At the fourth hour of the afternoon, an armored postal courier in a mud-splattered green wool tunic galloped into the courtyard of the High court. He carried an oilskin dispatch metal tube sealed with the emerald river-wax of the Southern Maritime Patrol. Apprentice Olla took the metal tube at the gate. He ran up the spiral stairs three at a time to the central writing hall.
Tomas Reed, Hester Quill, and Nessa Vale gathered around the master table as Olla broke the triple wax seal with his thumb and unrolled the five-foot thick parchment. The dispatch was drafted in the bold, seaman’s hand of Captain Wren of the Maritime Patrol and co-signed by thirty-two elected elders representing the marsh communities of the Weeping Delta.
Tomas leaned over the thick parchment, his ash-wood pack frame resting against his knees. He reached down to adjust the lower buckle on his left calfskin wrist brace. He felt the stiff leather support the scarred outward tendon that always throbbed when coastal dispatches brought memories of the salt-marsh damp. Five years had passed since he had walked the dangerous, fever-haunted causeways of the Delta, hauling quarantine relief crates through waist-deep black mud while trade ring gunboats patrolled the waterways. But the physical reality of that suffering remained permanently etched into his flesh.
