Summary: In the months after Vivianne’s death, the people demand justice for the war that ravaged the country. With the leader of the cult dead, the demand for retribution falls upon those she left behind, including Toivo.
Short story by Jay
Aidan loses count of the number of times those months that Nikki says, It’s just for show. Don’t worry about it. You just have to sit through it so the tribunal can say they put you up to a fair trial.
Toivo doesn’t even pretend to believe her most of the time.
Everyone wants to blame someone, and with Vivianne dead and Derik gone there’s no one to blame, no one on which to pin the hundreds dead, the Beasts still haunting the woods and mountain passes, the towns burned.
So the people left get rounded up: the puppet dwarven head of state; the coup co-conspirators; the cult members they can find, the ones who haven’t vanished the way Derik did. And Toivo.
Toivo doesn’t fit in, but once the investigation starts it’s clear that too many people know about his connection to Vivianne for it to be swept under the rug. What his connection to her was isn’t exactly clear to the public—personal bodyguard, some rumors say, or spy, or researcher. He’s visible. People want justice. Everyone knows he joined the other side, but that isn’t enough for some. You can’t be forgiven for your sins just by doing something good afterward. You have to atone for the bad things you did.
So the trial is probably just for show. Probably.
It’ll be over in a month, Nikki says.
———
After the adventure was over, the bureaucracy came crashing down on their heads.
The first problem is that none of them were registered as adventurers before killing Vivianne, and being part of the guild gives you a certain amount of legal leeway when it comes to extrajudicial murder of cult leaders. So Nikki arranges for them to quietly sign documents that say given their services on behalf of the nation, the restored government will publicly attest they were acting under jurisdiction of the guild, just sign these forms and we’ll backdate your registration. A little bureaucratic fudging is preferable to all of them going through murder trials, and Nikki even gets the government to retroactively pay their guild fees for the last 18 months.
But becoming official adventurers doesn’t solve the issue of Toivo: he worked with Vivianne. It’s undeniable, and it’s quickly becoming public knowledge. And because she was behind the coup the government is treating the other conspirators as war criminals. Some people just don’t care whose head rolls as long as someone’s does.
“Maybe I deserve it,” Toivo suggests once, and Dia punches him in the shoulder.
He yelps and leaps out of her range but insists, “I did it though. I worked with her. I fought you. I delivered messages for her. For months. I’m not innocent.”
“Shut up,” Nikki says. “Don’t martyr yourself for politics.”
Nikki delivers the news of Toivo’s indictment grim-faced despite her reassurances that it’s all political, that he’s not in any actual danger of being convicted. By the time it became official they were all expecting it, but Toivo still turns ghostly pale when he hears.
———
Toivo and his defense lawyer aren’t in the courtroom every day during the trials. The lawyer argued hard for this—for him to be tried separately, that his willing defection from Vivianne made his circumstances different enough to warrant separate judgement. That he’d be in danger from the rest of the conspirators if he was forced to stay in detention with them. But the pauses just make the process all the more excruciating.
Aidan, Nikki, and Dia watch the trials from the gallery. The benches in the courtroom are horribly uncomfortable, hard angles of stone with no concession to the shape of people’s bodies. The courtroom is cold stone from top to bottom. The whole damn city is cold stone. There’s no direct sunlight here, only weak beams refracted down through a half mile of solid rock. Aidan hasn’t felt warm since they came underground six weeks ago.
The war hit differently down here. Aboveground it was attacks from Beasts, mysterious disappearances and illness, danger on the roads. Down here it was the coup, dissenters being snatched from street corners by the new government, martial law. Aboveground, caravans were destroyed; here they languished under arbitrary trade restrictions until their goods rotted, doing nothing for anyone except that it created chaos, giving Vivianne more chances to spread the curse among desperate people. (And if she had succeeded, wouldn’t the sudden restoration of trade have looked great for her and her puppet government?) While elves and humans huddled behind city walls aboveground, here they streamed out to…whatever the countryside looked like down in the bedrock tunnels.
Aidan has never been underground before. When they crossed the mountains on Vivianne’s trail last year, they’d taken the dangerous mountain pass instead of risking being caught in the tunnels controlled by the government Vivianne helped put in place.
When they’re not in court, Aidan and Dia are alone most days. Toivo is under house arrest in the human embassy and Nikki has gotten herself involved with the politics of the restored government. She and Dia and Aidan are staying in a nice inn near the embassy on the government’s dime. Well, it’s nice by dwarven standards, which means a lot of intricately carved stone that Aidan keeps scraping himself on when he’s trying to find the bathroom in the night.
Technically, Toivo isn’t actually under arrest. Technically, he handed himself over to the protection of the state willingly on the advice of his lawyer. Technically, the embassy guest bedroom he’s staying in and the guards posted outside of it are for his protection against the parts of the city populace that might try to hurt him.
Which is true. It isn’t that anybody hates him. They just want someone to blame it on.
The thing is that Nikki is constantly busy with important meetings and Toivo is locked away and also deeply depressing to be around. Dia is good at finding things to do with herself, but often those things are meditating or practicing forms; Aidan feels too twitchy for the former and too unathletic for the latter. Down here there isn’t much use for a half-trained field medic. Down here there isn’t even a temple for Aidan to try to make himself useful at.
The dwarves have temples to Enfyn, of course, but there isn’t much worship of her sun aspect below ground. Aidan supposes that the tall pillared caves with vertical water gardens are also nice, but he resents the lack of stained glass, of wood, of light. He spends a few days there learning about hydroponics from the clerics, but he can tell they’re suspicious of him. Sun-worshipping clerics of Enfyn aren’t in anyone’s list of favorite people right now, not after word had gotten around about the particular cult that Derik and Vivianne’s other cronies belonged too. Never mind that Aidan learned his magic at a temple Derik sacrificed as a testing ground for the curse. He’s tainted by association. Whatever. When is he ever going to need to know about gardening anyway?
Dia doesn’t drink, and she doesn’t care if Aidan does but it isn’t any fun to sit at a bar next to someone sober so he ends up buying big brown bottles of ale and bringing them back to Toivo’s room. Most nights they all end up there sooner or later.
When Nikki shows up she complains a lot about the process of rebuilding the government: bureaucracy and factions and everybody wants power but nobody wants to get their hands messy by making an actual damn decision to clean up the mess of the last few years because that would mean it’s their fault if they get it wrong and there’s no way to get it perfectly right. Now that the war’s over, the lobbyists for the mountain pass railroad immediately popped up again, like anybody’s actually going to allocate funding for new construction right now even if it would stimulate movement along the devastated south-north trade routes and increase confidence aboveground in the new government. Aidan nods along and encourages her to keep talking. At least politics distracts Toivo from looking quite so miserable.
———
Nikki testifies first.
The defense lawyer has briefed them all on their role in the trial. As the one who established their little group, the de facto leader, Nikki’s is to lay out the facts.
She’s good at testifying. The lawyer barely has to prompt her before she’s spinning the tale—her escape from the city after the coup, knowing that outside influences were at work but desperate for answers; the way she had collected Aidan and Dia; their investigation of the coup and the Beasts; Toivo joining the group, bringing key information; the curse Toivo was under when he escaped from Vivianne; the chase after Vivianne; the desperate last fight. Aidan can already picture which quotes are going to appear in the newspaper tomorrow.
She testifies that to the best of her knowledge, as the person most closely hunting Vivianne for the longest time, as a person with key testimony in prosecuting the other conspirators, Toivo was not involved in any of the criminal activities with which he was being charged. That if anything, he was Vivianne’s hostage—kidnapped from his family by someone who had lied to and manipulated him for years.
“The only thing we ever saw him do was defend a woman he loved,” Nikki tells the tribunal. “And you can’t really blame him for that, right?”
———
Two weeks after the trial starts, a sturdy human girl with straw-blonde hair in pigtails shows up and disappears into Toivo’s room. When Aidan introduces himself later that evening it’s obvious they’ve both been crying.
The girl is Toivo’s sister, Anita. After the initial shock of her blue eyed blondeness, Aidan can see the resemblances between them—their height, their noses, the shape of their eyes behind their glasses, their smiles.
She doesn’t stay very long, only a week. Apparently it’s harvest season up north and she’s needed back on their family farm. Toivo had mentioned a farm back home, explaining how he knew so much about plants and cooking for them on the road. For the first time Aidan gets a glimpse of what Toivo might have been like before all of this—a naïve farmboy with the same kind of friendly innocence that Anita hasn’t yet lost. Before she leaves, she makes Toivo promise that after this is over he’ll come back home. He avoids her eyes and mumbles that he’ll try. His eyes look hollowed out in their sockets.
She gives him a look that Aidan suspects she inherited from their mother. “Toivo. Don’t be stupid. Of course you’re going to come.”
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to come back home after this!” he snaps back.
“You will,” Anita says stubbornly, her jaw clenched the same way Toivo does when he’s trying not to cry. “You will and you’re going to come see mom and Matti and me.”
Toivo nods wordlessly and pulls her into a hug, tucking her head under his chin.
———
Dia testifies next, starting with the fact that Toivo was not present during the Beast attack on her temple. She confirms what Nikki told the tribunal—she never saw Toivo involved in any cult activities. Never saw him communicate with any of the other people on trial. Only ever saw him help take down Vivianne.
Her cheerful teenage innocence is an energy their defense desperately needs. Unlike Nikki and Aidan, Dia isn’t a professional liar. Unlike Toivo, she doesn’t have a cloud of doom hanging over her head. There isn’t much for the prosecution to press her on.
After her testimony, Toivo looks less like he wishes the tribunal would just announce him guilty already. It feels a little bit like a win.
———
Three weeks into the trial, the day comes for Aidan to testify.
The bailiff tells him, “Please state your name and identity for the court record.”
Viewed from the witness stand, Toivo is a slumped pile of long, narrow limbs, exhausted and hollowed out by waiting through the endless trial. The rest of the gray, cold room disappears into tunnel vision because Aidan knows what’s coming next. He couldn’t make himself bring it up with Toivo beforehand. Too much of a coward to talk about it more than once. He takes a deep breath and pretends his throat isn’t so tight it hurts to speak. “My name is Matthew Gray. I am a cleric of the sun and my identity can be verified with the Church of Enfyn.”
“Or with several municipalities across the south of this country.” The prosecution’s response comes almost before the formalized statement leaves Aidan’s mouth, the beginning of a well-prepared counterattack.
What neither side expects is Toivo’s astounded, “Your name is what?”
His lawyer grabs his arm, pulling him back into his seat from where he’s leapt to his feet. Aidan can hear their whispered conversation from the witness stand—the admonishing You’re not helping yourself here! and Toivo’s hissed My fucking character witness is someone I apparently don’t even know!—as the prosecutor smirks.
“As I was saying,” she tells the tribunal. “Mr. Gray’s identity can be verified across several different locations with local law enforcement for crimes such as impersonating a cleric to peddle fake spells. And not, apparently, by the very man he is here to testify on behalf of.”
Your history won’t matter, their lawyer had told him last night. Actually, it can help us build the narrative of redemption that we’re trying to craft here. But with Toivo’s disbelieving, betrayed stare burning into him, it’s harder to take her word on it. Aidan lifts his chin and fixes his eyes on the carved wall on the back of the courtroom.
Part of his job here is to demonstrate that Toivo had nothing to do with what Derik did. The lawyer asks the questions she told him she was going to ask and he tells the story she asked him to tell. Derik, mysterious disease, quarantine, death, fire. Never spoke to Toivo until six months later. The whole time, he keeps staring at the carved wall. What had Nikki called it? A relief? A mirror image of a tribunal etched into the stone, some famous judges from history or something.
They get into the details of why he’s up on stand. Yes, he first encountered Toivo when Nikki’s party confronted Vivianne face-to-face and they were driven off by him. No, he didn’t trust Toivo at all when Toivo later showed up half-dead at their campsite. Yes, he recognized the same symptoms in Toivo that he’d seen during the quarantine at the temple. Yes, he had successfully cured Toivo of Vivianne’s curse. Yes, he believed that the curse was placed on Toivo unwillingly or unknowingly. Yes, Toivo had provided them with genuinely useful information. Yes, he had fought by their side. Yes, he had taken part in the final attack against Vivianne. No, he had not shown any hesitation before killing her.
There’s more: rote details confirming what Nikki and Dia had already testified. The specifics of what they knew about Toivo’s defection from Vivianne. Toivo’s actions to assist them against Vivianne.
The defense lawyer asks her final question: “Do you now trust Mr. Kissa?”
He looks at Toivo then, trying to catch Toivo’s eye behind the light glinting off Toivo’s glasses. “Wholeheartedly.”
The cross examination is what their lawyer had told him to expect. The prosecutor digs into his history, trying to cast him as an unreliable witness, someone whose record proves his word is worthless. Nikki’s past isn’t so different than Aidan’s, but Nikki has good standing in the city now. Aidan is an outsider.
He answers truthfully. Lying wouldn’t do his case any good. He always brings it back around to the fact of his genuine conversion. He keeps his expression contrite. The prosecutor can’t deny that he is, in fact, a trained cleric now. Even if they don’t have the same worship down here, even if the human church is viewed with suspicion, being Enfyn’s clergy still means something. He pulls up his sleeve to show the tattoos and brands on his arm, the proof that he did the things the lawyer is accusing him of. See? He’s already paid for his crimes.
That night Toivo greets him with, “So what’s your goddamn name?”
“Aidan,” he says in the tone of voice that means and I don’t want to talk about it.
———
Toivo is the final witness called to the stand. Even from the gallery, Aidan can see how tight his jaw is as his lawyer prompts him to tell the story of the time he had been associated with Vivianne. His expression is brittle. He doesn’t look away from his lawyer the entire time he speaks, as though if he does he’ll lose his focus and shatter.
She taught the magic classes at my school.
She initiated a relationship with me.
Yes, it was a sexual relationship.
Yes, she told me we had to keep it secret.
I left with her because she told me she was in danger. She told me she needed protection.
I didn’t know what she was doing. She kept me in the dark. She lied to me. I was never aware of her involvement in the coup. I was never aware of their development of the Beast spell. I didn’t know that she placed a curse on me.
I didn’t know.
I didn’t know.
When I found out, I left.
His answers are short, terse. Sometimes the lawyer seems like she’s waiting for him to say more, but she recovers well from the awkward pauses. Between questions she spins her narrative to the tribunal. Despite his close relationship with Vivianne he wasn’t a conspirator. He was just a kid, a farmboy who was taken advantage of. He had no idea what he’d stumbled into. You don’t blame a highwayman’s horse for carrying the criminal. You don’t blame a dog for following behind its master. He didn’t understand, didn’t know any better. The crimes were against him, not committed by him.
Aidan watches Toivo’s face instead of the judges’. He isn’t any good at concealing his emotions, a fact that might be the strongest argument in his favor. But it’s obvious from his scowl how much he hates the argument his lawyer’s chosen, even if it’s the one that will win.
During the cross examination, the prosecutor asks: “Was there ever a moment you suspected that Ms. Ives was lying to you about the bigger picture of the activities you two were involved in?”
Toivo opens his mouth. The defense lawyer leans forward, nodding—they’ve prepared for this question. But then Toivo makes a face, twisting his mouth to the side and furrowing his brow.
“Yeah, of course I suspected something was going on. I’m not stupid. But I didn’t want to believe it. I loved her.”
The defense lawyer’s face goes carefully blank, which Aidan knows after weeks of watching her means she’s hiding her frustration.
The prosecutor wants to know why, if he was so innocent, Vivianne kept Toivo around as long as she did. Toivo says he doesn’t know. Nobody knows. The prosecution argues that this was out of character for Vivianne—that other witness testimony had shown her behavior was characterized by narcissism and a lack of empathy, not affection for unremarkable farmboys.
Toivo keeps his mouth shut this time, but Aidan had heard it enough times from him on the road to know what he’s thinking. Toivo wants to believe that it was because Vivianne did care for him. That only he could take care of her the way he had. That he was special to her. Even if he knows it isn’t true. He can’t accept the idea that she only kept him around to be useful. He needs the fantasy that she really did love him.
But the tribunal hearing Toivo try to humanize Vivianne won’t be helpful to their case and Toivo’s feelings are speculation anyway, so Toivo tells the prosecution what he’s been coached to say: “I don’t know why she wanted me.”
“You don’t know? Even though you were close to her and travelled with her for months?” The prosecutor eyes him up and then looks meaningfully at the tribunal. “You don’t have any idea why she kept you around her?”
Toivo’s jaw tightens again. “I don’t know.”
Aidan has his own suspicions. Toivo thinks that Vivianne placing the curse on him was punishment for leaving. Maybe the sickness was punishment. But when Aidan started to untangle it, there was another layer to the curse, a nauseating tidal pull siphoning off the magic in Toivo’s body. She was still trying to use his magic, even after he left. Aidan had broken that off too as best he could, but he was never quite sure if he’d been able to fully scrub the stain of it. The color of Toivo’s hair and eyes were proof enough that the curse had left a permanent mark on him.
He kept that particular fact from Toivo, letting Toivo think the restoration of his full magical ability was just a side effect of the curse being broken. Telling him would be another knife in his back. Better that Toivo thinks he was being punished than knowing he was just being used.
———
When the head of the tribunal announces that Toivo is acquitted on all counts, Toivo’s expression of gloom doesn’t change. Even as Dia whoops and Nikki pounds her fists on the courtroom bench in joy, Toivo’s eyes stay downcast. It isn’t until he’s released from the courtroom, escorted past the throng of reporters and protestors to see the three of them standing in the street that it melts into stunned realization.
“I told you so,” Nikki crows, smacking him on the back. “I said you’d get off!”
Toivo stumbles off balance and Aidan has to grab his arm to keep him from falling over.
“I can go home,” he says. Tears fill up his eyes and roll down his cheeks. “I can go back.”
“Hell yeah you can!” Nikki is as proud as if she’d done this all by herself, and that’s fair—the trial wouldn’t have gone nearly as easily as it did without her influence. “We are going out tonight.”
Aidan isn’t entirely sure Toivo wants to go out, but Nikki’s energy is irrepressible and she’s already leading them toward what she calls “the best bar in the city,” which judging by Nikki’s usual standards means they’re going to get plastered and see at least one bar fight. Toivo wipes the tears from his face and stands up straighter than he has in months.