The midnight bells of Crown-Reach Cathedral tolled across the misty capital as the twelve Chief Justices returned to the dais of the King’s Bench. They had spent three hours in the Inner Council Chamber under locked doors, reviewing two hundred years of precedents, the forty closed dockets, and the comparative accounting rolls. Not a single spectator had left the gallery. Five hundred working citizens sat in patient, resolute silence beneath the soot-darkened oak rafters. It waited for the words that would decide whether their rights existed in law or only in memory.
Tomas Reed stood at the petitioner’s bar with Hester Quill at his side. He had used the recess to drink a cup of bitter chicory water and rest his scarred left arm against the wooden stone base. The three-inch iron buckle of his brace was cinched tight. It held the wrist rigid. But the throbbing ache had settled into a steady, manageable rhythm that matched his breathing. Across the table, Barrister Brandon Keld sat alone. His junior clerks had fled the courtroom. Just then, the bells began to toll, leaving the scarlet-robed advocate pale, disheveled, and sweating beneath his powdered wig.
Senior Chief Justice Aldous Vance stepped to the center of the bench. He held the heavy sheepskin folio of the court’s interlocutory decree. His glasses were perched upon the bridge of his nose, and his voice was clear. It rang with the ancient majesty of common law that no royal decree could silence.
