Hesper Quill had read a great many documents in her life, and she had learned early that a document tells the truth about itself in its smallest parts. Not in its clauses. Clauses lie as easily as men do, and a good clerk can make a lie look like a wall. The truth is in the margins, in the thread, in the pressure of a pen on the third letter of a word that the writer was not thinking about. She had taught her clerks to look there.
She sat at the Great Hall’s long table with her spectacles on, and she put the glass to the spine of the wet copy, and she read the seal.
It was the Lessary seal. There was no doubt of it. The crown was too heavy in the centre and the wheat was tied too tightly at the band, which was the Chancery’s old fault, the fault of a die-cutter who had been paid by the weight of his gold rather than the sharpness of his lines. Quill knew the die. She had seen its impression on forty Dovereach bonds in her first year as a magistrate, and every one of them had been from a Chancery that was still paying for its own bread.
