The Crossing-Hall

The seat of Highbridge's government on the High Terrace — the reeve's chair and the trade-moot's benches, where the free city rules itself. The old Vandahl dais is still under the floorboards, and the High Reeve's chair is bolted down directly on top of it.

The free city needs somewhere to pretend it is a state, and the Crossing-Hall is it: a long timber-and-stone hall on the High Terrace where the trade-moot sits on tiered benches — the old families, the guild seats, the caravan factors — and the High Reeve keeps order from a heavy chair at the head of it. The reeve is elected by the moot and, in practice, is whoever the moot is most afraid to cross; for eleven years that has been Halvard Crane, who runs the city like the ledger of a very large, very nervous merchant house. The hall's whole history is legible in one detail every child is shown: the reeve's chair is bolted to the floor over the old Vandahl audience-dais, so the settler government literally sits on the House it unseated, and the bolts are checked yearly. That is the free city in a sentence — a real government doing real work (tolls, roads, grain-writs, the watch) while standing on a claim it does not own and cannot afford to test. Business here is loud, procedural and surprisingly honest at the clerk level and surprisingly not at the top. A newcomer comes to the Crossing-Hall for a caravan writ, a grievance heard, a trade-charter stamped, or an audience with the man who actually runs Highbridge — if Crane decides the newcomer is worth the quarter-hour.