“What’s a lawyer?”

  Clara had to hold back a chuckle at Iris’s question. How can a second-year student at Claves not know what a lawyer is? For what’s supposed to be the Kingdom’s premier educational institution, surely they must have some sort of class on laws.

  “A lawyer is someone who defends you in court, my lady. Who challenges the evidence presented by the prosecution, or argues there were mitigating circumstances… things like that.”

  But Iris simply tilted her head as if what Clara had just said was absurd.

  “Defends you? From what?”

  Wasn’t Iris supposed to be smart? What part of this is hard to grasp?

  “From the accusations against you, of course. If the prosecution says you tried to murder Helena, your lawyer will try to show that you didn’t, that there’s another explanation,” said Clara.

  Iris stood up and held Clara’s hand, leading her to a chair. Clara sank easily into the velvet cushion—it was almost as comfortable as a premium Herman Miller.

  “Are you okay, Clara? Do you need some time to rest? I don’t mind.”

  She felt Iris’s fingers running through her scalp as the lady picked up the brush and began to comb Clara’s long, dark hair.

  The sensation was so unexpected that Clara froze.

  When was the last time someone had done this for her, touched her hair so gently? Her mother, probably, back when Clara was small enough to sit still for it. After what happened to her parents, there’d been nothing, not really. No friendly roommates; no time for relationships that went beyond casual drinks and work.

  Iris’s fingers were smaller than Clara’s own, softer, without the calluses—though were the calluses she had now the same as the ones she’d had before, from penning hundreds of essays and exams? Or were they from Stella’s work as a maid? Iris moved her hand through Clara’s hair calmly, finding tangles she hadn’t even noticed and working them out with patient care.

  It felt like being cared for—not like a spa treatment or a professional massage, which was great but ultimately transactional. It felt like kindness. And Clara couldn’t help but feel a wetness beneath her eyes at this simple human gesture, inappropriate though it was when it came from a lady to her maid.

  She rubbed her unformed tears away, then brushed her hand against her lips. The liquid felt warm and slightly salty, just as it should. She couldn’t deny it anymore. Iris’s hands, too, were warm and real; the brush was solid wood; the velvet cushion beneath her was supporting actual weight.

  It didn’t feel like fiction anymore.

  This was reality. That knowledge was so unfathomable, so overwhelming, that she didn’t even know where to begin processing it. Somehow, by some unknowable means, a trick of the universe, whatever Clara was experiencing now was without a doubt real.

  Descartes was wrong. It should’ve been ‘I feel, therefore I am’.

  She’d been granted a second chance. A second chance that, if what Iris said was true, was about to be snuffed out. Clara couldn’t stop the tears from coming. She wanted to get away, go back into her room and sink into the storm of her feelings.

  “My lady,” Clara started, her voice rougher than she intended. “This is not the appropriate way for a lady to act with her maid.”

  But Iris simply pouted. “We’ve been through this before. You may be a servant of the von Rhenias, but when we’re in private like this, you are my friend. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  Clara felt a tightness in her chest. She was receiving a kind, earnest affection, yet she knew deep down it wasn’t meant for her—these feelings belonged to someone else. It was a love that she wasn’t entitled to.

  She couldn’t stop herself from asking. “What about Stella?”

  “Who’s Stella? That’s a funny name,” said Iris.

  A million thoughts rushed through Clara’s mind. She was trying to comprehend the situation, to make sense of what was happening, to wrestle with this uncomfortable feeling that she was experiencing a lie. She opened her mouth to explain—

  “Shh.” Iris’s fingers pressed gently against Clara’s temple, then resumed their path through her hair. “Let me do this. Please.”

  And Clara did. For what felt like hours, she sobbed silently while Iris pampered her. After Clara let all her feelings out—her disbelief, her shock, her happiness, her anger, her worry—the tears stopped coming. She wiped herself with a handkerchief and let out a long breath.

  “Thank you, my lady.”

  When Clara finally turned her head to face Iris, she noticed her reddened eyes and puffy cheeks.

  “You are most welcome.”

  Iris sat next to her, and Clara carefully wiped away her tears with her handkerchief. For the first time since she’d walked in, Iris smiled. And, almost automatically, maybe as part of Stella’s reflexes, or maybe something more, Clara found herself smiling back.

  “My lady,” she began. “If you don’t mind, can you tell me what you know about the trial?”

  If this was real, and at least for now, Clara was convinced that it was, she had somehow taken over Stella’s place; maybe Stella had actually died in a suicide attempt, and then some force of the universe wrote Clara into her role. Regardless of the mechanics of it, she needed to find out everything she could about the upcoming trial. It was past what she’d read in the novel—of course the universe hadn’t been nice enough to put her in a story she’d seen the end of—and it seemed her life depended on the outcome. And Clara definitely wasn’t keen on dying again, so soon after the first time.

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  Iris pursed her lips and thought for a moment before answering.

  “We stand accused of the attempted murder of Helena Rosewood, the only child of Baron Rosewood. She’s been seriously ill for several weeks now, ever since I… Well, you know that part.”

  She nodded. In the original story, Iris had asked Stella to procure an herb used as a heavy laxative—though Clara had stopped reading just as that was about to happen.

  Iris continued. “We’ll be taken to court tomorrow. Since I’m the daughter of a duke, Her Holiness the Pope will preside over the trial herself.”

  The Pope? Her Holiness? So trials here were still run by the church, probably some form of canon law, under the authority of a female pope. Wait, the church…? Clara suddenly felt as if she were forgetting something important.

  “We’ll be sworn in by the inquisitor, and that’s when they’ll cast their truth spell on us.”

  Magic. She was forgetting magic.

  A minor detail, really.

  Holy shit! This world has magic! Real magic! Somehow, Clara hadn’t really thought about it—probably because it was even more outlandish than all the other outlandish parts of the last twenty-four hours—but the world of My Fair Villainess was a world of spells, where the church’s holy chants brought forth actual sorcery.

  Wait. Fuck. This world has magic. Truth magic. They’re going to ask Iris if she poisoned Helena, and Iris will gladly answer ‘yes’. That was not at all the start of a compelling case for the defense.

  “Can’t you refuse to answer them? Who’s going to be defending you—us?”

  Iris looked just as puzzled as before. But in these circumstances, Clara had to allow for the possibility that this wasn’t Iris being ignorant—it was her.

  “There’s nothing to defend us from, Clara. The inquisitor will ask us about our sins, we’ll have to answer, and then the Pope will render her judgement. It’s really all up to the Heavens.”

  “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Clara blurted out.

  Iris narrowed her eyes.

  Did I just call a duke’s daughter stupid? Clara could feel her heart beating faster and faster.

  And then Iris laughed. A hearty, arrogant laugh that fit her to a tee. “Oh ho ho! You always know just how to amuse me, Clara.”

  Phew. Crisis averted.

  But what she’d said was still true. It was stupid. Even if truth magic existed—and Clara had her doubts about how that would work in practice—that hardly made the notion of lawyers obsolete. Though Clara wasn’t a criminal attorney, she’d taken her fair share of criminal law classes and watched a decent few trials, too. So she knew that, despite the general public’s imagination, lawyers hardly ever argued about the truth. A defense attorney wasn’t a detective; their role was much more about holding the prosecution to standard—verifying the chain of evidence, presenting other possibilities, showing mitigating factors.

  Everyone deserved a defense. Even those who were guilty, even those who confessed. Truth spell or no truth spell. That was the only way to ensure the system wasn’t being abused.

  And as far as this case went, she knew that Iris wasn’t trying to kill Helena. That she really had only intended to give her a laxative. So why had Helena gotten seriously ill? Why had Stella tried to kill herself? Where had it all gone wrong?

  There were so many unanswered questions. And the trial was tomorrow.

  Nothing like a one-day deadline for a major project. Oh Caine, Polis & Smith—how I’ve missed you.

  “Lady Iris, I know this may be improper of me to ask, but do you mind accompanying me to the library?”

  Clara spent the rest of the day combing through the contents of the von Rhenia library—law books, history books, everything that looked like it might be helpful for tomorrow, no matter how old or dusty it was. Iris seemed quite amused with Clara’s ‘newfound literary appreciation’, but guilty as she felt, the young lady seemed content to indulge her. As one would indulge a last meal for a death row inmate, if you put a grimmer spin on it.

  As expected of a ducal family, the library was sprawling, with thousands of books arranged neatly under the Dewey Decimal System. Fortunately, they were all in English—or at least in a language that her brain processed as English, though she also spoke French, Portuguese, and Spanish. There was a notable amount of Latin terms, too.

  As she went to search for the second volume of On the Laws of the Elysian Empire, for the umpteenth time, she told herself: do not, absolutely do not, think about the implications of the Dewey Decimal System, which was invented in the United States in the late 19th century, existing in this world. For doing so would only invite a series of curse words towards an author who could never hear her.

  Her progress was meaningful, but slow. She sorely missed her team of junior attorneys, paralegals, and interns, whom she’d trained to be excellent at this type of grunt work. She affectionately called them ‘her minions’, and she knew they’d make short work of this.

  But even alone under the gas lamps, she’d managed to answer several of her initial questions about the world’s legal system: originally, the continent was unified by the militaristic Elysian Empire, which set down the basis for the laws that were still used today. Some sort of cataclysm hundreds of years ago resulted in magic appearing in the world, which led to the fall of the empire and the rise of several kingdoms.

  That included the Holy Kingdom of Arcadia, which she was now in. It was ruled by a constitutional monarch, but also had an extremely influential church controlling several important aspects of the country—including the legal system. Based on this, Clara felt confident in concluding that she was looking at a bastardized combination of Roman law and medieval canon law.

  Yet for every question answered, several new ones popped up. And there was only so much time. She did the best she could, until it got so late she caught Iris yawning next to her. Then she noticed it was dark outside, and her own stomach growled. They’d spent the entire day in the library, and Iris hadn’t complained even once: not of boredom, nor of hunger. She’d only watched curiously, like a parent might watch their toddler.

  Clara felt a pang of guilt. She thanked Iris and led her back into her room, then went into the kitchen and asked them to prepare a light dinner of pasta aglio e olio and deliver it to Iris—one of her favorites, Clara instinctively knew. For herself, she took only a loaf of bread with some butter; she was far too stressed to enjoy food, anyway.

  After eating, she walked back to her room. The other servants were all avoiding her like some sort of pariah, so she couldn’t even try to get useful information out of them. She didn’t know if it was because of the trial, the suicide ‘attempt’, or something else entirely. But that was a puzzle for another time.

  When she came inside, there was no longer any sign of the blood spatters or the mess of pills. She’d have to thank the cleaning staff later; even if they were all ignoring her, they did clean up after her—or Stella’s—mess. The least she could do was thank them properly.

  But that wasn’t the only difference between how she’d left the room this morning. A white envelope sat atop her desk, bearing her name and the address of the von Rhenia estate, sealed with golden wax. She carefully opened it, wondering who’d sent her a letter—or sent one to Stella, more accurately.

  Inside the envelope there was a single, folded sheet of paper. When she unfolded it, she saw a message written in bold black capital letters.

  ‘DO NOT THINK YOU CAN WALK BACK ON YOUR SIDE. YOU KNOW WHAT IS AT STAKE’.