The lead cradle carved into the center of the limestone witness rail was four inches wide, worn smooth at the rim by three centuries of border magistrates, and cold enough to frost the skin of a mortal thumb.
Master Serit did not hesitate over the cold.
With Hobb’s flour-stained kitchen cloth draped over her left forearm like a deacon’s towel, the elderly royal envoy lifted the Great Seal of Orren in both hands. The disk weighed nearly four pounds—solid river-lead cast around a core of old ducal gold, its face deeply intagliated with the nine royal roads and the seven founding crowns. Even through the scarred stone of his own body three feet away, Noll Vey could feel the dense, ancient accumulation of witness weight stored inside that metal. Generations of tax-rolls, border treaties, and assize judgments had passed beneath its rim; the bedrock of the Hall of Witness recognized it the way an old lock recognizes the smith’s master-key.
“Make the entry ready, Master Cale,” Lady Serit said. Her voice was neither loud nor theatrical, yet every cough and boot-scrape along the packed stone tiers ceased at once.
At the clerk’s lectern, Cale dipped his reed pen into the horn inkwell, his hand steady over the open page of the Communal Book of Witness. “The page is lined and dated, My Lady Envoy.”
