[Brion Hillrover]

Brion Hillrover wasted no time in escorting the King's Envoy, Lawrince
Ournel, up to the witness stand. Despite the Envoy's own share of dark
circles under his eyes he looked calm and immaculate. His greying blond
hair was neatly cut, and his long mustache was precisely trimmed. His brown
silk tunic and blue trews were unwrinkled, and properly brushed; the brown
cloak he had originally worn in was now left in an adjacent room.

He waited patiently for whatever form of swearing in the new Montfort legal
system had chosen.

[Allenel/et al.]

    The oath, when read, revealed itself as nothing more startling than that
traditionally used in the courts of Claremont -- that spoken for years
before Allenel's father, the late Judge Gilford.  An oath to Crown and to
community to speak no falsehood, so that justice may be given to both
guilty and innocent.  Allenel himself asked the envoy to swear it, before
the man took his seat and turned his attention to Arno Everett.

    Marisa shifted in her juror's seat, leaning forward slightly to get a
closer look at the first witness.  -We're supposed to pay attention,- she
told herself.  Decide how truthful the witnesses would be (for all knew
they could lie, despite any oaths they might give).  Decide whether their
words would be enough for the jury to find against Fillip. -Don't be swayed
by his office,- she thought, with a slight frown.  Even the high-born and
titled could be liars and thieves, with less honor than the roughest
visitor to the Dragon's Inn, just as likely to stiff a waitress of a tip as
to slip a blade between ribs.

    Arno Everett, when he addressed the witness, employed the same neutral,
though respectful, tone that he had used throughout the morning. The first
series of questions were designed simply to introduce the witness to the
jurors, to the spectators -- where he was born, what his career had been,
how he came to be in service to the Crown.  Simple questions, these, each
one innocuous -- but the cumulative effect of the answers serving to
establish Lawrince Ournel's own history, how he had earned his place rather
than having inherited it, how he had been commended for his distinguished
service.

    "And now," Everett continued, after those matters had been covered, "to
turn to the issue that brings us here today.  As I understand it -- and
please correct me if I am wrong -- you first came to Montfort under the
guise of another name?  Could you please explain to the court why you took
such a course of action?"

[Lawrince Ournel]

"You are correct," Lawrince said, sounding tired, "I chose that course of
action because there was some concerns that my secretary, Mr. Netit Vanit,
had been using his office for illegal dealings. It was also suspected that
he would use our official trip to Montfort for some of his dealings, and I
hoped to learn the truth."

[Allenel/et al.]

    A brief murmur through the spectators at this -- the envoy's first public
statement on his dead secretary, who had been fished from the canal. Marisa
frowned even more at the mention of the secretary's name, glancing over the
other juror's in confusion.  They all knew that Vanit had come out of the
waters with his throat cut ... and all knew that no one, not even Fillip,
had been charged with his murder.  Would they learn more about that crime?

    "And what did you discover about your secretary when you arrived in
Montfort?" Everett asked, standing to face the defendant rather than the
witness.

[Ournel]

"Little," the envoy said, "Even though I followed him into Montfort I did
not follow near enough, and it wasn't until recently that it was confirmed
that it was his body that was fished out of the canal. The nearest that I
came to him in my enquiries was that he had been seen at the Dragon's Inn
on his first night - feeding a white cat."

[Jurors]

Elkanah returned Marisa's look with a shrug of his shoulders.  He himself
had heard very little about the dead body that had been found in the canal.
 From his experience as a royal guard though, he knew that intrigue and
plotting filtered down to all levels of the royal court.  Now the last
thing that the royal envoy said really confused him as well.  "What does a
white cat have to do with anything?" he thought.

[Brawl]

Frowning at that revelation, Brawl stifled another yawn -- lest the sound
again carry well across the chamber -- and shifted slightly in his seat,
the space allotted him by no means sufficient to permit a minotaur to
properly stretch.  Not without displacing a good half of the jurors from
this undersized box, at least.  By the gods, but how it dragged on, and on
... and *on* ...  Something akin to despair was slowly growing in him now;
if matters had already descended to such irrelevancies as white cats and
the dead secretary's favored tavern, then the proceedings were truly
destined to extend across an interminable length of time.

Were it permitted, he'd have suggested a trial of arms by now, even
volunteered his services to the prosecution if they were of a mind for it.
To have matters settled in combat, the concept did have its own merits: it
provided the crowds with the requisite and bloodthirsty spectacle, and
above all, it was *quick*.

[Lawrince Ournel]

Over the next hour the Royal Envoy, Lawrince Ournel, answered the
Prosecutor's quietly spoken questions, and over that hour the story formed
of what transpired (or the Envoy's version) the night Fillip Menagrem was
captured.

Nor was Lawrince given to dramatics, though his testimony was not
emotionless; this was obviously a man remembering a night when he had been
afraid for his life.

Alone, in a town unknown to him and in a role unknown to his quiet life, he
had sought his missing secretary. Slowly he had begun to suspect that the
ravished body in the canal might belong to Netit, and his questioning led
him towards the Golden Griffon; where one night a seemingly frightened
young man approached him in front of the inn. A young man who claimed that
he was related to a powerful mage, and that this same mage was the murderer.

Ournel, under questioning, explained that the tale the stranger gave fit
with what little he had learned at the Dragon's Inn - that the white cat
was a mage's familiar. So, against his better judgement, but with no other
leads, he agreed to meet the young man in the park; armed with only a vile
of itching powder and a knife.

He described the the deserted park, and how a whispered voice tried to bind
him by compulsion to stay by the silent fountain. And how some instinct
warned him to throw the itching powder towards the bushes, where the voice
originated from. How an enraged figure broke free, but instead of chasing
the fleeing Envoy a spell was cast, and the plants entangled his feet.

Lawrince spoke of laying on the gravel path - watching his swearing
attacker approach with a dagger. (His own knocked from his hand when he
fell.) Of seeing only a hooded man approach. Of how his rescuers came to be
there he had to admit that he was a little foggy, but he did know that his
sneezing, angered, attacker cast free of the place. And he told of
learning, once they had returned to the Golden Griffon, that his rescuers
consisted of Batista Dyer, and two gentlemen in for the festival. One of
whom was a mage in his own right.

The rest of the night was a hunt as they tried to trace the residual
magical traces; traces that led to a burning shack in the shanty town, and
then off into the forest - where they found the haphazard grave of the poor
Denlira. And a hunt that finally ended in nightmarescape of the blasted
citadel - with Fillip cowering amongst the ruins. Lawrince also told of
meeting Alexandrin and Yals in the shanty town, where they fought the fire,
and of Lucc, the young forester who had found the grave.

[Arno Everett/et al.]

    Throughout it all, Arno Everett stood back from the witness box, allowing
the envoy to directly address the jury.  Marisa for one sat rapt at the
edge of her seat, expression revealing each emotion -- surprise, horror at
the revelation of Denlira's body.  And anger, as her eyes flashed in the
direction of the defendant, imagining him harming the woman who had loved him.

    At the end, the prosecutor made no grand flourish, and simply thanked the
envoy.  "The Crown has no further questions of Mr. Ournel at this time."

    Almost immediately, the attention of the spectators moved towards the
young attorney at the defense table.  An air of expectation could be felt,
all on-lookers wondering what approach Fillip's champion would take against
his chief accuser.

[Crofton Lyons]

For once the red-haired lad's mind was not filled with dreams of arches,
or aquaducts. He had scooted forward on his chair and listened to the
Envoy's testimony. It sure sounded like the man had been through a lot!!

Occasionally the papermaker's apprentice stole a glance towards the
accused, and noted had rigidly Menagrem sat. Looking as white as bleached
bones, with hard eyes. Of course, he couldn't blame the man for looking
wound tight...What would it be like to be only inches from a noose?

[Brawl]

It was almost with relief, that the minotaur watched the Prosecutor
conclude with the first witness, the envoy.  If the length of time passed
had served to daunt him before, here was much more now, with which Brawl
might be assailed.  Give him a mace and a man to swing at, and all was
well, he mused; sadly, this was a far cry from open battle.  Still, the
attorney would provide a somewhat livelier spectacle, that much was almost
a certainty -- at least, if the reactions of the onlookers were in any way
to be relied on for such things.  For once, Brawl almost welcomed the
rising tension; it was a harbinger of much that might now come.  One could
always hope.

[Dionessa]

Dionessa listened intently to Lawrince Ournel's testimony.  She'd heard bits
and pieces about this, but never the whole thing in sequence.  'Definitely
more going on here than one woman's murder,' she thought, 'though that's all
we're to judge on.'  She watched as the defense attorney stepped up toward
the witness, wondering what his tack would be.

[Magda Nightwalker/Scribe]

The dark-haired woman sat putting the final touches on another sketch,
while the younger woman next to her wrote.

The mention of a white cat, almost assuredly Azriel, had concerned Magda
but the matter had apparently been dropped.  She stopped and looked over
the sketch of the minotaur juror with a satisfied nod.  Then she turned to
a fresh page and started on the next.  Why Bryce wanted these drawings
she didn't know, nor did she feel the need to ask.  Likely as not she was
better off without that information.

[To be continued.]