The silence that followed Tessa Dene’s question was not the cold stillness of an empty tomb; it was the taut, humming quiet of an iron cable drawn near its snapping point.
On the third tier of the amphitheater, Edren Dene leaned forward against the wooden handrail. His breath whistled in his damaged chest, a wet, rattling sound like water boiling in a cracked kettle, but his faded gray eyes were fixed on his daughter’s straight back. Beside him, Renn of the crystal leg and two other retired miners from the lower town nodded slowly, their rough, calloused hands resting on their knees.
Lord Auditor Orin Vane did not rise from his chair, but the polite court mask he had worn through four days of siege slipped by a fraction. A faint, sharp line appeared between his brows.
“The March Ledger is an organ of state, Mistress Dene,” Vane said, his voice dropping into the cold, clinical cadence of a senior magistrate dismissing a petition from an unrepresented peasant. “Its archives contain sovereign revenue rolls, judicial findings, and imperial military contingencies. Crown registers are audited solely by the Barons of the Exchequer under royal seal. To permit municipal laborers and unlicensed delvers to rummage through Crown records would dissolve the very boundary between governance and disorder.”
