Regina Vance came through the yard gate on the fourth morning after the expulsion carrying one suitcase. She had been living in that yard for eleven weeks, which is the detail that made a packed case strange to everybody watching her cross it.
Sanctuary had put her in the second hut on the east line behind a garrison seal she did not hold a key to. A seal on a door is a kindness paid for by somebody else, plus it had been the whole of her standing since the sanctuary meeting.
The case held two coats, a bound set of Ivory underwriting rules, plus a guild seal a clerk had cut in half in front of her. Alder Vance read the expulsion out himself at the trustees' table, which nobody in Blackforge asked her a single question about that morning.
She put the case on the gatehouse table before anybody had offered her a chair.
"I am not here for protection," she said, "I am here for a role, with terms, on a roster, from which I can be dismissed in writing."
