The Painted Mark

Twenty days before his Dawning Night, when the sunstone would read him and offer him a class, the heir of House Meridian was given a man to hang between the toast and the second pot of tea. The sun lay warm across his shoulders, as it did every morning of his life, and he did not think about it once.

“A mark case,” said his father, and slid a letter across the cloth with the end of his silver letter knife. “The Lowmarket bench sits at noon. You’ll sit at it.”

Everyone in the Daylands had windows, small panels of words that only they could see. Sorin’s opened before the letter had stopped moving.

The seal on this one was white, with a lantern pressed into it.

“The Order,” Sorin said.

“The Order.” Halric turned a page. “A man-at-arms off the marsh forts. He walked off the wall one night last winter, and they struck his mark for it, which is their right. Now the Watch has picked him up on the salt wharf wearing a second mark he didn’t come by honestly, which is ours. The Order would like him hanged before the longest day, while the city’s still sober. They’ve written to say so. Very nicely. Read the third paragraph, it’s a little masterpiece.”

It was. It said that the Order had every confidence in the wisdom of whomever the Lord of Noon might send to the bench, and had noted, with every respect, the outcome of the last two mark cases heard there. It did not say you fined them both. It did not need to.

“I fined them both,” Sorin said. “The first was a debtor with four children. The second was a girl of sixteen who’d borrowed her dead sister’s mark to get work in a laundry.”

“I know. I read the rolls.” Halric looked up at last, and his blue eyes were warm and amused and gave away nothing at all. “The law says you may hang him, Sorin. The law says a great many things. I’d like to know what you say.”

At the far end of the table, behind a book propped against the toast rack, Elodie said, “He’ll have a bad wrist.”

Everybody looked at her. She turned a page.

“Struck men always do. The iron goes deep and heals badly, and they pick at it. And then somebody in an alley paints a new mark on the other wrist with gilt and lye and lampblack, and the lye eats the skin, and by the time the Watch finds him he’s got a hand like a ham.” She closed the book on her finger. “I’ll come.”

“You’re not invited,” said Sorin.

“I’m never invited. There’s a woman on the fish market with a hand I want to look at, and I may as well look at two.”

The House put its illegitimate children at the far end of every table, and Elodie had been sitting at the far end of this one, being right about things, since before Sorin could reach it.

Sorin’s Station was Noble, given him at twelve, and it opened windows on other people whether he asked it to or not.

It had never once told him how to win an argument with her.

“Ser Aldric will go with you,” said Halric, which was like saying the sun would go with you.

Behind Sorin’s chair, a step back and to the left, where he had stood every morning for twelve years, Ser Aldric Vane said nothing. Sorin had known him long enough to hear it anyway: you’re going to fine him, aren’t you.