, been an integral part of a disaster befalling me at the same time. If I even let the magisters think that they might be able to turn off my magic I am sure that will immediately start them plotting something vile and underhanded. But if they think that they still have to contend with explosion sorcery, they'll give me some respectful space. It's just a convenient method to get them to back off to a less aggressive posture.

I had lunch at the pub across the street and I was shocked that I didn't see anyone else from the trial there. It's right here. It's practically like having a deli in the same building as your office! The food was amazing, the service was no worse than mediocre and the ambience was- okay the food was good. And the coffee. I guess most of the legal eagles in this area don't want to rub elbows with the local homeless population and random workers taking a break.

The main source of business for this restaurant was the court building across the street. Since lawyers don't make vagrants want to leave, but vagrants make lawyers want to leave, the space had been rather thoroughly claimed by the indigent poor. And they sat and minded their business, ate their food same as I did, and we all went on our way. It was not a big deal. Sure, I had people side-eyeing me the whole time, but I'm actually surprised and curious that not even one of them approached me.

Most of them have been watching me on trial for the past couple of hours. They've heard me shout, snarl, sigh, philosophize, proselytize, patronize and polemicize. Nobody can say I have not been putting on a show. We're still mired in opening motions and I've put on a whole three-act drama. Hopefully it picks up. I've taken steps to bolster the publicity here. and starting tomorrow we should pull better crowds, and more invested interested crowds.

Ultimately, today is about a few things: getting comfortable in front of this audience, buying time for the publicity to get out, dunking on the opposition, and of course those opening motions. Since the judge is deferring all of them to 'consideration', that means we're not getting any rulings today, but also that we're not going to revisit this.

Today we're setting the ground rules for the whole trial, we've got one day to put in all our input and then the judge goes home, looks at the papers, and then comes back tomorrow to tell us which ones she's decided to ignore, and which ones we will honor. I don't expect it to go in my favor. The opposition counsel has peppered in about forty different requests and rules. Can't bring up this, can't request that, can't call these witnesses, can't make these claims.

Can't use sorcery to make someone miserable during trial, she's got about a dozen versions of that in the docket. Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. After I started off this day by destroying her notes, Teilur Nuur has had her assistants copying everything down from memory so she can file those in. So instead of one comprehensive page they're struggling to get even half of their demands recorded.

And the unexpected benefit to me is that breaking it up like this has given me the opportunity to counter each time. They file a motion that I am not allowed to cite Inquisitor Pina's disastrous duels against sorcerers back in training. I file that they can't suppress my magic. They file that I can't call any member of the royal family as a witness, and I respond that they can't suppress my magic. It really is that important to me. There is a limit to how bad things can get, unless they ward my sorcery away.

Then all bets are off. My process is simple. The judge is going to take all this home. She is probably going to give Teilur Nuur everything she asked for, or nearly there. Because she's been bought off in a big way. But if she's going to hand Nuur a Christmas wish list, she has to give me at least something. Some tidbit of slack. And since the only thing I have asked for, at all, is the freedom from magister wards, then she has to grant me that.

She can't possibly give Nuur dozens of rulings in her favor and turn down absolutely everything from me. Well, yes, obviously she can. She would prefer to. Nuur would prefer it too. But the difference is that if they try that, I'm going to start a fucking riot and nobody could blame me for it. That's why I want a big interested crowd tomorrow when the rulings come in. I want a riled-up sea of humanity so I can hit them with the Independence Day speech and unleash a maelstrom of civil disobedience.

After lunch, the rest of my day was spent with the same gimmicks. Fucking with the opposing counsel, practicing my impassioned pleas to the audience, arguing like this was a really toxic domestic dispute, and filing demand after demand that Pina and the Magister College Backup Band keep their grubby little wards the fuck away from me. By the time we recessed, everyone on that courtroom floor looked exhausted.

Me, I've got a ton of stamina, and I'm still sparking and skylarking when they finally gaveled down and adjourned for the day. I wove a little of the aurora borealis into my clothes to glow even brighter, and then I lifted off slowly, rising into the air with my arms spread wide. When I rose to twice the height of the building itself, I took off like a shot, flying so fast that hardly anyone could have even told which direction I was headed. It would not have been hard to guess.

I'm headed to the Harigold residence. In a better world I'd be simply flying out of Skyside out through the wide-open mouth of the cavern, pull a wide U-turn and gain some altitude, and come in over Cliffside and settle down over the family-held house.

But the city has a lot of wards to keep that from happening, since the mouth of the Skyside cave is still one of the biggest commercial-route highways in the nation, and if it was possible for someone to just fly through there without slowing down or identifying, then the customs officials could not tax, fine and fee every shipment that came through the north-south passage of the middle third of the kingdom.

No, trying to just buzz out there at high speed would get me shot with a ballista, and then magic lightning, and then run into an impenetrable magic wall, and then fall to my death because my flight would be disabled. And if anything was left, the town guards would stab it. Bottlenecks are militarily and economically strategic. That's why it's important to control them. That's why I had started blowing up new paths through the Fissuring: no more bottlenecks.

But until the roads are graded, surveyed and paved, traffic travels through Hearstcliff. Anyway, all this is why I keep leaving by portals when flying is much more fun. I popped in and out of reality, and then circled the residence in a long, low spiral around the block. I let some of the wind come at me, to feel it on my face, just to get that rush of freedom after being stuck in a courtroom making the same people miserable all day long.

Per my promise to the house's staff, I don't open up portals inside anymore, and besides it's still more fun to swoop in and make a jogging landing right at the front stoop. Depending on my mood, my flight is either a propelled jet, or a frictionless zooming about like I was standing on my own private flying saucer, or a bird-like glide that rode over the currents and drafts of the air like riding over hillocks and valleys. I like being able to choose between them, whatever I need whenever I need it.

Sometimes I'm Superman, sometimes I'm Glinda, and sometimes I'm Toothless. But I agreed to stop raising portals without warning, I did not promise to keep knocking at the door like it's cookie season. I flicked the lock open as I approached, and the door swung open ahead of me and closed behind.

"Honey I'm home!" I called out, pausing to shoot the deadbolt closed as I felt the place out with my senses. Those glass discs were a pair of spectacles, so that vacancy in the air was Cousin Bruce. That other vacancy two rooms over was too big to not be Cousin Petunia. I have given all of the maids perfumes scented with my favorite flowers, so I could use traces of jasmine, lily, hydrangea and orchid to identify the housemaids from the other staff.

The groundskeepers had traces of aloe on them, the valets had more brass on their uniforms. A lot of learning to use new senses is about learning to use context clues. When Gedes found me I was in the kitchen with the cook, mooching morsels of dinner under the pretext of helping her taste-test the meal. I wasn't fooling her but I wasn't trying, we were giggling and having a good time.

"Lady Natalie," he said, drawing upright until his heels clicked and giving a steep, respectful bow of his head.

"I shall presume that things have gone well."

"Every day that I make an appearance in court and don't get arrested is a good day," I agreed. He raised an eyebrow.

"My understanding is that most people get arrested and then attend court?" he nudged.

"I always have to do things my own way," I reminded him. I paused, thanked the cook, patted her hands, and then flitted and skipped over to the butler's side.

"Please allow me to divert you over to a room for a spot of business talk?" The kitchen had a side room that was normally used for an assistant or scullery to sit at the table and do prep work, peeling potatoes or chopping onions. I set down some linen covers so that Gedes' white-glove protocols would remain intact while he and I sat for a chat. The cook stayed her post, prepping dishes for supper and making sure that all propriety was being observed.

And so I shut off sound in and out of the room and motioned him to begin the talk. He cleared his throat.

"You will not worry about power of attorney, because anyone would have to contest the power of attorney currently held by the office and person of Thames Jompson, who is a business identity of Thames Jaddeus, who is a business identity of Thames Jeobald, et cetera. All of these are fictional people but since the business-identity filings are all in different towns and provinces, it would be take a dozen years for anyone to run down all the paperwork needed to prove that.

I have done similar for your medical disposition or institutional holds. Depending on who's asking, your legal identity is either an aristocrat in good standing from the province of Meadowtam, or a full-owned shell company with holdings but no assets, or a single banking account with a dozen addresses, or nothing at all, or an exclusive members-only club of hobbyist flower arrangers.

The rules by which your legal identity transfers between those modes should assure that you cannot be assailed by any twist or tweak of law or procedure."

"I am extremely impressed, and extremely gratified," I said, letting my deep relief show.

"My brother is a forger and a charlatan, and he has a strong habit of always hitting me from whatever angle I'm not defending. I need to close avenues." He gave a nod. Most of his gestures are strange to me. When he nods, it is only his head and neck that move, not his shoulders, his jaw, the angle of his arms. Every one of his gestures or expressions is exhibited in isolation. His shrugs are added to his regular posture, not replacing it. When he moves a hand to his face, his face does not move with it.

It makes all of his movements seem extremely premeditated, but also extremely dignified. Gedes looks and acts like he never does anything without intent. Like he could never actually make a mistake. It's strangely comforting to me. So I assume he had every intention of teasing me when he said, with a precisely-measured smile, "In fact, if my signatures are all in place, there is a very good chance that should you be arrested this week, I can have you released for technically being an endangered migratory bird."

We laughed, just a little. It was relieving. But also, under the right circumstances I can turn into an endangered migratory bird, so I'm not actually discounting this plan as being just a joke.