Sect Year 7 · first month · night of day 2 · the sixty-third life: Wrenfold, the bench on the fifth day and the spring after
The bench sat in the old grain hall at the top of the market square, under a roof that had leaked for as long as anyone could remember. The judge was an old woman with a narrow face and ink on her right thumb. She had been a clerk before she was a judge, and she still held her pen between her fingers as though someone might take it from her. Three places down from her sat Dacre Rook in his clean collar, with his own clerk beside him reading from a fair copy of the landlord’s claim.
The claim said that the rain was the widow’s fault. It said so in four clauses, each one cleaner than the last. The clerk read them aloud in the trade speech, which the judge understood, and then, when he came to the third clause, in the river dialect, which she understood better. She nodded at each line as if she were confirming a sum.
Haskin stood up when his turn came. He didn’t hurry. He had argued in the lower courts of Wrenfold for ten years, and he knew the shape of a room that had already decided to be impressed. He spoke first in the trade speech, then in the river dialect, then in the old scribal tongue of the bond itself. It he hadn’t…
