From the shadowed corner bench beside the St. Jude alms-box just inside the River Lantern’s open taproom door, forty-eight-year-old Sister Oda watched Special Provost Warden Brecht wipe the soles of his calfskin boots on the braided rush mat before stepping across the threshold.
She did not look at his hands first; she looked at the skin around the outer corners of his eyes.
Before she had come to the bridge shrine of Harth twenty winters ago to tend barge-men’s fevers and keep the parish death-rolls, Oda had served eight years as an infirmary canoness at the Great Penitentiary of St. Giles in the capital, where the High Chancellery housed state prisoners awaiting the inquisitor’s bench. She had washed the backs of men questioned by royal clerks, and she had sat across oak tables from the senior overseers who signed the disposal certificates when a witness died of night-chill in the lower cells.
She knew that a royal magistrate who truly yielded to a point of law always showed a trace of irritation around the mouth—a pinched nostril, a reddened ear, the small human friction of a proud official forced to amend his schedule.
Warden Brecht’s smile as he stepped into the warm, hop-scented air of the River Lantern taproom was completely symmetrical, unhurried, and bloodless.
