The second case of the week was not so easily solved with Faust's relic and a cabbage joke.
The village was smaller than Erfurt, its name barely worth remembering, its tribunal room a converted barn that still smelled faintly of the animals it had displaced. The accused this time was a girl of perhaps fifteen, mute since birth, whose silence the local priest had somehow reasoned into evidence of a hollow soul, ready for possession.
"Just remind me why are we doing all of these?"
Faust chuckled, sipping on his bitter tea, "My divination said that we might find something... or someone useful if we solve a few cases. So what's up with the documents and chronicles connected to the Hugues de Payens?"
Isfrid looked up his face red because his constantly bent position.
"No, nothing," Isfrid sighed.
After some digginig, Faust was almost finished with his tea.
"Oh, wait! There's something..."
Faust stood up, intrigued. "What?! Show me!"
"Bah, nevermind, that's another document of 'Latin Rule'."
"Curse you, I thought you found something worthy!"
This made Isfrid chuckle, "Nah, I'm done, let's go better get some sleep, we have a court to deal with tomorrow"
***
Faust watched, jaw tight, as two men dragged the fiffteen-year-old accused forward by the wrists hard enough to bruise, and felt the old, familiar heat behind his bandaged eye flare in sympathy with something that was not, this time, the Devil's voice at all.
It was his own, plain, human fury, kept on a very short leash after a century of practice.
Isfrid did not have a century of practice.
"Take your hands off her," Isfrid said, and the temperature in the barn dropped four degrees before he'd finished the sentence.
Frost bloomed along the wooden beam nearest his shoulder, delicate and involuntary, a thin lattice of white crawling up dry timber that had no business freezing. Three of the tribunal's own guards took an unconscious step backward.
The priest's mouth opened and closed twice without producing sound, which Faust privately found darkly funny given the circumstances.
"Isfrid." Faust kept his voice low and pleasant, for his godson's ears alone. "Breathe."
"They think her silence is a demon, Faust—"
"I am aware. Breathe anyway."
It took a visible effort.
Isfrid worked his jaw, his gloved hand tightening white-knuckled around Isbert's cane.
The frost receded from the beam, slow and reluctant, like a tide unwilling to give up the shore.
Faust dismissed the guards' concerns with a wave of a hand and had the girl released into her mother's arms within the hour, on grounds so thin that he privately suspected he'd have been laughed out of Rome for citing them: the tribunal finds insufficient evidence of possession absent an actual demonstration of demonic speech, which by definition the accused cannot provide.
No one in this barn was in a position to know that.
Afterward, on the road out of the village, Isfrid rode in furious silence until Faust finally broke it himself.
"That cannot happen again," Faust said.
"She was fifteen."
"I know precisely how old she was. I also know that frost bloomed across a dry beam in a room full of frightened, superstitious men who were already looking for a demon to blame, and that if one of them had thought to look up instead of at the girl, we would currently be having this conversation from inside a burning barn." He let that sit for a moment. "Your aura is not a secret you keep by choosing not to speak of it, godson. Every hungry, hunted, or hunting thing within half a mile can smell it the moment you let it slip its leash. A village priest is not the worst thing that might notice."
Isfrid's shoulders dropped, some of the fury bleeding out into something closer to shame.
"Then what am I meant to do? Watch and say nothing?"
"You are meant to learn the difference between a leash and a muzzle, our world is full of injustice, it's evil even," Faust said, gentler than he generally allowed himself to sound. "You know it better than me. You've got more secrets than I do. And you understand better than my one-hundred-year-old self does. Anger is not the enemy." He glanced sideways, caught the boy's stubborn, miserable profile against the grey afternoon. "You need to discipline yourself and learn how to control your relic. That's the part of your accolade."
Isfrid said nothing for a long while, but the frost, this time, stayed exactly where it belonged, quiet and coiled, entirely his own to release only when he chose to.