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“This meeting of the North American Magical Council is now in session,” the wizard in the middle said with another strike of his staff on the floor. A large ceremonial gavel sat on the table in front of him, but it looked like the staff was the real sign of power. I’m sure Freud would have had something to say about that. “There has been a request to add an agenda item: A petition from Mr. Ivor Ramsay to grant a seat on this Council to the chairman of Spellworks and to reconsider the MSI seat, as that organization has failed to provide proper leadership to the magical world. We will address that issue after we deal with the primary matter that brings us together today. Now, bring in the accused.” He pounded his staff again.
There was a shimmer in the air around the doors beside the Council’s table, and then the doors opened. The black-clad men came in, guiding Owen by the elbow. He was dressed in a dark suit, and if his hands hadn’t been bound behind his back, he’d have looked like he was having just another day at the office. Even the dark circles under his eyes were all in a day’s work for him.
They brought Owen to stand in the middle of the circle in front of the elevated table, and he looked very young and very small with the Council looming over him. I’d seen what he could do using magic, and I still didn’t think anyone could imagine him to be a threat given the way he looked. The crowd murmured, like they were discussing Owen’s appearance, and I hoped they, too, thought he looked harmless. I felt Gloria tense next to me. She reached to take my hand and clutched it fiercely.
Merlin stared Owen down with a glare that made me squirm uncomfortably, and it wasn’t even aimed at me. Owen seemed to be studiously avoiding looking at Merlin, but that wasn’t the kind of glare you could ignore for long. Even if he didn’t see it, he had to feel it. Once he finally caught Owen’s eye, Merlin’s expression changed. His lips moved ever so slightly, but I couldn’t make out any words. I couldn’t see Owen’s face to get a sense of what he was doing, but his head nodded a fraction of an inch before he turned away from Merlin. I got the feeling that something had been communicated between them, but I wasn’t sure how. They both had a tendency toward eerie knacks, but I’d never heard about either of them being able to communicate telepathically.
The head wizard peered through his reading glasses at a sheet of paper he held and said, “Owen Morgan.”
“Palmer,” Owen corrected, in a voice that rang through the room. “My legal name is Palmer. I was adopted by Stan and Lisa Palmer when I was an infant. Their parental rights were terminated and I eventually became a ward of this Council, but my name was never legally changed. As far as I know, there is no proof of my parents being the Morgans. That is merely an allegation. I have no record of who my birth parents were.” That was one upside of not having had the chance to get that envelope from the fire station, I thought. He could say with absolute honesty that he didn’t know his parentage.
“Very well, then, Owen Palmer,” the head wizard said, “you stand accused of conspiracy to commit magical crimes, namely that you have engineered a variety of incidents around New York City in which magic has been used to cause trouble and create a state of fear among the magical population so that you can then come to the rescue and make yourself appear to be a hero. How do you plead?”
“Not guilty.”
“On what grounds?”
“I thought that the way this court worked was that you had to have the grounds to charge me. We’ve had that in our law longer than it’s been the law of the land. After all, we’ve suffered too much from witch hunts to conduct them on ourselves. I don’t need grounds for anything. You have to present the grounds for the charges, and I must admit that I’m extremely curious to hear what you’ve come up with.” Owen sounded almost cocky, like Idris on one of his more annoying days. Merlin was fighting so hard not to smile that he ended up looking very stern indeed.
“That is true, Rudolph,” a woman at the opposite end of the table from Merlin said. “Surely you had evidence before you had Mr. Palmer arrested.”
“But we can ask you questions as part of these proceedings,” Rudolph said.
From the way Owen’s shoulders shifted, I got the feeling that he would have crossed his arms in front of his chest if his wrists hadn’t been bound behind his back. He did lean his weight onto one leg and cross the other in front of him, in a fair approximation of the way he might casually lean against a wall. “Then ask me a question.”
Ethan made a strangled noise, and I couldn’t help but glance at him. He looked like he had to bite his tongue to keep from shouting, “Objection!” My experience with the ordinary legal system was limited to jury duty a couple of times back home and watching the occasional episode of Law and Order, but even I could tell that there was something funny about the way this hearing was going. The low rumble of murmurs from the audience verified this.
Rudolph let the crowd mutter for quite some time, possibly because he couldn’t think of a good question to ask. After a couple of minutes, he banged his staff on the floor to demand silence. Merlin caught Owen’s eyes and held them, then leaned forward and said, “I have a question for Mr. Palmer.”
“Yes, Mr. Mervyn,” Rudolph said, sounding rather relieved.
“Mr. Palmer, have you ever used unauthorized magic?” Merlin asked.
I was fairly certain that this was part of whatever Merlin had planned, and that Owen was somehow in on it. Owen’s head snapped toward Merlin like he was shocked, but his posture looked far too relaxed. Someone whose mentor was questioning him about a crime should have been a lot more tense. He should have looked like he was barely holding himself back from jumping at the man.
Gloria, on the other hand, went tense enough for both of them. “What does he mean by this?” she whispered, and she moved as though she was about to go after Merlin, herself.
“I think Merlin’s up to something, and Owen knows what it is,” I said. “Look at him.” She stared at Owen’s back for a moment, then turned ever so slightly back toward me, one eyebrow quirked upward.
Ramsay’s reaction was even more interesting. He actually twitched, probably from being torn between impulses. If Merlin went on the attack against Owen, it could undermine his attempt to make Merlin look like he was out of it, but if Ramsay came to Owen’s defense, that ruined his chances of setting Owen up to take the fall for killing Merlin.
“Could you be more specific?” Owen asked.
“You have used questionable magic in my presence. I don’t know that it is strictly illegal, but I suspect that is because no one believed it could be done, and therefore it hasn’t been included in the magical code of conduct. You have interfered with time itself.”
That set the crowd going again. If this was part of a plan, I thought they were heading into risky territory, since Owen had interfered with time, and I knew it made Merlin intensely uncomfortable when he did it.
“Nonsense! No one can do that,” the youngest-looking member of the Council said.
“I have seen him do it,” Merlin insisted.
Rudolph glared down at Owen. “Can you do it?”
Owen stared back up at him, and he must have given a glare worthy of Gloria, since Rudolph pressed himself against the back of his chair, like he was moving as far as he could from Owen without getting up and fleeing. “You mean you can’t?” Owen asked.
“Of course I can’t! It’s impossible.” Rudolph addressed the other wizards on the Council. “Can any of you?”
o;Very well, then, Owen Palmer,” the head wizard said, “you stand accused of conspiracy to commit magical crimes, namely that you have engineered a variety of incidents around New York City in which magic has been used to cause trouble and create a state of fear among the magical population so that you can then come to the rescue and make yourself appear to be a hero. How do you plead?”
