The cheering around the market cross died down into a watchful, flint-hard silence as Sir Cael Ardent walked to the foot of the granite steps.
Nobody ran from him. In earlier lives, when the Knight of the White Rose had strode through Harth in his blued steel plate with his ancestral greatsword slung across his back, the townspeople had parted with the hushed, superstitious awe reserved for a figure out of a taproom ballad—a golden lord sent down from the capital to save simple country folk who did not know which end of a pike to hold.
Today, the people standing three deep around the oak trestle table were not onlookers waiting to be rescued. They were the fifty legal proprietors of the house Cael had just tried to seize by a counting-house trick.
Master Baker Dunstan Harl stood at the right corner of the table with his flour-whitened arms folded across his barrel chest, his clogs planted wide on the wet cobbles. To the left stood Marris Gault with her iron leveling bar and Garrick Holt with his four-pound smith’s hammer hooked at his belt. Behind them stood Joran Finch, Bessa Karr, Harlan and Mira Pike, Briony Kell, and four of Captain Dain’s river-gate watchmen. None of them raised a weapon or shouted an insult; they simply stood shoulder to shoulder in their working aprons between the royal knight and the subscription table, looking at him the way valley tradesfolk looked at a tax-collector whose writ had come back…
