Alexander's POV:

The four elders have been in this room for ninety minutes.

Arguments move across the table in the register of men who have lived with these precedents longer than I've been alive — cross-referencing, citing, laying the old law against the new situation and finding where it holds and where it strains.

'They're coming to it,' Antony says.

Elder Whitmore sets down his document. "Under ancient law," he says, "a fated ...