King Aldric III received the treaty's final ratified text in the throne room at the third hour after dawn, in the ceremonial setting that the treaty's significance warranted and that the Lord Chancellor's office had arranged with the professional thoroughness that the arrangements of significant occasions required even when the occasion's significance was the significance of acknowledging something painful.
The treaty was seventeen pages in the Threian legal script. The preamble occupied the first three pages.
The word was on the first page.
Aldric read it twice. Not because the reading was unclear. Because the reading was clear and the clarity was the thing that required the second reading, the confirmation that the word was the word that it appeared to be and not the approximation that legal language sometimes produced in service of meaning's dilution.
