The High Parliament Hall of Crown-Reach had not seen such an assembly since the Great Fire of Year 142. The towering stained-glass windows along the southern high window row threw broad sharp-angled bands of crimson, cobalt, and gold light across the tiered oak benches, lighting up six hundred delegates who had traveled from every corner of the realm.
On the upper benches sat the traditional peers. The Earl of Oakhaven, the Viscount of West-Reach, and forty country barons whose fur-trimmed velvet cloaks smelled of bitter pine-resin and damp manor houses. But on the lower benches, occupying the seats once reserved only for royal chancellors and ecclesiastical abbots, sat sixty working delegates from the Seven River Communities. Draymen in boiled leather vests, water gate-tenders with callused thumbs, millers with flour in their beards, and forty-eight elected aldermen representing the urban wards of the capital.
At the center of the hall, resting upon a massive eight-foot oak easel before the Speaker’s Chair, was the Deed of Endless Give-up. It was written on nine skins of prime thick parchment joined with green silk cord and sealed with thirty-six heavy discs of beeswax bearing the counter-seals of the King’s Bench, the Court of the Rolls, and the Commoners’ Board.
