Stephanie Edwards Donnell Head lawyer of the community's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Stephanie stood in the hall outside Justin's room with the signed testament in her satchel. Down the stairs, the rider waited at the porch. He claimed blood kin from the north. If a judge believed him before Justin's last breath, the pen and the story inside it could be pulled from James's hand. She had minutes, not hours. She went down the stairs fast. The rider was tall, mud on his boots, a leather cord around his neck. He held up a folded paper and said his father was Justin's brother. He said the law of blood came before any town scribble. "Come with me," Stephanie said. "If your claim is real, it gets recorded. If it is not, it dies on paper." She walked him across the square to the licensing hall. The building was new. Its columns were pale stone and its double doors stood open under a painted sign. Inside, a long counter ran the length of the room. Ledgers sat in rows, each bound in red cloth, each stamped with her seal. She had built this place for exactly this kind of fight. Every claim in town now passed through here first. She pulled down the kinship ledger and set it on the counter. "Write your father's name. Write your mother's name. Write the year and the parish." The rider hesitated. He wrote a name. He wrote a year. Stephanie opened a second book beside it. This one held the founder's own record, copied from Justin's family Bible three winters ago when she drew up his first deed. She turned the page and set her finger on the line. "Justin had one brother," she said. "He died at eleven. No wife. No child. Your father cannot be him." The rider's hand stopped on the pen. He looked at the line. He looked at the door. "Sign the ledger," Stephanie said, "and I file a false claim against your name. Walk out now and leave the paper, and I record only that the claim was withdrawn." He set the pen down. He backed away from the counter. He turned and walked out into the square without the folded paper. Stephanie picked it up and slid it into the ledger. She wrote one line beneath it: Claim withdrawn. Witnessed by counsel. She pressed her seal into the wax. She ran back across the square and up the stairs. Justin was still breathing, thin and slow. James held the pen to the paper. His father's voice was almost gone, but the words were still moving from the old man into the ink. Stephanie sat on the bench in the hall. The rider was gone. The testament held. But Justin had maybe an hour left, and the story was not finished. She could hear how much of it he still had to say, and how little breath he had left to say it with.