The white linen parley cloth was tacked to an ash stave with three copper tacks. It did not flutter in the dead, cold air; it hung sodden and heavy, stained around the hem with ditch mud and soot from the burning palisades.
Jon Hale carried the stave in his left hand, his thumb resting over the top tack. He had not changed his clothes. His linen apron was still dark and stiff with Cael’s arterial blood, the crust cracking with every stride of his boots across the churned clay of the south ramp. Across his hands, the nine active rings burned in the evening damp: four on his right hand, with the bare index finger marking the spent wire, and five on his left. Circling his right wrist, the twin etched bands of the Witness Vow and the Non-Execution Covenant felt taut as cold wire, while along his right forearm the four somatic bands held the weight of the forty-eight shares sworn to the common charter, warning him that sixty paces of wet grass were all that separated Harth from total reduction.
To his right walked Lady Signe Lorr. The Imperial Magistrate wore her dark green wool riding coat with the silver collar tabs of the High Assize tarnished by salt damp. In her right hand she carried her ivory-headed judicial cane, its iron-shod ferrule clicking against the wet stones, and under her left arm she carried a roll of heavy calfskin vellum secured with red crown wax. Her step…
