Nobody in the Grand Hall moved a boot while the auditor looked down at his bread crust.
Even the west-farm carters, who ordinarily treated any speech from a Crown official as an excuse to scrape their bowls and check their mule traces, sat with their wrists resting on the scarred pine planks. Near the herb shelves by the inner door, twenty-year-old Fen stood with a roll of boiled linen in his hands, his dark eyes fixed on the sleet-haired man at the end of the trestle.
Noll Vey watched from five feet up the western wall, feeling the quiet warmth of the fuel-less stove ripple through the damp lime mortar around his blue stone. In his stage years, Noll had known a dozen actors who could weep on command. Some bit the inside of their lip until the salt came; some kept a flake of dried alum under a fingernail; some thought of a dead dog or an unpaid tavern bill. Noll himself had once wrung three silver crowns out of a cattle-drovers’ lodge in Bracken Ford with a trembling monologue about an orphan sister who had never existed. Because he knew every hinge and pulley of counterfeit sorrow, he recognized the real article the instant it walked into a room.
