“Can you see her?” asked Vilate, her voice thin and quavering. “Do you see how beautiful she is? She taught me how to be beautiful, too.”
“Shut up!” cried the salamander. “Tell them nothing, you bitch!”
Yes, the voice was definitely lower in pitch now, thick in the throat, rasping.
“I can't see her, no,” said the judge.
“She's not my friend, though, is she,” said Vilate. “Not really.”
“I'll rip your throat out, you…” The salamander let fly with a string of expletives that made them all gasp.
Vilate pointed at the salamander. “She made me do it! She told me to tell those lies about Alvin! But now I see she's really hateful! And not beautiful at all! She's not beautiful, she's ugly as a… as a newt!”
“Salamander,” said the judge helpfully.
“I hate you!” Vilate cried at the salamander. “Get away from me! I don't want to see you ever again!”
The salamander seemed poised to move– but not away from her. It looked more as if it meant to spring from the table, leap the distance between it and Vilate, and attack her as its hideous voice had threatened.
Alvin was searching carefully through the salamander's body, trying to find where and how the Unmaker had control of it. But however it was done, it left no physical evidence that Alvin could see. He realized, though, that it didn't matter. There were ways to get a person free of another person's control– an off-my-back hex. Couldn't it work for the salamander, if it was perfectly done? Alvin marked out in his mind the exact spots on the table where the hex would need to be marked, the order of the markings, the number of loops that would have to be run linking point to point.
Then he sent his doodlebug into that part of the salamander's brain where such sense as it had resided. Freedom, he whispered there, in the way he had that'animals could understand. Not words, but feelings. Images. The salamander seeking after food, mating, scampering over mud, through leaves and grass, into cool mossy stone crevices. Free to do that instead of living in a dry handbag. The salamander longed for it.
Just do this, said Alvin silently into the salamander's mind. And he showed it the loops to make to get to the first mark.
The salamander had been poised to leap from the table. But instead it ran the looping pattern, touched one toe on the exact point; Alvin made it so the toe penetrated the wood just enough to make a mark, though no human eye could have seen it, the mark was so subtle. Scamper, loop, mark, and mark again. Six tiny prickings of the table's surface, and then a bound into the middle of the hex.
And the Unmaker was gone.
The salamander raced in a mad pattern, too fast to follow clearly; ran, then stopped stockstill in the middle of the table.
And then, suddenly, the intelligence seemed to go out of its movements. It no longer looked at Vilate. No longer looked at anyone in particular. It nosed across the table. Not certain yet whether the spell that bound the creature was done or not, no one moved toward it. It ran down the table leg, then scurried straight toward Alvin. It nosed the sack under his chair that contained the plow. It ran inside the sack.
Consternation broke out in the courtroom. “What's happening!” cried Marty Laws. “Why did it go in that sack!”
“Because it was spawned in that sack!” cried Webster. “You can see now that Alvin Smith was the source of all this mischief! I have seen the face of the devil and he sits cocky as you please in yonder chair!”
The judge banged with his gavel.
“He's not the devil,” said Vilate. “The devil wears a much more lovely face than that.” Then she burst into tears.
“Your honor,” said Webster, “the defendant and his lawyer have turned this court into a circus!”
“Not until after you turned it into a cesspool of scandalous lies and filthy innuendoes!” Verily roared back at him.
And as he roared, the spectators burst into applause.
The judge banged the gavel again. “Silence! Come to order, or I'll have the bailiff clear the court! Do you hear me?”
And, after a time, silence again reigned.
Alvin bent over and reached into the sack. He took out the limp body of the salamander.
“Is it dead?” asked the judge.
“No, sir,” said Alvin. “She's just asleep. She's very, very tired. She's been rode hard, so to speak. Rode hard and given nothing to eat. It ain't evidence of nothing now, Your Honor. Can I give her to my friend Arthur Stuart to take care of till she has her strength back?”
“Does the prosecution have any objection?”
“No, Your Honor,” said Marty Laws.
At the same time, Daniel Webster rose to his feet. “This salamander never was evidence of anything. It's obvious that it was introduced by the defendant and his lawyer and was always under their command. Now they've taken possession of an honest woman and broken her! Look at her!”
And there sat beautiful Vilate Franker, tears streaming down her smooth and beautiful cheeks.
“An honest woman?” she said softly. “You know as well as I do how you hinted to me about how you needed corroboration for that Amy Sump girl, how if you just had some way of proving that Alvin did indeed leave the jail, then she would be believed and no one would believe Alvin. Oh, you sighed and pretended that you weren't suggesting anything to me, but I knew and you knew, and so I learned the hexes from my friend and we did it, and now there you sit, lying again.”
“Your Honor,” said Webster, “the witness is clearly distraught. I can assure you she has misconstrued the brief conversation we had at supper in the roadhouse.”
“I'm sure she has, Mr. Webster,” said the judge.
“I have not misconstrued it,” said Vilate, furious, whirling on the judge.
“And I'm sure you have not,” said the judge. “I'm sure you're both completely correct.”
“Your Honor,” said Daniel Webster, “with all due respect, I don't see-”
“No, you don't see!” cried Vilate, standing up in the witness box. “You claim to see an honest woman here? I'll show you an honest woman!”
She peeled her shawl off her shoulders. At once the illusion of beauty about her face disappeared. Then she reached down and pulled the amulets out of her bodice and lifted their chains from around her neck. Her body changed before their eyes: Now she was not svelte and tall, but of middle height and a somewhat thickened middle-aged body. There was a stoop to her shoulders, and her hair was more white than gold. “This is an honest woman,” she said. Then she sank down into her seat and wept into her hands.
“Your Honor,” said Verily, “I believe I have no more questions for this witness.”
“Neither does the prosecution,” said Marty Laws.
“That's not so!” cried Webster.
“Mr. Webster,” said Marty Laws quietly, “you are discharged from your position as co-counsel. The testimony of the witnesses you brought me now seems inappropriate to use in court, and I think it would be prudent of you to retire from this courtroom without delay.”
A few people clapped, but a glare from the judge quieted them.
Webster began stuffing papers into his briefcase. “If you are alleging that I behaved unethically to any degree–”
“Nobody's alleging anything, Mr. Webster,” said the judge, “except that you have no further relationship with the county attorney of Hatrack County, and therefore it's appropriate for you to step to the other side of the railing and, in my humble opinion, to the other side of the courtroom door.”
Webster rose to his full height, tucked his bag under his arm, and without another word strode down the aisle and out of the courtroom.
On his way out, he passed a middle-aged woman with brown-and-grey hair who was moving with some serious intent toward the judge's bench. No, toward the witness stand, where she stepped into the box, put her arm around Vilate Franker's shoulders, and helped the weeping woman rise to her feet. “Come now, Vilate, you did very bravely, you did fine, we're right proud of you.”