The silver signet ring made a faint scraping noise as Vane turned it against the calloused skin of his knuckle.
It was the same motion Tessa Dene had noted weeks ago in the cold dining room of the Survey House, when the March Ledger clerks had eaten their boiled mutton in silence while the Auditor sat at the head of the table. Whenever the ledgers threatened to reveal an unaccountable deficit—whenever a question arose that could not be answered by citing a subsection of the border code—Vane’s thumb would find that heavy ring, twisting the metal around the joint with the unconscious regularity of an apothecary grinding dried roots in an iron mortar.
Noll Vey kept his boots planted on the flagstones.
He did not step forward. He did not let the basalt plates of his chest grind together in a triumphant rattle, and he did not offer the room a stage bow. When you had an opponent cornered behind the footlights with a three-card monte trick laid bare on the green baize, the fastest way to lose the crowd was to swagger. Men who had been cheated did not want to watch the sharper gloat; they wanted to see whether the man with the cards possessed the courage to count the change.
