For the space of three slow breaths after Noll Vey refused the signature, nobody along the supper benches reached for the bread basket.
The west-farm carters and the creek sawyers had spent their whole lives watching what happened when a small holder told a Crown officer no in front of witnesses. Usually the officer’s face went the color of boiled beet-root, a fist came down on the pine plank hard enough to jump the salt-cellar, and two troopers were called in from the porch to turn the tables over. One of the log-haulers at the middle bench quietly slid his iron-shod boot backward under the seat, getting his weight over his heels in case the doorway needed clearing in a hurry.
Lord Auditor Orin Vane did not strike the table.
He looked down at his earthenware bowl, where the horn spoon rested in the cooling barley broth. With the unhurried neatness of a clerk closing an inkwell at five o’clock, Vane lifted the spoon from the soup, tapped one drop of broth cleanly off the tip against the inner rim, and laid the horn handle across the top of the bowl. His right thumb brushed once—lightly, almost thoughtfully—across the flat iron-and-oath-silver face of his signet ring before releasing it.
