Twenty-four pine chairs stood in a ragged circle across the flagstones of the Grand Hall, every one of them empty, mismatched, and scraped at the heels from a winter of hard use.
Some had come from Hobb’s kitchen tables; three were split-back camp stools salvaged from the old coaching yard; one was a high-backed oak armchair with a singed velvet cushion that Noll had dragged out of the ruined officer’s quarters during his first month in the stone. Together they looked like a village parish committee assembled to argue over church roof slates, which Noll privately considered a much healthier model for survival than a royal tribunal.
“Put the broken stool on the east side for Vane’s second clerk,” Tessa Dene said, dropping a heavy ash bench into place near the chalked witness ring and dusting her palms on her apron. “If a man has to write down his master’s excuses for six hours, he shouldn’t get a cushion.”
“No,” Prit said from the center of the ring, where he was measuring the distance between the lectern and the boundary line with a knotted string. “The auditor’s party receives the level oak bench on the eastern curve, six feet from the rail, with a clear sightline to the ceiling inscriptions. If we give a hostile witness a crooked seat, the Hall records the tilt as procedural bias before a word is spoken.”
