The parish church of St. Jude-in-the-Fens had never been designed for an imperial tribunal. It had thick, squat walls of dressed limestone, low Norman arches that trapped the smell of tallow and wet sheepskins, and six narrow slit-windows that admitted only thin, smoky shafts of afternoon light. For two centuries, the people of Harth had come through its iron-banded doors to baptize their infants, bury their stonemasons, and swear oaths over disputed pasture boundaries.
Today, the communion rail was draped in the heavy scarlet cloth of the High Tribunal, and on the altar table sat Lady Signe Lorr’s open sheepskin ledger.
A crowd of eighty townsfolk packed the nave. They stood shoulder to shoulder in the damp gloom—bakers with flour still dusted into their aprons, blacksmiths smelling of charcoal, weavers with dye-stained fingers, and thirty grey-faced Host deserters huddled together beneath the shadow of the south gallery. At the head of the center aisle stood Captain Dain of the Bridge Guard, flanked by four royal spearmen holding their eight-foot ash pikes upright, their iron breastplates dull with road-grease.
Jon stood beside Master Dunstan Harl near the baptismal font, watching Lady Signe prepare the seal.
The imperial Observer wore her full judicial mantle—dark charcoal wool trimmed with white ermine, the bronze scales of the High Tribunal pinned across her throat by an imperial signet brooch. She was methodical, displaying neither haste nor hesitation. With a small pair of iron tongs, she lifted a cube of red sealing wax from a charcoal…
