The Drone Who Claimed the Marshal novel · Chapter 26 of 32

Chapter 26: The Law

Linus walked to the middle of the floor, where the white chair had been.

His hands were still faintly lit, and he kept them open at his sides.

"I want three things," he said. "I'll say them once."

"We are listening," said the eldest lord.

"End the Claiming. Not change it, not make it kinder. End it."

Nobody on the benches spoke.

"Open the Ore Works. Every drone sent below in the last seven years walks out with their papers and a year of wages, paid from the Lorne estate."

He looked along the half circle.

"And the Claiming Hall holds one more session. Not to sell anyone. To read the names of the three hundred and twenty-nine, and say them out loud to the people who sat there and watched."

A lord at the end of the bench shifted in his seat.

"The estates of the Warborn who sat in the front row will not like it," he said.

"I didn't ask them," Linus said.

The eldest put the question to the benches.

"All in favour of the three, stand."

For a moment, nothing moved.

Then Ambrose, at the back of the hall, rose to his feet.

He did it slowly, in front of everyone, with his bare glowing hand at his side.

It was seven years late, and every person in the hall understood it.

Linus saw his husband standing and had to look away for a second at the cracked dome.

One by one the lords stood too.

Seventeen of the twenty-one stood, and the eldest struck the floor with his staff.

"Carried."

They went home through a capital that had not gone to bed.

Drones in the cheap lanes had hung lamps in their windows, and in the Hall square a baker was giving bread away from a cart.

Linus knew the baker from the ward, and the baker lifted a loaf over their head at the car.

At the keep, Ambrose carried him up the stairs.

Linus told him to put him down, and Ambrose did not.

"I have been wanting to do this since the stair," he said. "Let me have it."

The wide bed was the same, and the window full of sea.

Ambrose set him on his feet beside it, and then he knelt.

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