Lady Signe Lorr had spent twelve years mastering the precise weight of iron-gall ink upon Crown vellum, and she knew that an empire did not fall to armies; it fell when its magistrates ceased recording the truth.
She sat at the small deal table in the back parlor of the River Lantern Inn, her traveling cloak thrown back over the ash chair, her white linen collar stiff against her throat. Her portable writing desk—an eighteen-inch box of dark rosewood reinforced with brass corners and lined with green baize—sat open before her, its ink-pots uncapped, its ivory rulers laid in parallel lines across the lid. The small drawer on the right held her sticks of red sealing wax, her brass paper-shears, and three packets of dried quill nibs imported from the marsh sanctuaries of the southern delta.
Across the room, sitting within the six-sided boundary of dark hoop-iron, Sir Cael Ardent looked less like the Emperor’s Chosen Shield than a deserter awaiting the provost’s firing squad.
His blued-steel breastplate lay on the flagstones outside the ring, spattered with river silt and horse sweat. His linen tunic was pulled open, exposing the blackened, purplish crater over his collar wound where the flattened gold disc of the Returner Seal pulsed with that sickening, greasy gold light. On his left arm, Sister Oda’s willow-bark compress was already turning dark, absorbing the foul, sulfurous sweat that seeped from his swollen veins.
