Chapter 2 - The Magistrate from the Capital
Gideon Crowe did not like Ravenford. He did not like the smell of wet wool that clung to the locals, he did not like the way the timber-framed houses leaned toward each other like gossips whispering behind a hand, and above all, he did not like the provincial mud that caked the silver buckles of his riding shoes.
A man who had spent five years in the western wing of the Sunken Palace—shuffling petitions for the Third Secretary of State—did not expect to be buried in a border borough where the most exciting crime since the great sheep-rustling of ninety-four was a drunken cooper falling into a cider press.
Yet ambition was a hard taskmaster. When the Grand Chancellor had quietly suggested that certain provincial magistrates were being "insufficiently rigorous regarding crown prerogatives," Crowe had understood the subtext clearly enough: Find a treason trial, or find yourself clerking in the salt-mines.
So Crowe had spent his first three weeks reading through every moldering parchment in the municipal cellar until his fingers were black with iron-gall ink. Most of it was tax-rolls and boundary disputes between sheep-farmers. But toward the bottom of an iron chest marked Ministry of Defense — 71st Year of the Restoration, he found it.
Act 12-B: Concerning Unregulated Beast-Taming and Treasonous Familiarity with Non-Human Entities.
Written during the tail end of the Border Skirmishes, when enemy cavalry had used trained drakes to leap the southern palisades, the statute carried a mandatory sentence of public scourging and property forfeiture for anyone found "providing sustenance, shelter, or intelligence to any winged leviathan without a royal wrangler’s license."
The law had been forgotten before the ink was dry. No one enforced border decrees against dragons because the dragons had all vanished after the King’s disappearance three years ago. All except one, apparently.
Crowe sat at his mahogany desk, the tallow candle guttering in the draft from the warped window frame. Across from him stood Sergeant Miller, a grizzled local guardsman whose nose had been broken in three different tavern brawls during the previous decade.
"The girl," Crowe said, tapping a quill against the parchment. "Eleanor Hart. The baker’s daughter."
Miller shifted his heavy leather belt. "She’s a good girl, Magistrate. Keeps to her baking. Her dad supplies half the parish with Sunday rolls."
"She feeds a dragon," Crowe said, his voice dropping into that smooth, dry register he had practiced before the mirrors in the capital. "Every evening at dusk. Without a license. Without reporting its location to the garrison."
"It’s just an old beast," Miller muttered, looking down at his boots. "Nobody’s seen it breathe fire since the great frost. It just lies up by Blackthorn Gorge like a sick dog. The old folk say it’s lived there since before the King vanished."
"The King," Crowe said with a thin, sharp smile, "has more important matters to attend to than an oversized lizard in a ditch. What concerns me—and what will concern the High Court when my quarterly report reaches the desk of the Lord Chancellor—is that a civilian in Ravenford has maintained an unregistered, potentially hostile military asset within three leagues of the border for thirty-six months."
"She gives it stale bread, sir. Not military intelligence."
May you like
"The law makes no distinction between crusts and beef-carcasses, Sergeant. Tomorrow at the Saturday market, you will bring her to the whipping post. We are going to remind the Crownlands that the law still lives, even here in the mud."
Miller opened his mouth to argue, took one look at the narrow, ambitious gleam in the magistrate’s eye, and closed it again. He gave a stiff, miserable nod. "As you say, Magistrate."
