Lord Auditor Orin Vane did not rise from the stone bench beneath the shored eastern corbel. Two of Lady Serit’s envoy halberdiers stood three paces behind his shoulder, and though they had left his wrists unchained after he laid his signet ring and the siege charter’s revival seal onto the witness rail, Vane sat with the rigid, narrow posture of a man who had spent forty years behind a high mahogany desk and intended to treat his own ruin as a slightly irregular committee meeting.
“So you elect to survive,” Vane said across the circular court.
His voice was dry, level, and scrubbed clean of the frantic tremor that had broken through his throat an hour ago when his dead wife’s false echo nearly formed above the broken register. Now that the emotional seam had closed again, the old habits of the March Ledger returned to his tongue like ink flowing back into a split nib.
Noll Vey knelt at the witness rail, his right stone hand resting near the chest recess of his basalt frame. He turned his carved limestone head toward the eastern bench.
“I elect to pay the bill with work instead of a funeral, Vane,” Noll said. “Yes.”
