“Zero points,” Prit said, tapping the point of his white filing chalk against the slate on his knee with the dry, measured rhythm of a woodpecker testing a dead elm. “You spent fifteen minutes of your finest stage voice on a junior revenue clerk and two halberdiers, sir, and the ledger has credited the house with precisely zero points.”
“Patience, Prit,” Noll said comfortably from the western wall niche, letting his stone sight bask in the warm afternoon air of the Grand Hall while the rain outside thinned to a high grey mountain fog. “You are looking at the morning receipts before the evening doors have opened. A farmer does not dig up his potatoes ten minutes after he drops them in the furrow.”
“A farmer,” Prit replied, “plants potatoes, sir. You planted an assertion that a piece of old bottle-glass is a moral touchstone for buried gold. The clerk looked through it, saw mud, and wrote mud on a royal writ. Even a dungeon core cannot buy roof slates with zero.”
Across the hall, Sella Rusk sat at the pine bench with the duplicate assessment notice spread flat beside her elbow. She had brought the sheet in from the timber gatepost as soon as Cale and his two guards disappeared down the second switchback of the mountain track—not to tear it up, as Tessa had fiercely suggested, because tearing down a posted writ gave the bailiff grounds for immediate summary entry, so instead Sella had copied every figure onto…
