For twenty years on the kerosene-and-sawdust circuit, Noll Vey had stood behind painted canvas booths and watched men decide what to believe.
A farmer at a country fair did not decide with his ears; he decided with his thumbs, rubbing the edge of a painted wooden cup to see whether the groove felt honest before he put his copper penny down. A magistrate in a shire court decided by the smell of the clerk’s sealing wax and whether his own supper was getting cold. Soldiers, however, had a harder trade. When two orders met nose-to-nose in a narrow lane at midnight, whichever scrap of parchment a captain chose to call lawful made treason out of the other, and there was no curtain to duck behind if the rope came out at dawn.
Down on the wet stone bridge over the mill stream, Captain Arda Dorn did not hurry.
Through the lime-washed abutment and the cold runoff trickling down the ditch from the hill fort, Noll felt the iron-shod shift of her roan mare’s hooves on the gravel. In her left gauntlet rested two pounds of dull yellow gold and black touchstone—the Great Seal of Orren—and, nested inside the carved ring of the seven ducal crowns, the scorched, grease-smudged disc of Saved Chorus Token Number One.
