“You’d think.” Antimony leaned back, rubbing the bridge of her nose. “All right. How do we go about this?”
“We are still at you asking the Guard. Any of the ones who are thoughtful about the inheritance implications, in particular. Edgarton. Donovan. I don’t need to make you the list.” Griffin was making his own in his head, of course. “I’ll make some inquiries here, and see about the other courts. I have reason to sit in at least three of them in the next week. I’ll see what I gather from that. And who knows, it might give me another line of inquiry.”
“I do love that you’re a solicitor first, sometimes. Figuring out how to get at the fundamental question and what’s needed to move forward. Very restful to give you your head and let you work rather than have to orchestrate it myself.” She cupped her hands around her mug. “How’s the rest of it? It’s been, what, a month since we caught up?”
“You’ve been busy,” Griffin pointed out. There’d been her daughter’s wedding and a handful of other events. The wedding had been a larger affair, near two hundred guests, many of whom Griffin knew. He’d barely talked to Antimony all day. It might have made him a touch wistful - that wasn’t a life he knew - but he’d enjoyed himself. “Mum and Dad are enjoying retirement. If things settle down here, I was thinking of taking a week or two and visiting. Perhaps over the equinox hiatus.”
“Is that enjoying, or enjoying complaining about not having enough to do?” Antimony said, grinning. “Not that either of us know anything about that.”
“Oh, Dad’s still rotating through the same six arguments about why he shouldn’t have handed the department store over to anyone else. Mum keeps managing him into other projects. He’s been taking up woodwork.” Griffin gestured at the chair. “I begged a favour, asked Seth to get him started, and it’s actually turned out well. He’s finished three side tables and a set of shelves so far, so if you need any smaller furniture, let me know. I’m trying to talk him into a better drinks cabinet, with doors that aren’t annoying to manage. Something that slides.”
“Huh. That would be handy, actually. And possibly take some of the locking charms a bit better. There’s an interesting puzzle for someone.” Then she heard a noise, and rummaged in her shoulder bag, pulling out her journal, which was chiming insistently. She flipped through a few pages of it for the current message. “Pardon. They’re shorthanded tonight, and I need to go maintain some order in the chaos.”
“Good luck.” Griffin meant it, sincerely. “And we’ll talk in, what, a week, about what information we have.”
“A week. Send me a note, or I’ll forget to schedule it.” With that, Antimony was up, though she remembered to shift her cup to the tray for the cleaners to get later that evening.
Griffin opened the warding for her, leaving it that way. There was no reason he couldn’t head home, and several reasons he should. Mrs Ellis, the housekeeper he shared with the main house on the lot, would have left him something easy to stick in the oven and heat. He had several books he’d been meaning to read, and an evening on the couch sounded comfortable.
Chapter2
FEBRUARY 24TH IN TRELLECH
Three weeks later, they definitely had a problem. To be precise, they had several problems, starting with half a dozen people being needlessly difficult about this meeting. It had taken the last fortnight to get everyone involved to agree it was needed, and three attempts at scheduling and rescheduling. Now they were all here, seated round one of the long tables in the most posh of the conference rooms, and Griffin was at the head.
He’d selected the attendees carefully. It was a decidedly mixed group. Some of that was out of necessity, but some of it was a deliberate decision. They had two judges, including the Honourable Magister Rollings, both of whom heard cases regularly relating to inheritance. Both would hold their own counsel until they felt it was time to comment, but Griffin hoped they were both sensible and sensitive enough to have felt the impact on their own work by this point. Both Rollings and the Honourable Magistra Follett had decades of experience in the courts. And while both maintained a studious neutrality with Griffin himself, neither had gone out of their way to be unduly difficult.
After a little consideration, Griffin had also made a relatively simple and also challenging decision. He’d invited his two most senior direct colleagues with the overall responsibility for the magics of justice. Christopher Gregory was the easy one to deal with. He’d come up through Dunwich, from a long line of people who had done the same. Christopher knew how to weigh information as easily as trade goods. Griffin understood how the man thought.
Gloriana Hector, though, had been dubious about Griffin ever since he’d returned after the War. She was one of the ones who absolutely felt that no one with his sort of disability should advance further in the Courts than he had already come. He suspected she’d argue Griffin should not have his current position, either, except that he gave her no room for that.
She’d been like that since Griffin had resumed work after his recovery and sorting out how best to use his chair and canes and crutches and magic. For the last seven years, they’d been in a civil but chilly detente about it. On the other hand, it wasn’t as if she’d be easier to deal with if she were left out of the conversation now. And she was good at her work, that was the thing, and she might well have useful insight.
Antimony was there, of course, along with Captain Donovan. They’d hoped for Edgarton, since he wore three hats to Captain Donovan’s two. Edgarton was a magistrate, besides being a Captain in the guard and Lord of the land - or Lady, in Donovan’s case. But he’d been on a complicated case for three days that didn’t show signs of letting up. And Genevieve Donovan was definitely on Griffin’s and Antimony’s side in this.
They had two of the more senior clerks, Willis and Henning. Mistress Henning was certainly the most formidable of them. Her reputation for precision and the proper form were known well beyond the Halls of Justice. Willis was nearly as thorough about details, but he also had a tremendous memory for precedent and timing, which seemed useful here.
And, of necessity, they had both Nestor Aplin and Harriet Wilson, the other two potential Heirs to Trellech’s land magic. There was no avoiding that, either. Harriet was fine. They had an amiable agreement with each other. But Griffin had never got along with Aplin before the War, and that definitely hadn’t improved. Aplin was the sort - well, Rollings was too - to be all hearty outdoorsman whenever Griffin was in hearing distance. They were both skilled enough at rhetorical construction to make it clear that Griffin’s need for a chair made him less in their eyes without ever coming out and saying so.
More fool them, but that was easier to say with conviction some days than others. Now, though, Griffin knew what he was about. More to the point, he knew how to apply his own mastery in Incantation, addressing the room with a clear “Order, please,” that cut across the murmuring. Obligingly, everyone fell silent. Griffin nodded. “Thank you all for coming and your time. I believe everyone here knows all the other parties, save perhaps for my apprentice, Charlus Edwards, who will take our notes.”
Charlus stood briefly beside Griffin. “Copies by end of day tomorrow, as usual.” Charlus came from a notably more posh family than Griffin himself did - the forename was a certain amount of a hint there. But he’d also begun his apprenticeship by earnestly wanting to learn all he could. He was a third son, and going into the courts in some form was an entirely respectable vocation.
He was young enough he’d not seen the War up close. But his older brothers had, and that turned out to make it easier for Griffin to get on with him. Charlus likely had another year or two of his apprenticeship to go, but he’d fully qualified as a solicitor in his own right last year before becoming Griffin’s particular apprentice. Not the fastest to do so, but solidly respectable.
Now Griffin had to lay out the meat of it. He - and Antimony - knew it had to begin here. He briefly, but with proper attention to detail, walked people through what they’d observed, adding a number of benchmarks and necessary notations. Griffin called out specific points where everyone in the room knew there had been a bobble. It was, as they’d asked around, strongest in the inheritance court, but there were examples in every other courtroom as well. Nothing that was precisely a problem, yet, but keeping it solely in the realm of unmet potential was Griffin’s job. One of his jobs.
Griffin didn’t stand. It would not win him any extra points here, and it wasn’t worth the energy it’d take. He was, at least, having a better day today. They’d had three days in a row of stable weather. When he was done, he waited.
“You’re sure there isn’t some other cause? There was the weather, in the autumn, all that chat about auroral storms.” That was Master Willis.
“A cause, possibly, for snow, which we certainly had. But nothing to affect the charms. And honestly, all our records suggest that if it were related, we’d have seen an impact sooner than five months. This appears to be a steady degradation over time, though, of course, we are working from the seasonal testing points.” Griffin shifted one of the pages in front of him. “We ran the next one early, of course. That’s in the notes in front of you.” It had meant three long days in a row, because they couldn’t begin until the courts let out for the night.
Henning flicked through the pages to find what she wanted to reference, marked up with her personal charms for indexing. “And it’s nothing that’s been done there in the past three months. No unusual cases, in terms of the magical effects. A few that were trickier than usual on the judicial front.”
“But the truth magics were straightforward enough. We checked around the times of the few cases that might cause a concern, but there are no notes of anything shifting when it shouldn’t.”
“Captain Orland,” Nestor Aplin spoke up. “You believe there’s something to this?” There was an unpleasant note in his voice. Griffin wondered, not for the first time, how that sort of thinking blemished everything else Aplin did. Oh, Aplin was an excellent man with the more mechanical sorts of agreements, contract law and the forming of oaths. He was not so much concerned with the truth, the way Griffin was, as with precision properly documented.
