Lord Auditor Orin Vane did not raise his voice when he refused the room.
He kept his right hand flat upon the brass-bound walnut casing of his portable register, right where Sergeant Berr’s fire-blackened bone fingers still rested near the lower corner of the control plate. Though the thirty-year Hill War archive seal inside the box had been forced open at dawn, the heavier iron lock governing the active expeditionary charter and the second collar anchor remained latched under Vane’s thumb.
“A royal expeditionary force is not a parish road-mending committee, Master Serit,” Vane said, turning his neat, grey-templed head toward the royal bench. “And it is certainly not a travelling theatrical company that can tear up its playbills because the landlord complains of the noise. Eight thousand soldiers of the March stand on those hills under a commission signed at the Old Royal Seat three hundred miles south of this valley. Neither a municipal reeve, nor a fugitive clerk, nor an irregular dungeon core has the jurisdiction to unmake a royal army.”
Up in the military tiers, the company delegates shifted in their wet wool cloaks. Noll could feel their unease pulsing through the floor flags. Most of the men in those rows had spent the past eight days staring at a hillside that refused to behave like a proper fortification. They had watched their horses saved from forest-fire smoke by a rain corridor; they had watched forty-six half-frozen privates fed barley soup at the gate lane; and this…
