The ink on Cale’s quill tip gathered into a fat black bead and dropped onto the blank corner of his foolscap sheet.
Nobody reached for the blotter. Across the oak trestle, Tessa Dene’s salvage bread knife lay flat beside the two crumbs of dry mortar Sella had used to represent the campaign charter and the Great Seal. The smokeless hearth threw a steady copper light across Tessa’s scarred knuckles, which were still grey with cellar lime from the morning’s masonry check.
“If the officers say no,” Cale began, his voice dropping half an octave from its bright courtroom pitch, “then Lady Serit still holds the Great Seal—”
“Lady Serit is one woman in a velvet traveling cloak,” Tessa interrupted. She did not raise her voice; she spoke in the flat, level tone she used when telling a carter that an axle pin had sheared clean through and no amount of grease would get the wagon up the hill. “She has four coachmen and two clerks with clean cuffs. Lord Auditor Orin Vane has twelve halberdiers wearing royal alloy around their throats, six siege batteries sighted on our gate, and an engine in the Survey House basement that can rewrite a man’s own receipt while he holds it.”
