Sella Rusk took the folded parchment from Cale’s hand without stepping off the dry inner flagstone of the threshold.
She did not read the copper totals first, as a debtor does. She turned the stiff foolscap over in the grey morning light, checked the impressed counter-stamp along the left margin, and ran the pad of her thumb across the heavy disk of dark red wax hanging from the bottom tape. It was the habit of a woman who had carried March Ledger warrants in her own saddlebags for ten years before she learned what the signatures at the bottom were used to buy.
Out on the porch, the two Survey guards shifted their weight from boot to boot. A curl of warm air from the Grand Hall—smelling rich and savory of Hobb’s simmered barley broth, toasted crusts, and dry stone—drifted through the open arch past their faces. The older guard, a grizzled veteran with a grey mustache and a patch of rust on his gorget, sniffed the air with undisguised longing and muttered to his young partner that whoever haunted this ruin kept a better kitchen than the Survey House barracks.
Inside the wall, Noll watched Sella’s eyebrows draw together as she scanned the third paragraph of the writ.
