The summons didn’t arrive by court guard. It came at the fourth hour past noon in a naval gig rowed by six blue-coated marines, bearing a folded parchment sealed with the crimson anchor of the Commander-in-Chief. The Master Assessor of the Office of Claims will present himself at the Admiralty Flaghouse forthwith.
Four marines with brass-butted carbines escorted Tomas Reed up the granite stairs cut into the cliff face of the High Bluff.
The rising sea wind drove freezing spray against the stone. With every step, the cold bit into Tomas’s knees. Meanwhile, his left forearm, bound between cedar splints beneath his coat, pulsed with throbbing heat. The weight of his braced arm dragged at his shoulder. That forced him to lean into the wind as the iron heel-plates of his cart driver boots clicked against the roar of the surf below.
At the summit rose the Admiralty Flaghouse. A four-story castle of dressed gray cut stone perched like an iron coronet over Crown-Reach.
Tomas was led through heated marble galleries smelling of dry limestone and beeswax, hung with portraits of naval lords in powdered wigs. There was no mud here, no reek of rotting bladderwrack or bilge grease, no sound of shivering dockers coughing over wet peat fires.
