She was dragged to the court chamber. Her thick make-up was gone, her satins shredded. The sickness was obvious now, as seeping sores broke through her skin.
The guards dumped her before the court and hurried away to wash their hands. Even the judge recoiled at her stench.
“You are charged,” the judge spoke, crushing the urge to gag, “with willfully spreading plague, both mundane and cursed, throughout the townsfolk, with the spoiling of wells and with the worship of fiends of disease. The punishment is death. How do you plead?”
She smiled, then shuddered violently, her chair rattling against the floor.
“How do you plead?”
She began to cough, her whole body seizing as lumps of vivid green phlegm fired from her throat.
“How do you plead, you wretch?”
Her eyes rolled back as she gave a long and strangled wheeze, ending in a deathly rattle. Her body crashed to the floor, still twisted. Slowly a thick black miasma seeped from her mouth, clogging the courtroom air. Chairs flew as the crowd rioted out.