The witness chair of the King’s Bench was built of solid bog oak, black as coal and polished smooth by two hundred years of litigants. Mirelle Voss sat upright in the center of the well, her woolen skirts smoothed neatly over her knees, her hands resting calmly on the arms of the chair. Beside her on the green baize table rested Exhibit One. The weathered cedar delivery chest, the forty silver coins of her father’s locked deposit. The small tin songbird whose clockwork wings gleamed softly beneath the candles.
Tomas Reed stood at the petitioner’s bar three paces away, his left arm resting against his chest harness. The hall was so quiet that the faint whistling of the wind through the high leaded traceries sounded like the breathing of a sleeping giant. Five hundred spectators leaned forward in the gallery, while outside in the square, thousands listened in silence as clerks stood at the open doors to repeat the spoken words to the crowd.
Hester Quill adjusted her wire-rimmed glasses and stepped forward with a slender folio. ‘State your full name, age, and calling for the sovereign record.’
‘Mirelle Voss,’ she answered, her voice clear, low, and without a trace of tremor. ‘Forty-nine winters of age. Registered scroll-keeper and laundress of the North Grave Ward in Fen Hollow Parish. Daughter of Oren Voss, master lantern-tender of the Lower Floodgates.’
