Sella Rusk’s steel pen-knife made a clean, sharp slice across the edge of the vellum, trimming away the frayed corner of the final deposition page.
In the grey light of the inner courtyard, she dipped her thumb in dry river sand, sprinkled the fine quartz grains over the fresh black strokes of Cale’s Mere ink, and waited two minutes while the wet characters set into the calfskin. When the ink had dulled to the flat, permanent charcoal of an official record, she tilted the volume, tapped the loose sand into a tin saucer, and handed the pen to Sergeant Berr.
The dead sergeant did not hold the quill between his fingers as a clerk would. He clasped the turkey-feather shaft in his bare iron-sheathed gauntlet, steadying his wrist against the flat boulder that served as their table.
With three slow, deliberate strokes that dug into the vellum with a faint, scratching screech, he signed his name and regiment:
BERR, M. — SERGEANT, 4TH BORDER GUARDS (ATTACHED ORREN CROWN PROVOST)
Under his name, Sella drew her own neat line, followed by Fen’s signature in his careful parish-school hand, and Tessa’s bold, angular mark resembling an iron chisel. At the bottom of the folio, Prit pressed his official red wax wafer, embedding a single grain of white filing chalk into the center to signify an archival lodging under Hearth-rank registry.
