By the seventh bell, forty-eight citizen shareholders stood in a tight half-circle around the stepped granite base of the market cross, their breath rising in white plumes against the damp Flood Month chill. Up at the top of the plinth, where royal tax bailiffs had once read out tallow levies and conscription rolls, Lady Signe Lorr upturned an empty herring barrel from Harlan Pike’s quay shed and spread the Bound Common Charter across its coopered oak head. Fifty wax seals hung from its lower margin on braided flax ribbons—forty-eight active and two retired into municipal trust when Harlan Pike and Vannic Dorr took back their silver on the first morning—while the silver-nibbed ivory bone stylus that formed the first broad band on Jon’s right forearm rested beside Signe’s iron-gall inkhorn.
The four guild masters stood at the four corners of the stone steps: Marris Gault with her iron mason’s square tucked into her lime-stained apron; Bessa Karr smelling of sharp rock-salt and cedar smoke; Joran Finch rubbing his ink-stained weaver’s thumb against his wool lapel; and Garrick Holt leaning on the four-foot ash helve of his rounding hammer, his blackened forearms bare despite the frost.
Ten paces back at the edge of the cobbles, Sir Cael Ardent stood with his arms folded across his quilted gambeson. His ancestral greatsword remained racked on the iron tallow-hooks behind Jon Hale’s taproom bar—the first morning in twelve lives that the Knight of the White Rose had attended a war council in Harth without…
