Page 144

The public trade hall is not built for truth.

It is built for spectacle, negotiation, and beautifully dressed lies. The vaulted ceiling rises above polished stone columns veined with silver, and banners from the major houses hang in long, jewel-toned sheets from the upper gallery. Contract tables line the central floor in neat rows, each one fitted with ink wells, witness lamps, seal plates, and warded drawers where noble families store agreements that can ruin lives with six elegant sentences. The hall carries the faint metallic tang of binding magic soaked into the stones over generations.

Every step I take across that floor feels like walking into the mouth of a law written by people who never expected me to speak inside it.

Corin walks beside me.

Not in front of me.

Beside me.

His hood is up, glamour tightened over the horns beneath it, but the bond between us burns steady and focused enough that I feel every breath he reins in. Sable moves behind my left shoulder with a satchel full of copies and the expression of a woman prepared to turn diplomacy into a street fight if the room deserves it. Rhazek remains somewhere near the hall’s western shadows, present in the way storms are present before windows begin to rattle. Lady Syrenya has already entered through the noble gallery, green silk gleaming beneath the lamps, her face arranged into the bored interest of a woman who came to watch someone else bleed socially.

Good.

Let them all watch.

A clerk at the nearest contract table looks up as I approach. Recognition flickers across his face, followed by alarm.

“Lady Isolde,” he says, voice thin. “This floor is restricted during noble announcements.”

“I know.”

“You are not listed as a presenting officer.”

“I know that as well.”

His eyes move toward Corin, then away quickly when the gold beneath Corin’s hood catches the light. “Then I must ask you to⁠—”

I place my palm flat on the table, directly over the witness lamp, and speak in the formal cadence every contract clerk in the room has been trained to obey before thinking.

“Emergency audit challenge under civic contract code, section seven, subsection twelve, with attached allegation of soul-energy misappropriation, ward expense fraud, and unlawful infernal siphoning under noble authority.”

The nearest conversations die first.

Then the next row.

Then the gallery.

Silence travels through the trade hall faster than fear because formal audit language has teeth even nobles cannot pretend not to hear. Heads turn. Fans still. A seal stamp drops somewhere near the east tables and cracks against the floor.

The clerk in front of me goes pale. “You cannot invoke that without sponsor authority.”

“I can invoke it under analyst emergency exception when active public hazard exists and neutral witness protocol has been compromised.”

“That exception requires documented basis.”

I lift the first packet from my satchel and drop it onto the table.

The sound is small.

The effect is not.

“Then document it.”

Corin’s presence warms at my side, the heat of him through the sleeve of my dress. He does not speak. He does not need to. For once, the room is going to hear me first.

A minor noble in blue-gray robes steps away from a cluster near the center aisle. Lord Kairven’s nephew, if I have placed the family resemblance correctly. His eyes are sharp, his posture too eager for neutrality.