Yselle’s gaze flicked once to the papers. “I had not realized the lower border estates were still solvent enough to travel.”
The cruelty in it was polished to a perfect edge. Not loud enough for open rebuke. Not vague enough to miss its mark.
Sabine looked at her properly then.
Yselle was beautiful: honey-pale hair, perfect skin, a mouth trained for graciousness and sharpened by ambition. She smelled faintly of cold air and expensive soap. Every seam on her was new.
“Neither had we,” Sabine said.
A beat.
Yselle’s smile altered by almost nothing. She had expected flinch, defense, perhaps provincial rudeness. Calm acknowledgment forced her to work with less.
“How bracing,” she said. “I do admire honesty in houses that can no longer afford illusion.”
“Then you must admire the district today.”
A woman farther up the line glanced back. One of Yselle’s attendants lowered her eyes very carefully to keep from reacting.
Yselle accepted the return stroke without visible injury, which only made her more dangerous. “I admire order,” she said. “Illusion is often very expensive.”
Then she stepped away again, leaving the line arranged as before and the hierarchy plainly drawn. She had not raised her voice. She had not needed to. The room itself did much of the work for women like her.
Sabine watched her rejoin her place.
A richer house. Better positioned. Better dressed. More at ease under scrutiny. Yet not here for leisure either. No one willingly submitted to this room unless something lay beyond it worth the weighing.
The line shortened.
At the far end of the hall, the oath table stood beneath another banner in gold script. Two braziers burned on either side, not for heat but for effect. A black basin waited beside the ledger. Beside that sat a lacquered tray holding narrow ritual blades, lengths of black-and-gold silk, and a row of small circular tokens dark as enamel.
A hush moved through the last part of the queue. Sabine saw why when the woman before her stepped aside.
High Hierophant Serast stood at the oath table in person.
He was taller than rumor had made him and thinner, his face severe enough to look carved rather than aged. Temple robes fell in straight black lines edged with restrained gold. No jeweleddisplay. No ornamental sanctity. Ink and blood had stained one knuckle dark long ago and never fully left it. Two lesser clerics stood beside him with ledgers and cloths, but the center of the table belonged entirely to Serast.
A district registration seat should have been beneath him.
That he had come at all meant the summons mattered more than the public version admitted.
The woman before Sabine offered her hand. A cleric checked her papers, Serast asked three questions in a voice that carried without effort, and the entry was accepted. Blade. blood. mark in the ledger. token tied at the wrist. Move aside. Next.
Efficient. Consecrated. Entirely without comfort.
Sabine stepped forward when called.
The clerk to Serast’s left took her packet first and checked the vellum strips from the earlier tables. “Lady Sabine Corvyr. House Corvyr. Maternal proof admissible. Legal standing confirmed under existing title. Debt encumbrance entered.”
Serast looked at her then.
His attention did not resemble curiosity. It resembled classification.
“You enter willingly,” he said.
The question was ceremonial. Its falseness did not soften its force.
“I enter lawfully,” Sabine said.
