Ossane read the draft of the conditional Writ on the commission’s table in the late afternoon, under the canvas, with the sun gone down behind the Caul and the river going grey and then silver beneath the planks. She read it the way she read everything, twice, once for the sense and once for the joints, and by the time the clerk had finished copying the second sheet for the Chancellor’s seal she had found the hole in it.
It was not a large hole. Halse did not make large holes. He made small, exact ones, the kind a careful man would not notice unless he had been trained by the same masters, and she had been trained by the same masters. They had both learned their law in Sallowmere, from the same grey lecturer with the same thin voice, and she had been the better student at the subjunctive and he at the arithmetic, and they had spent their young lives arguing about which of them had been right to prefer one over the other. She had never once beaten him in an argument. She had beaten him twice in a court, and both times he had smiled at her afterward as if she had done him a kindness.
