The terms of the supervised access ran to two pages, and the lawyer read every clause aloud on the guild hall’s steps before Mara signed.
A Directorate observer would sit in Hearth’s forge gallery during every session Mara worked there. The observer would keep a timed log of every action: when she entered, when she left, what she touched, what she said. Every reading she took in the forge would be returned to the Directorate’s office at the end of each day, in full, on a printed sheet. The office could suspend the access at any time, with notice. The access authorized no alteration to Hearth’s heart, its channels or its load. It authorized inspection, measurement and preparation.
Mara listened to each clause. When the lawyer finished one, Mara read it again aloud herself, from the page, slowly, before she wrote her initials beside it. The guild clerk watched her do it. So did Halvek’s representative, the grey-collared man from the hearing, who had come out onto the steps with a copy of his own.
She did not like the terms. She said so, to the lawyer, quietly, between clauses, and the lawyer said, “Nobody likes terms. Sign the ones you can live with and read the others twice.” She disliked the observer, and the timed log, and the daily return, and most of all the last clause, the one that said inspection, measurement and preparation and left out repair. She signed them anyway.
