Trial by Fire (Worldwalker 1)

Snowshower dropped his head, nodding to himself as if he were accepting responsibility for all that Lillian had said.

“But what other choice do we have?” he asked, raising blazing eyes to meet Lillian’s. “The Covens will sell us spells, but few of us can afford them. Even if a whole family starved for it, most can’t pay what a witch asks for one tab of your magic-made antibiotics. Should the Outlanders do nothing just because they’re poor? Lay their sick down and let the weakest ones die?”

Lillian leaned forward in her chair, an angry red flush burning through the pink makeup on her cheeks.

“Yes.” Her eyes matched his for fire and her voice grated in her throat with passion. “Better a few die than to do what you have done. You have admitted your crime freely. No trial is necessary. Michael Snowshower, you will hang.”

While the court clerks scribbled down the judgment and punishment in their little books, Juliet stared at her sister in disbelief. Snowshower was only trying to help as many of his people as he could. He was a good man, albeit misguided. She looked up and down the row of dignitaries, sitting in their plush chairs, nodding their heads in agreement with Lillian’s decree. Not one of them tried to make a plea for the man.

Snowshower barely flinched. He’d known all along that he would die, and hearing it firsthand made little difference to him. Carefully, deliberately, Michael Snowshower got down on his knees in front of Lillian.

“Lady of Salem, I beg you to save the children of my people,” he said, holding his painted hands out to her, palms up. “Please, Great Lady. Make a gift of your magic. Don’t let them suffer and die.”

Juliet’s gaze flew to her sister’s face. Surely, Lillian would do something to help. Juliet knew her sister was strict, harsh even, but Lillian would never allow thousands of innocent children to die. But instead of finding compassion in Lillian’s expression as she expected, Juliet saw triumph.

“I want names, Michael. Three names in particular,” Lillian said, a small smile on her dry lips.

Snowshower’s outstretched arms dropped in defeat. “I don’t have them,” he said weakly. Even Juliet could tell he was lying.

“Then I don’t have the spell.” Lillian sat back in her giant chair, completely at ease. She looked down the row to her right at her Coven, her voice light. “Does anyone in my Coven have a spell to cure the Outlanders?”

They laughed. Juliet felt her heart shrivel at the sound. She looked at Michael Snowshower, still on his knees, as he realized that his fate was going to be worse than the death he’d already accepted.

“I’m sorry, My Lady,” Nina answered with an obsequious smile. “It appears that the tithe for this particular spell is three names. The Coven can’t work without a tithe.”

“You have a choice, Michael Snowshower,” Lillian said, her tone suddenly shifting from false gaiety to deadly serious. “It’s not unlike the choice you made when you decided to use science. You see, when you chose to start meddling in things that you don’t understand, you were choosing to save a few lives over the thousands who would suffer from the consequences of your actions. You are exactly where you put yourself, Michael Snowshower. Now you have the choice to protect three dangerous scientists who, like yourself, offer the world nothing but false promises and death, or save—what is it, Thomas? Twenty thousand?” Lillian asked Danforth, leaning to her left.

“If it’s as bad a winter as we think it will be, estimates place the death toll at twenty-one thousand, Lady,” Danforth replied with a sanctimonious frown.

“Twenty-one thousand dead,” Lillian said slowly. She leaned forward, genuinely pleading with Snowshower. “You ask me to save the children, but it’s in your power, Michael. I need three names. Three lives for twenty-one thousand. Please. Please save them.”

CHAPTER

10

“No. Keep your eyes closed,” Rowan ordered. “Use your stones to see inside the leaf, stage by stage. You have to learn how to control this, Lily. Go easy. Don’t just rush in.”

Lily closed her eyes and tried to ignore her pounding head—and the faint sense of him there in her mind with her, watching her as she tried to complete the simple task of zooming in on a fern frond. How was she supposed to calm down and focus if Rowan was essentially breathing down her spinal cord? Especially since she enjoyed being close to him and feeling the touch of his presence in her mind.

Today’s lesson was about controlling her power, and Lily’s continuing problem was an excess of strength. All Tristan and Rowan wanted her to do was look at a fern and increase her ability to see into it, as with a microscope, using slow, measured increments of magnification until she was down to the atomic level. To Lily, this was like trying to hold a glass doll with a vice. Her problem wasn’t ability. She could look so closely that not only could she see into the atom, but she could see down to the quarks and beyond to the squiggly, almost alive-looking strings that jigged enchantingly through a dozen dimensions. She just had a slight problem doing it slowly.

“No,” Rowan scolded when she skipped a magnification level. “I told you to stop before you could differentiate the cell walls. You’re looking at a single cell’s mitochondria. That’s deeper than I asked.” Lily groaned, but Rowan had no pity for her. “Stop there and observe it,” he said. “Then draw for me, in all the exact stages, how the mitochondria turn sugar into energy by passing the spare electron around in a circle.”

That would take forever. For a second, Lily thought she might start crying.

“Ro,” Tristan objected. “She’s exhausted. You can’t expect her to observe a whole cycle.”

“How else is she supposed to learn?” Rowan snapped.

“But I already learned this,” Lily whined. “Mr. Carnello taught me this in eighth grade. It’s the citric acid cycle discovered by Hans Krebs, like, seventy years ago.”

“Try about two hundred and seventy years ago. Here anyway,” Tristan said with a sympathetic smile. “And we’ve never heard of any Hans Krebs. The cellular energy cycle was first observed, understood, and manipulated by witches.”

Lily threw up her hands in defeat. One of the things she was trying to absorb was that here, in this version of the world, magic had made all of what Lily knew of as scientific discoveries, and no wonder. With her willstones, Lily didn’t need microscopes or chemicals or centrifuges to see and manipulate cells or—for example—unzip and recombine DNA. All she needed was a willstone and a deep understanding of the way DNA worked and she could do it.

Here, in this universe, what differentiated science from witchcraft was that scientists had fewer resources and couldn’t magically manipulate the natural world by will alone. They had to fumble around until they found a chemical or developed a machine that achieved the same results. There weren’t many people who called themselves scientists here, and not just because Lillian persecuted them. Witches were much more efficient at tackling the challenges of biology, chemistry, and physics, so why even try to be a scientist? That is, unless you were either in love with the profession or because you were desperate and

had no access to a witch’s cure-alls, as was the case with the Outlanders.