The Great Chamber of Spires had grown as still as an unworked quarry on a winter Sunday. Even the spear guards stationed along the red stone pillars seemed to have ceased breathing. Their steel breastplates reflected the torchlight in rigid, unmoving plates.
Hester Quill took two measured steps forward, coming up to Tomas’s left shoulder. She didn’t open her folios. She knew the text of the Imperial Trust Acts as an old carpenter knows the grain of seasoned ash. Her gray hair, pulled back tightly beneath her linen coif, showed three streaks of white at the temples. But her dark eyes were as hard as river flints.
“May it please the King,” Hester said, her voice cutting through the thick, perfumed air of the hall with the dry care of a bookbinder’s shearing blade. “The question before this assembly isn’t one of courtesy, nor of thanks. It’s a question of office law, governed by the Four Fixed Laws of the Last Claim Promise, to which the Crown became a signatory under the Great Seal of King Alden’s grandfather forty years ago.”
Chancellor Vane grimaced, his hand waving dismissively. “We’re not in the Court of Common Pleas, Mistress Quill! The royal prerogative stands above guild covenants and water-wagon drivers’ agreements!”
