Even at six in the morning on a drizzling Tuesday, Lady Signe Lorr did not sleep late.
Through the two-inch oak panels of Room 2, House Memory told Jon that the High Assize magistrate had been up since the first grey light at five. She had washed her face in cold pitcher-water without calling for a heated ewer from the kitchen, braided her iron-grey hair into its severe judicial coil at the nape of her neck, and spent the past forty minutes sitting upright at the mahogany dressing table by the window, comparing the parish hearth-tax rolls against the River Lantern’s noon invoice.
Jon shifted the forty-pound canvas bundle of the sheared bronze gate fitting (#10) onto his right hip, raised his scarred left hand, and rapped twice—firm, measured, and unhurried—against the upper frame of Room 2.
“Enter if you carry the morning coal-scuttle,” Lady Signe’s crisp alto voice called from within. “If you are from Sir Cael’s guard-post, leave the muster tally under the sill; the High Assize does not receive military petitioners before the seventh bell.”
Jon did not slide the papers under the sill. He lifted the brass thumb-latch, pushed the heavy oak door inward three feet, and stood squarely on the threshold with his flour-dusted apron tied around his waist, the leather document portfolio tucked beneath his left elbow, and the oil-stained canvas bundle resting in the crook of his right arm.
