The morning sun broke clear and bright over the slate roofs of Crown-Reach on the day following the fall of High Chancellor Vane. A brisk autumn wind swept the Grand Square clean of soot and mist. That left the limestone columns of the King’s Bench gleaming like polished marble against the blue sky. At nine in the morning, the Twelve Chief Justices convened in extraordinary constitutional session to issue the Sovereign Charter of the Last Claim.
The courtroom was quiet, filled with an air of solemn constitutional respect. In the center of the well. There, the respondent’s dock had stood during the trial, sat a newly carved table of heart-oak, upon which rested the Sovereign Roll of One Thousand Hands and the Forty Brass Seals of Tomas Reed. Beside the table stood Tomas, Hester Quill. Scribe Nessa Vale, wearing clean linen smocks and dark wool coats, their manner as unrushed and disciplined as wagon drivers preparing a morning wagon train.
Senior Chief Justice Aldous Vance stepped forward to the front of the dais. His reading glasses were held in his hand as he addressed the assembled delegates of the Seven Communities and the full bar of the capital. “For three hundred years,” Justice Vance observed, “our jurisprudence operated under the dangerous assumption that the Crown and its ministers were inherently capable of self-correction. We believed that statutes alone could restrain greed. That parchment decrees could protect the weak from the strong. The thirty-five years of hungry embezzlement we exposed yesterday…
