At Elin’s warning, Jon Hale shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet beside the corner table, his right hand hovering an inch above the rim of a heavy three-pound pewter serving trencher on the sideboard while his eyes locked onto the velvet-trimmed cuff of Warden Tomas Brecht’s left sleeve. Beside the table, Sir Cael Ardent did not draw his four-foot broadsword in the crowded aisle; instead, the young knight’s left hand dropped to the cross-hilted steel parrying dagger at his belt, drawing the twelve-inch blade clear of its leather scabbard as he stepped around the end of the trestle bench to take Brecht’s wrists.
Warden Brecht did not back away, nor did he raise his hands in surrender.
Instead, standing trapped between the three defused brass demolition pots on the table and the barred oak doors of the taproom, the tall, stooped bureaucrat let out a single dry, humorless breath that sounded like dead leaves scraping across a gravestone. The fussy, ink-stained pedantry he had worn since riding into Harth at noon peeled away from his narrow face, revealing the cold, fanatical certainty of a man who had spent thirty years paring human lives out of state ledgers in the windowless vaults of the Special Third Chamber.
