Lord Auditor Orin Vane did not look like a man defending himself against an accusation of murder.
He stood with his spine straight and his shoulders loose, both hands clasped loosely behind the small of his back, speaking with the clear, rhythmic cadence of a senior lector addressing a hall of young magistrates. Lantern light from the iron chandeliers caught the polished horn buttons of his coat, casting two steady discs of reflection against the limestone wall behind him.
“Master Serit,” Vane said, his voice carrying easily into the highest gallery where the town delegates sat, “a kingdom is not a church choir. It is an apparatus of survival built by imperfect men across six centuries of famine, border invasion, and civil blood.”
He walked two paces toward the center of the aisle, his boots falling with quiet, measured authority upon the flags.
“Thirty years ago, when the winter passes failed, forty thousand people in the northern marches ate boiled nettles and birch bark because the grain wagons could not cross the high ridges without fortified toll gates,” Vane continued. “Ten years before that, a rogue Seed-core in the eastern valley woke in a quarry, generated illusions of gold seams, and drew four whole townships into debt-fever before its backlash collapsed the river bank and drowned six hundred children in their beds. Those are not figures plucked from tavern gossip. They are recorded in the Great Rolls of the Old Royal Seat, countersigned by every chancellor since the third dynasty.”
