In the quiet back parlor of the River Lantern Inn, Lady Signe Lorr laid Warden Brecht’s confiscated leather dispatch valise flat upon the scrubbed oak table and reached for the heated cobbler’s knife that Tobin had just brought in from the kitchen brazier.
Through her thirty-six years—twelve of them spent riding the northern and western judicial circuits as a Traveling Magistrate and Assize Auditor of the High Crown—Signe had always taken an austere, almost monastic comfort in the physical architecture of royal law. A properly drafted writ had margins of one thumb’s breadth, sealed with beeswax and vermilion at the lower left corner, countersigned by two sworn clerks of the Chancellery roll, and entered into the permanent Assize ledger so that neither baron nor bailiff could alter a syllable without leaving an iron-gall scar on the parchment. She had broken her own royal reporting seal in Harth four lives ago because Sir Cael Ardent’s unwritten resets made a mockery of accountable record.
Even so, until she had stood in the muddy throat of the north gate this morning and watched Cael pull five inches of poisoned Reliquary steel from Warden Brecht’s velvet sleeve, some stubborn remnant of the capital jurist in her had clung to the belief that the Standing Catastrophe Order in Tobin’s lead tube was the rogue instrument of a single faction inside the War Ministry.
