The clerk with the papers stood up from his stool, cleared his throat twice, and read the next name off his sheet in the flat, anxious voice of a man who had been told to call it and did not want to be the one who got it wrong. He had been trying not to look at the end of the bench for a quarter of an hour. Mireille had watched him try.
“The commission calls the witness Mirelle Ash,” he said. “Of no house. Auditor.”
Mireille stood up.
She did it slowly, with her satchel in one hand and her cloak falling straight from her shoulders, and she walked the length of the platform to the witness’s place at the end of the trestle, where a plain wooden stool had been set for her with its back to the river. She did not sit on it. She stood beside it, very upright, with her hands folded at her waist and her face toward the centre chair, and she waited until the clerk had dipped his pen and looked up at her, and then she spoke, in the even, careful voice she used for sums.
“My name is not Mirelle Ash,” she said. “I used it for travelling. It was on my warrant, and it was convenient, and it is a poor name for an auditor because it has no house in it. You may write it down as an alias if the commission requires one, since the Chancery seems…
