By the ninth bell of the morning, the oak trestle table from the River Lantern’s taproom stood planted squarely on the broad granite paving blocks at the foot of Harth’s market cross.
A brisk river breeze had swept the dawn drizzle out of the valley, leaving the carved limestone shaft of the ancient cross gleaming wet and white above the square. Around the base of the steps, where farmers ordinarily stacked willow baskets of winter turnips and smoked eels on market mornings, more than two hundred townspeople had gathered in their working aprons and damp wool cloaks. Down South Lane behind them, Bessa Karr’s journeyman coopers were already rolling the last of the sixty pickled-herring barrels down the cellar chute of the River Lantern to the rhythmic thud of wooden mallets.
On the trestle board, weighted against the wind by Alden Bram’s iron try-square and Elin’s brass coin-scale, lay the fifty-share articles with their forty stamped red wax seals trailing along the bottom ribbon, beside four gleaming ten-crown towers of coined royal silver.
Sir Cael Ardent did not stand at the table. He stood ten paces back under the stone arcade of the Merchant Assize hall, his blued steel pauldrons catching the cold morning sun while Notary Corve Penner waited beside him with the green pigskin register and the portable assize balance-beam resting on a folding velvet stool.
