The public levee of Checkpoint Three had become a safe hall of payback. Upon three long tables beneath the open sky, Hester Quill and the court clerks laid out the four lead dunnage trunks recovered from the granite crypt of Old Willow Clinic.
Inside lay the twelve hundred and fourteen original parchment freehold land patents. The ancient titles to ten thousand acres of rich peat pastures, ditch willow beds, and salt-hay fields that the Quarantine Barons had taken away twenty-five years before.
Tomas Reed stood beside Lord Justice Vane. He held his iron-gall ledger and the master petition roll for The Marchland Land Patent Reversion. One by one, the elders of the marsh lineages were called forward to the bench.
Elder Maren of Bitter-Reeds was the first. The old woman stepped onto the platform, her boots caked with the dried mud of the firebreak trench. Justice Vane picked up a thick parchment patent bearing the faded royal seal of sixty years ago, reading the parish description. To the lineage of Maren, four hundred rods of willow marsh along the Black Canal.
Justice Vane dipped his quill into dark royal ink, wrote his court confirmation across the bottom margin. Then he applied the heavy brass seal of the King’s Bench. He handed the parchment into Maren’s trembling hands.
