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The low table
The tribunal table was low enough for everyone to see everyone else's knees. Sera Venn disliked this. People could arrange their faces; knees told the truth without permission. Daro Kes had pressed his together beneath a rust waistcoat. Across the room, Tavia Rell planted both boots wide, as if the polished floor might begin moving. Between their separate chairs lay a strip of sunlight and the place where a fourth chair had been removed.
Sera was forty-six, brown-skinned, with a black braid silvering at one temple. She cleaned her brass spectacles on her ivory blouse, then fastened her bottle-green jacket. Tall windows showed the canal, the floodgate and harbor cranes carrying on with their indifferent, useful work. On the oak table a folded map lay under a blue evidence cord. Daro, fifty-eight, had cropped gray hair and a split thumbnail he kept hiding. Tavia, thirty-nine, wore close black curls and a plum workcoat with a new cuff on one sleeve.
Chair Leth set down a cup without a saucer. "We are not deciding whether the water happened." Three months earlier, on the seventeenth of Rain, Daro had opened Glasswater's gate. Water entered the lower cut. Orin Rell died in the laundry cellar; Tavia and her adult apprentice Len escaped. Eleven homes became uninhabitable. The infirmary stayed dry. Sera would carry the witnesses' Lower Reach speech into civic speech and back again. She knew both languages. She did not yet know where to put her own voice.