There were certain things about being a magistrata that Kang Yoorae found frustrating.  Keeping a straight face was one – it was genuinely hard to remain dignified when she ended up with a young cutpurse in front of her who’d managed to slit everybody’s belts as well as their wallets and leave an entire marketplace trouserless.  Resisting the temptation to start yawning was another, especially after such a long day in the court room.  Possibly the worst, though, was maintaining the magistrata facade.  Be marble.  Be obsidian.  Show them no emotion, let them know of no distractions – give the criminals nothing to latch onto.  The law is the law, and it is rigid, and our magistrati and magistrata must embody that.

Yoorae knew that it worked, and that the cutpurse in the docks was absolutely petrified of her (he would have been petrified whoever he’d been brought before, to be honest), and that the whole veneer of the magistrati and magistrata of Saurellis being almost super-human in their ability to be unaffected by anything except what fell on the right and wrong sides of the law.  But none of that prevented the fact that she was absolutely freezing.  The courtroom was large and bare, devoid of wall hangings or rush-reed floor mats to keep heat in, and lacking a fireplace to produce it in the first place.  The high window set at the opposite end to her sometimes sourced heat (and sunlight) straight onto her on a sunny day, but night had long since fallen – a cloudless night, judging by the stars she could see through the thin panes of glass.  There wasn’t even a cushion to protect her from the coolness of the marble chair of judgement that she was sitting in, though that was because of the blasted magistrata image.

She could see everybody else in the room was cold too.  She wanted nothing else than to be able to shiver like the boy in the docks was doing, or to chafe her arms and hands along with no fewer than three of the witnesses for the prosecution, but that would make her look human.  It was even more difficult to call a halt to the proceedings so that she could draw up a fire sigil to warm them all, but that would show compassion, and the number one rule was no compassion in the courtroom.

“I call on the ninth witness for the prosecution,” droned the sole lawyer in the room, and Yoorae took a horrified moment at the number to scan down the line of witnesses drawn up to get some idea of just how long this was going to take.

When she counted another six yet to go, she banged her gavel down on the block, bringing proceedings to a screeching halt.

“The boy has admitted to his own guilt, sir, I don’t see why we need fifteen witnesses in a state prosecution,” she said dryly.  “Unless any of the witnesses have different arguments for how he detrousered them in public or accusations of other crimes beyond the two admitted, might I suggest we start to wrap this up?”

The boy’s teeth were chattering and Yoorae’s wanted to chatter in sympathy, but she held firm, prescribing an extra day in the capital city’s prison beyond the mandated sentence for petty theft (she really ought to have given the boy more than that, but the whole affair with the trousers was funny, even if Yoorae hadn’t been able to laugh openly at it), and maintained her aloof demeanour until everybody had shuffled out.

The second they were all gone, she slumped down over the desk in front of her and tucked her hands into her armpits, shivering and yawning with abandon.

A quiet cough soon interrupted her pity party.  Yoorae opened her eyes to see her aide and childhood friend Kyungsoo standing there and groaned, turning to face the other way.

“Ma’am,” he began politely, but then realised she wasn’t going to listen to him.

He grabbed her shoulder and hauled her upright.  “Yoorae, there are still another three to go through tonight.  Get a grip.”

She tried without success to plant her face back on the desk.  Unfortunately, Kyungsoo was strong, and he held her up.

“Can we please do them tomorrow?” she begged.

“No,” he said.  “And also, thirty-two days for that boy Han?  It should have been at least sixty.”

“You can’t tell me you didn’t snort when you saw the briefing.”  Yoorae rubbed her upper arms briskly with her hands.  “Where’s my stylus?  I need some heat in here or I’m going to die.”

Kyungsoo raised an eyebrow at her.  “If you make this room any warmer, you’re going to fall asleep.”

Nonetheless, he did fish the stylus out of her pocket for her with fingers distinctly warmer and surer than hers were in the cold, and Yoorae hastily started scribing the sigils she needed to create warmth into the air.  They glowed faintly, waiting to be activated, and she checked them through to make sure that her trembling fingers hadn’t accidentally made a mistake before turning the stylus to the blunt end, where her own unique sigil lay, and brushing it over it over the ones she’d drawn.

They flared brightly and vanished, and heat immediately began to seep out from where they’d been.  Yoorae sighed contentedly, sticking her hands straight into it and basking, and Kyungsoo sniffed in a manner that tried to be disapproving when he was actually amused.  The sigil magic would only last a couple of hours – no sigil lasted longer than that even under the most competent mage – but it was more than enough.

“Who’s next?” Yoorae asked, eyes closed.

“Two cabbage merchants with a dispute over spoilt merchandise.  There appears to have been a back and forth of tipping over carts and running over the produce.  After that, there’s one to do with magic abuse—”

Yoorae shot alert.

“—Don’t get too excited, it’s just idiots using sigil magic inappropriately, nothing to do with naming magic—”

Yoorae slumped down again.

“—And then the last one, which I really don’t think should be on the list, is…”  Kyungsoo paused, searching for the right word to classify it.  Yoorae looked up at him expectantly.

“Weird,” he concluded.  “I only got handed it about half an hour ago, or I would have shown it to you earlier.  Apparently a boy from Tern Island has been making a bit of a nuisance of himself down by the Madreen docks.  The report says that last month, residents in the alleys near the docks alerted the city night watch to a disturbance – a fight of some kind – and when the night watch arrived they found the boy in a state of shock, holding a bloody knife and roughed up himself, mumbling ‘they took him, they took him’ over and over to himself.  They detained him for being a disturbance but let him go the next morning, since they couldn’t build a case to turn him over to the courts, but since the waning crescent he’s apparently been showing up on the docks every night and screaming ‘give him back!’ at the sea until somebody calls the night watch and they take him away.  Apparently tonight he’s annoyed the night watch one too many times, but I think he’d be better off with a healer examining his head than he would be in here.”

Frowning at the window, Yoorae considered for a few moments.

“Take him off the schedule for tonight: I’m too tired to listen to prosecution cases for much longer.  We’ll go and see this nuisance when I’m done.”

Kyungsoo nodded and tucked one of the three scrolls he had with him under his arm.  The other two he placed in front of Yoorae.

“I’m slightly more concerned the night watch isn’t investigating what could be a kidnapping,” he admitted, “but then, it does also sound like this young man might be a touch insane, and the watch is stretched thin enough as it is, so I guess I can’t blame them.”

As an afterthought, he reached into his clothing and drew out a small pouch, opening it up to reveal a slightly squished honeycake, which he offered to Yoorae.  Gasping, she all but lunged at it, and he laughed softly as she crammed it into .

“Thought you might need that,” he said, sweeping the crumbs off her desk – image was, after all, paramount – before retreating back through a small doorway behind her majestic marble seat.

***

It was bitterly cold when Yoorae and Kyungsoo finally left the courthouses just a short while shy of midnight.  The season was approaching winter anyway, but there was no cloud cover and the night was very still.  Even with the sea,