Stealing the Elf-King's Roses

Blair has engaged to perform over the last three years, only ten have been paid in full: five have received partial payments, well short of what was promised: and the rest, still unpaid, have pooled a significant amount of funds in order to bring this case into the civil courts, so that Justice might be given a chance to operate where other agencies have failed. We ask you to look with us at the defendant and open the way for Justice to enter here; to see the truth of the matter, find him guilty as charged, and to participate in sentencing should the verdict so require."

Lee nodded to the foreman and to the other jurors, turned and went to sit down. In a few moments Alan was on his feet, and had begun addressing the jury with his usual smoothness. Right now he was making the whole case sound like a series of coincidences, complicated by incompetent accountants, accidents, and badly drawn-up contracts. He went on to make everything Lee had said sound either foolish or mischievous, and finally said, "We ask you to look with us at the defendant, opening the way for Justice; to see the truth of the matter and to find him innocent." He sat down.

"Thank you," said Mr. Redpath, and tapped at his laptop's keyboard briefly. He looked over at the jurors' box. "Before we proceed, do any of you ladies or gentlemen require a recess at this time?"

The foreman, a small round woman with long wavy blond hair, looked down the length of the box at her fellow jurors. Heads were shaken. "No, Your Honor," she said after a moment.

"Very well." Mr. Redpath glanced at the bailiff. "Secure the room," he said.

The bailiff nodded, went over to confirm the time with the clerk of the court: the clerk reached under her desk to touch the button that locked the doors. Mr. Redpath folded down his laptop's screen, then folded his hands in front of him. There was a spate of the usual brief shuffling and last chance- to-cough coughing. Then things got very still.

The prosaic courtroom—the slightly dusty windows through which the afternoon's sunlight was beginning to pour, the pale golden birch paneling of the walls, the terrazzo floor and the acoustic ceiling, now started to take on a strange, sharp-edged quality, as if another kind of light were starting to suffuse the place, different from the hot sunlight, harsher, clearer. A different view of human affairs began to superimpose itself over the merely human one, as the Other without whom no court was fully functional began to manifest.

Once such manifestations had taken much more work. In ancient Greece, men had compelled Justice's presence by sheer weight of numbers. As technique improved, the Romans and Byzantines managed it with tribunals of fifty, and medieval Europe with only "twelve good men and true." In this country, most jurisdictions kept the jury as a check on the judiciary process. But you really needed only two or three properly trained people, these days-the two advocates, and the magistrate who maintained the structure which compelled the Power's attention. Once you had Justice's attention, everything else happened very quickly indeed.

That sense of the Other's presence deepened. Mr. Redpath just gazed down at his folded hands as the presence increased in the room, as everything became subtly more visible. Redpath wasn't one of those jurists who went in for voiced invocations or flamboyant gestures; he simply made room in the courtroom for Justice, and it arrived, without fuss, focused and fully empowered. Such matter-of-fact competence would probably push him into the Court of Appeal eventually, maybe even the State Supreme Court. But right now Lee was glad he was here, since with that matter-of- fact quality came the certainty of control.