Lady Signe Lorr did not pace the floor, wring her hands, or utter an exclamation when the full weight of the evidence settled into place.
Instead, she reached out with both hands, squared the edges of her black pigskin Assize docket so it lay parallel with the edge of the mahogany table, dipped her brass-mounted quill into the horn inkwell, and began to write.
In the quiet second-floor chamber, the steady, rhythmic scratch-scratch-scratch of her nib moving across the heavy vellum sounded like a mason’s chisel cutting an inscription into a headstone.
Jon stood patiently with his hands folded over his apron, watching as the High Assize magistrate formally deployed Object #6—the blood-stained Reset 3 troop orders—into the official judicial record of the realm.
First, she transcribed the complete text of the third-life proclamation word for word into the left-hand column of her docket. Next to it, in the right-hand evidentiary column, she entered the forensic measurements she had just taken with her assay glass: the White Falls spring vat-mark, the four-day iron-gall oxidation index, the twenty-thousandths-of-an-inch triangular feather nick matching her personal signet ring, and the dried arterial blood deposit of Militia Sergeant Hal Vane across the lower rubric.
