Page 63 of Zenith Court

I did not touch the other lines she carried. I never had. But I knew how the group would move: Jonah choosing the ground, Delphine marking every turn, Kieran talking so the others would not hear how tired he was. The picture steadied me long enough to stand.

Aldric watched me from beside the door. Blood had dried down one leg, and he leaned heavily on his stave. He did not tell me to leave my father. He only shifted his stance so the two stewards could lift the bolt.

One of them opened the door a hand’s breadth. No blade came through. Beyond it, boots were retreating toward the east stair and a woman was shouting for the wounded to be moved. The rite-guard had stopped trying to reach us.

I looked at my father once more before I stepped back onto the witness floor. I did not want to leave him. I went anyway.

The chamber had lost its order. Benches lay on their sides near the arch. A witness rail had split along the grain. Council figures who had not fled stood among the wreckage with their coats open and their ceremonial collars hanging crooked. None of them looked toward the doorway where Magnus Ashford lay.

They looked at me instead, then away when I met their eyes. An hour ago the Ashford heir crossing this floor would have drawn bows, challenges, calculations of rank. Now no one bowed. No one challenged me either.

Walkin stood at the center of the floor in an unmarked gray coat, sending the remaining stewards toward the east stair. The commands came in the same flat cadence I remembered from the Tower tribunal. At each one, people moved before glancing at the missing insignia on his collar.

Three benches behind Walkin, Lisle of the river seats watched who stood where, his lips moving. I turned away before he noticed me looking.

A Court clerk came through the wreckage with a satchel clutched to her chest. Her gray collar had been picked clean. Loose pages showed beneath the flap, covered in the close hand I had seen among Delphine’s copies.

She had a shallow cut across one temple and dust worked into the wet line of it. When a steward crossed her path, she flinched, tightened her grip on the satchel, and kept walking.

She stopped in front of Headmaster Asher Quill and held out the satchel. “These were yours to file,” she said. “I thought you should read them first.”

Quill stared at her. Then he took the satchel and opened it where he stood.

He read the first page in silence. His mouth tightened. He turned it over, checked the seal on the next, and went back to the first as if the words might have altered while he looked away.

“What is this?” he asked.

“The original charter,” the clerk said. “And the amendment that displaced it.”

Quill looked down again. When he began to read aloud, his voice carried farther than he seemed to intend. “The Marks are elder to this Court and answerable to no charter of it.” He stopped. The room had gone quiet around him.

He found the next line with one finger. “The basins, the discipline of suppression, the seats and their surety—this is the lock. It has never been the door.”

A man near the broken rail asked where the page had come from. Quill did not answer him. He turned the sheet toward the nearest lamp and examined the impressed seal, then scraped at its edge with his thumbnail. The wax did not lift.

The clerk drew the page beneath it forward. “Read the date.”

Quill read it. The amendment was three and twenty years old. He touched the second seal. “This is younger than my tenure.” He looked back at the original charter. “And that was here before it.”

“The amendment is the authority you enforced,” she said.

He searched the remaining pages instead of answering. They shook in his hands. I had heard that man read sentences at the Tower as if the paper absolved the mouth. Now he could not make himself continue.

“I administered every case,” he said. The admission was quiet. “I never asked what came before it.”

Walkin had one hand raised toward the stewards at the east stair. “Fall back to—” The order stopped there.

Quill looked at Walkin. Walkin looked at the pages. Neither man finished what he had begun.

The stewards held their positions for several breaths, waiting. Then one lowered his weapon. Another stepped away from the stair to help a wounded clerk sit against the rail. No one ordered them back into place.

The first weapon made almost no sound against the carpet. The second struck marble where the runner had been torn aside. After that came three more, not surrendered in formation, only set down by people who had begun looking at one another instead of at Walkin. The east stair remained open.

I returned through the arch. My father lay as I had left him, his coat open, the old sword beside his hand. Aldric waited several paces away.

I asked the two stewards to carry him to the sheltered landing above the stair. They lifted him carefully, one at his shoulders and one beneath his knees. His head turned against the first man’s sleeve. I straightened it against the man’s shoulder.

The older steward paused while I settled my father’s coat across his chest. She did not offer condolences. She only tucked the torn side inward so it would not drag.