The rain began to fall again. Not sleet now, but a cold, steady winter downpour that turned the soot on the roofs of Printer’s Alley into dark, oily tears that dripped from every timber top stone ledge.
In the center of the lane, Captain Sir Branoc stood with water running down the fluting of his blackened iron breastplate. His forty armored soldiers were bunched so tightly together their shoulder plate plates grated against one another with every nervous shift of their boots. The four hundred commoners surrounding them had not moved. They stood in drenched, silent ranks, their ash packing bats resting flat across their palms, their collective presence an unmoving wall of physical mass.
Hester Quill stepped down from the threshold of Number Seven. Her wet shoes splashed into a puddle of black rainwater. She didn’t wear an advocate’s furred gown. She wore her patched woolen shawl pinned with a common bone needle. But she held herself with the terrifying, imperious dignity of a Lord Chief Justice entering the Westminster Hall.
In her right hand, she held the proof sheet bearing King Alden’s red wax seal. In her left, she carried her leather-bound copy of the Statutes of the Realm.
