The hearing chamber of White Heron Hall had been built for spear reach rather than clerical comfort. Forty feet of bare, uncarpeted limestone flat stone slab stretched from the bronze-studded entrance doors to a low dais at the eastern wall. No screens, tapestries, or wooden baluster rails divided the floor. A double row of bright animal fat-and-mica lanterns hung from iron ceiling chains directly below the western high window row windows, arranged so that the fading mountain twilight and the lamplight came together squarely on a single chalk line drawn twelve paces before the bench.
On the low limestone bench sat Hall Mistress Soran. She wore a plain, unembroidered robe of heavy winter linen the color of raw, unwhitened bone, her grey-white hair drawn back tightly and pinned with a single iron needle-point arrow above ears scarred by old, pale bone-shaking puckers. Across her knees rested a standard six-foot practice spear of seasoned mountain hardwood. Unpeeled, two inches thick through the belly, and banded with iron for heavy Bronze impact drills. There was nothing frail, trembling, or dim in her stillness. She sat with the compact, motionless thickness of a boulder lodged in a clouded eye, her dark eyes fixed on Osen Tal’s mouth before his boots had finished crossing the threshold.
