Cale laid the stiff, cream-colored sheet of treasury vellum across the flat limestone top of the witness rail, right between Noll Vey’s cup-marked stone hand and the lead cradle holding the Great Seal.
It was genuine exchequer skin, watermarked at the corners with the seven ducal crowns and threaded along the left margin with a thin ribbon of blue linen that only royal commissioners of the first rank were permitted to carry. Cale weighted the upper corners with his brass ink-horn and a lump of clean chalk so the draft from the northern mine crack would not curl the parchment.
“Wait a moment, My Lady,” Captain Arda Dorn said, stepping quickly from the eastern arch to the rail. Her plain, braid-stripped wool coat smelled of wet sleet and black powder from the gun line, and her weathered face was creased with genuine alarm. “If you sign a general discharge and wage bond against the southern road customs without a countersignature from the Lord Treasurer or the March Auditor, the Exchequer Court won’t treat it as an emergency expenditure. They’ll indict you for private alienation of Crown revenue.”
Behind the evidence table, Lord Auditor Orin Vane did not even need to raise his voice; his polite, level courtroom murmur carried clearly across Sella Rusk’s oak shield.
