Before Tomas could step back from the table, Chancellor Vane made one final, desperate movement. Reaching across the scribes’ bench, his gold signet ring scraping the polished wood, he seized the fluted golden metal tube containing the Letters Patent of the Duchy of Silt-Reach and shoved it across the green cloth until it bumped against Tomas’s leather belt.
“Take it, fool!” Vane hissed, his breath sour with fortified wine and bile. “If not for yourself, take it for your guild! With a dukedom, the carriers could command the tolls of the entire river! You could build stone docks from Bellwether to the sea and make the wagon drivers masters of the province! Would you condemn your own kind to live in the mud forever out of peasant pride?”
Tomas looked down at the metal tube, chased with river rushes, wheat pulley wheels, and leaping carp whose garnet eyes caught the torchlight like sparks. Worth more than three years of a carrier’s earnings in metal alone, that gold metal tube was a key to every treasury, palace gate, and high court in the realm—land, meat, wine, and the power to command men to bare their heads in the street.
Tomas reached out with his scarred left hand, which couldn’t close fully around a four-inch timber because of the cut grip tendons. Placing the flat of his palm against the gold case, he pushed it back across the table.
