That meant if you wanted to get justice for what had gone down in the dark years that preceded the uprising, you had to get creative. Jail was no longer a remedy. Money was. But if you picked your defendants well, that would hit them where it really hurt.

“What would Njal do?”

That was what his old colleague Miles jokingly said when he started this case, teasing Donny about one of his favorite books, saying the name so it sounded just like “y’all.” It was an old book, the only one of the Icelandic sagas whose hero was a lawyer rather than some ax-swinging Viking raider. A lawyer in a society that had no real government other than lawsuits, which would be settled every summer at a national camp-out presided over by the elders. Like the Anglo-Saxons who ruled England with their schedules of fees people could be made to pay for causing an injury: this much for an eye, a finger, a limb, a life. Tort law was the ur-law, the law that was older than the idea of the state that enforced it, rooted in ancient customs designed to temper the destructive forces of revenge that powered ever-escalating blood feuds.

When Donny and Miles joked about Njal in those days, they didn’t know they were predicting the future. That the blood feuds were already happening on their watch, and would continue after the government was deposed. Hopefully by means other than the spilling of more blood. That Donny’s motivation in chasing this case was partly about avenging the spilling of Miles’s blood was something he tried to keep to himself. And as he sat there staring at the death certificate while everyone else in the room stood for the judge’s exit, hearing Miles ask him the question in his head, Donny knew one thing: Neither Miles nor Njal would let himself lose a case with these kinds of facts just because the client who actually suffered the injury no longer existed. If there was a real wrong, there was a way to make the law correct it, even when the law was designed to make that hard for a private party to do. Even when it was supposed to be impossible.

Donny put the death certificate down, facedown, and looked over at the victorious defense team packing up their portable war room to the sounds of paper shuffling, clasps locking, and bungee cords snapping into place.

“Hey, Karen,” he said, calling across the aisle.

Karen looked at him with a smile that was equal parts predatory and friendly.

“You know it’s not too late to settle,” said Donny, momentarily convincing himself that he believed it.

Karen laughed. “Not if you’ll take five figures.” That would be enough to cover what most people made in a year, but less than Karen’s client was paying her every month, and a tiny fraction of what would be fair.