New World

35 | Livia's Watch pt.2

Lila smiled lightly as she approached Catarina Loss where she sat with Tessa Gray on the other side of the room.

"Hey," Lila said lightly. "Do you mind if I talk to you for a minute? Both of you?"

-

She was cut off by Julian saying, "Thank you all for responding to my summons," and she looked at Catarina and Tessa with a quick smile before she walked hastily through the rows of seats and over to her seat next to Ty. "I won't drag out any explanations. You know who I am, you know who my brother and sister are; you know Aline Penhallow and Emma Carstairs. You know that Aline's mother, our Consul, has been illegally taken into custody. You know that Horace Dearborn has seized power in Idris—"

"He was voted in," voiced a warlock. He had a white mark on his cheek in the shape of a spiderweb. "We cannot pretend otherwise."

"No one voted for him to throw my mother in jail," said Aline. "No one voted for him to remove the Consul from power so he could be in charge."

"There are others in jail too," said Cristina's mother, who sat beside Cristina. "Diego Rosales has been jailed for nothing!"

"As has my cousin Divya," said a boy with black hair and an anxious face. "What do you plan to do about it? Intercede with the council?"

"Everyone, all of us here, have always accepted a certain amount of prejudice from the Clave as normal," Julian said. "Now the Cohort have changed what we thought of as normal. Never before have Downworlders been driven from Idris. Never before have Shadowhunters jailed other Shadowhunters without even the pretence of a trail."

"Why do we care what other Shadowhunters do to each other?" Asked a phouka in a T-shirt talking about someone named Kaelie.

"Because that's step one, and what they do to Downworlders will be worse," Emma said. "They've already registered many of you."

"So you're saying we need to fight them?" said Gwyn in his rumbling voice. "This is a call to arms?"

"They're not a good Clave." a woman—Julie Beauvale—rose to her feet. "But they are still Shadowhunters," she said. "A lot of people who follow the Cohort are scared. I don't want to hurt those people. And their fear is real, especially now that Clary and Jace are dead. They were our heroes, and I knew them—"

"Julie," the woman beside her hissed. "Sit down."

"Jace and I were personally very close," Julie went on, "I would go far enough to call him my best friend, and I—"

"Julie," the woman beside her said, and grabbed Julie's shirt, pulling her down into her seat. "I think that what Julie meant is that you're saying the Cohort wants to destroy the government. But I'm guessing, given all the secrecy, that you also want to destroy the government, and I...don't know how we do that without hurting innocent people."

"We're not suggesting destroying the government," Julian denied. "Were saying it's being destroyed right now, already, from within. The Clave was built to give all Shadowhunters a voice. If we are all voiceless, then it is not our government. The Law was enacted to protect us and to allow us to protect others. When laws are bent and broken to put the innocent in danger, then it is not our Law. Valentine wanted to rule the Clave. Sebastian wanted to burn it down. We only want to return our rightful Consul to power, and to allow the government of Shadowhunters to be what it should be—not a tyranny, but a representation of who we are and what we want."

"Those are some pretty words," said a werewolf who sounded french. "But Jace and Clary were beloved of your people. They will want a war against those who harmed them."