The tables had been removed, except for one placed in front of the long brick fireplace. A bluff-faced, stocky man, his hair thick with gray, sat facing them in a well-cut coat of dark green silk, hands folded in front of him on the tabletop. A slim woman who showed as much age stood beside the table in a fine, gray wool dress embroidered with white flowers around the neck. The local lord, Min supposed, and his lady; country nobility little better informed of the world than their tenants and crofters.

The guards situated them in front of the lord’s table and melted into the watchers. The woman in gray stepped forward, and the murmurs died.

“All here attend and give ear,” the woman announced, “for justice will be meted today by Lord Gareth Bryne. Prisoners, you are called before the judgment of Lord Bryne.” Not the lord’s lady, then; an official of some sort. Gareth Bryne? The last Min remembered, he was Captain-General of the Queen’s Guards, in Caemlyn. If it was the same man. She glanced at Siuan, but Siuan had her eyes locked on the wide floorboards in front of her feet. Whoever he was, this Bryne looked weary.

“You are charged,” the woman in gray went on, “with trespass by night, arson and destruction of a building and its contents, the killing of valuable livestock, assault on the person of Admer Nem, and the theft of a purse said to contain gold and silver. It is understood that the assault and theft were the work of your companion, who escaped, but you three are equally culpable under the law.”

She paused to let it sink in, and Min exchanged rueful glances with Leane. Logain would have to add theft to the stew. He was probably halfway to Murandy by now, if not more distant yet.

After a moment the woman began again. “Your accusers are here to face you.” She gestured to the cluster of Nems. “Admer Nem, you will give your testimony.”

The stout man eased forward in a blend of self-importance and self-consciousness, tugging at his coat where the wooden buttons strained over his middle, running his hands through thinning hair that kept dropping into his face. “Like I said, Lord Gareth, it was like this. . . .”

He gave a fairly straightforward account of discovering them in the hayloft and ordering them out, though he made Logain near a foot taller and turned the man’s single blow into a fight where Nem gave as good as he got. The lantern fell, the hay went up, and the rest of the family came spilling out of the farmhouse into the predawn; the prisoners were seized and the barn burned to the ground, and then the loss of the purse from the house was discovered. He did slight the part where Lord Bryne’s retainer rode by as some of the family were bringing out ropes and eyeing tree limbs.