A preliminary review was not a warrant, and Alistair had learned that distinction the way he learned everything in Verissan now, sideways, by listening to clerks complain about their workloads while pretending he had no reason to care.
A warrant was a decision that had already been made.
A review was the room where the decision still waited, and most reviews closed without ever leaving that room.
Some of them took months, while a few took only days, and the few that took days were the ones a man did not walk away from.
The Wreath's reading hall opened to anyone holding a council seal, and Tobian Marrow held a council seal, because a visiting scholar of Halversen needed access to land records to write whatever it was scholars of Halversen wrote.
Alistair sat at the long table with three real clerks and a stack of grain-tithe ledgers he had no use for.
He turned the pages of the wrong volume, slowly, until the hall thinned out near the close of the afternoon.
