Ossane Tiller had read a great many instruments aloud in her life, and she had never once read one that she did not believe in, and she had decided, somewhere on the long road from Sallowmere, that she would not begin with this one.
She stood at the Great Hall’s table in the candle-clock’s light with the Edict open before her on a board of pale oak. Its pages were thick and its seals were heavy, and the Order’s bell and the Crown’s lion had been pressed side by side into a wax the colour of salt. It was a handsome instrument. The Chancery’s draftsmen had worked on it for a month, and their work showed in every clause. There was not a superfluous word in it, and there was not a single sentence that a reasonable person could object to, provided that the person accepted its first premise, which was that the Dead were property.
Ossane did not believe the first premise. She had never believed any premise that began with a thing being owned. She believed in contracts. A contract was a promise between two parties who could each refuse it, and she had built her whole life on the principle that the refusal was what made the promise worth keeping. A thing could not refuse a contract. A thing could only be bought. And the Dead, sitting in their chairs in the Hold’s Great Hall with their hands on the table and their faces turned toward her…
