The royal siege charter of the Northern March was thirty-two inches of heavy calf-skin vellum, tanned with oak-gall at the Old Royal Seat, ruled in vermilion ink by the senior chancery clerks, and weighted at the bottom hem with three braided silk cords where the Great Seal of Orren and Lord Auditor Orin Vane’s emergency regency counter-stamp had hung before the afternoon reckoning.
For nine days, that sheet of scraped calf-skin had been the heaviest object in the valley.
It had pulled eight thousand men and women from six shires up a frozen mountain road. It had requisitioned every sack of oats between Greyford and the timber mill, chained twelve miners to Ossa Flint’s chorus bells, set the border pine forest ablaze, and lined up fourteen siege cannon at noon to batter a ruined hill fort into gravel. Even now, with its wax revival seal unclasped and sitting cold beside Vane’s signet ring on the witness bar, the black ribbon of sovereign command authority still clung to the vellum lines like iron filings to a lodestone.
Above the parchment, Eske opened its mismatched hands.
Its long, pale left hand hovered over the opening salutation—In the Name of the Crown and the Seven Founding Houses—while its broad, blunt-knuckled right hand covered the signature block where Vane had signed the midnight regency order. The skin of those hands seemed drawn from two entirely different worlds: one pale and smooth as winter birch, shaped by the theatrical dread Noll had spun before the…
