The oak door of the magistrate’s private chamber yielded under Jon’s palm with a dull, dry creak that was lost beneath the frantic rustle of paper inside.
The second floor of the royal post house smelled of lamp oil, sealing wax, and old parchment, but cutting through the legal dust was the sharp, unmistakable reek of sulfur rising through the floorboard gaps. In the center of the room, two young chancery clerks in dark wool gowns were frantically packing calfskin rolls and court rolls into iron-strapped travel hampers, their ink-stained fingers trembling as distant shouts echoed from the market square below.
Behind a massive oak desk cut from salted timber sat Lady Signe Lorr.
The magistrate wore her formal blue velvet assize gown, its ermine-lined collar pinned with the brass scales of the High Justiciar. Her gray hair was coiled neatly beneath a velvet coif, but her face was pale, tight with exhaustion. On the desk before her lay the Great Seal of Harth, its red wax wafer half-pressed into a municipal evacuation decree, beside an eight-inch stylus carved from the dense, cream-colored bone of a northern caribou. Her father, himself an assize jurist of the old border courts, had given her that bone stylus when she was sworn to the bar thirty winters past; its point was tipped with hardened iron, honed to slice wax and scribe indelible ink into vellum rolls.
