Lady Signe Lorr did not touch the itemized folio sheet with her bare fingers; she used the brass tip of her bone stylus to angle the pinned Harvest Month receipt toward the noon light slanting through the bottle-glass casements.
Behind her, Warden Brecht bristled, his black Chancellery cloak rustling as he leaned over the bar. “Magistrate Lorr, this is a routine quartering requisition in a frontier municipality under martial threat. We do not have time to adjudicate a tavern-keeper’s bookkeeping dispute while Marshal Ors’s vanguard is three days’ march down the river.”
“A magistrate of the High Assize always has time to examine a document bearing the royal exchequer’s internal transit watermark, Warden,” Signe replied, her cool, level voice cutting off Brecht’s protest without raising its pitch by a hair. Her gray eyes moved behind her wire-rimmed spectacles, studying the faded brown ink of the Harvest Month slip and the red-printed Latin clause along its lower margin. “Especially when that document is counter-signed in the hand of the Knight of the White Rose seventeen days prior to his official deployment order.”
At the center of the bar, Sir Cael Ardent stood motionless. His ungloved right hand rested two inches from the Room 4 brass key (#4). Under the high collar of his gold gorget, the pulse in his neck beat a slow, heavy rhythm against the blued steel rim.
