Lady Signe Lorr did not step across the outer ring of river salt and pulverized slag that Sister Oda had painted on the floorboards. She drew a high-backed oak chair right up to the white salt margin at the foot of the cot, laid her brass-cornered court portfolio across her knees like a portable bench, and fixed both Sir Cael Ardent and Jon Hale with the cold, impartial stare of the High Assize.
In the ninth life, when Cael had submitted to the first bedside loosening of the Returner Seal, the arrangement had been an improvised truce between a desperate, decaying soldier and an innkeeper holding a bowl of water in the dark. Neither man had trusted the other an inch, and at dawn Cael had snatched the seal back to his chest with the declaration that debating with civilians would get everyone killed.
This time, the town compact sat on the side table with fifty citizen seals hanging from its bottom ribbon, and Lady Signe Lorr was not permitting a single ambiguity to remain uninked.
“When we stood by the market cross twenty minutes ago, Sir Cael,” Signe said, her clear judicial voice filling the shuttered ground-floor chamber, “you demanded that I hold a naked blade to Master Hale’s throat throughout this treatment lest he use his Keeper standing to steal the return authority by stealth while you sleep.”
