For three ticks of the silver pocket-chronometer on her desk, Lady Signe Lorr did not touch the blood-stiffened parchment Jon had laid across her open ledger.
The smell of it rose immediately in the warm, beeswax-scented air of Room 2—not the wet, coppery tang of fresh slaughterhouse gore, and not the sour vinegar smell of tavern wine-lees, either. It was the flat, iron-crust odor of old human arterial blood that had soaked into rag-linen fibers during a fire, dried hard in river mud, and sat sealed inside a dark cellar recess for four weeks of lived time.
Lady Signe’s nostrils flared slightly at the stench, and her spine stiffened against the oak back of her chair. Yet within two breaths, the forty-year discipline of an Assize circuit justice took hold of her hands.
Instead of recoiling from the stained sheet, she reached to the velvet-lined case beside her inkwell, lifted a brass-rimmed faceted assay lens by its horn handle, and bent sixty degrees over the mahogany table.
Jon stood five feet back on the pine floorboards, keeping his scarred hands folded over his flour-dusted apron while Honest Measure held the judicial chamber in a clear, silent ring of blue municipal light.
