Eve's POV
The precedent took three hours to find.
Seraphine's legal archive was enormous....physical documents, centuries of Court rulings, filing systems that predated computers and had never been fully digitized because nobody had gotten around to it and also because Seraphine preferred it this way. Information that was hard to access was information that required effort to use against her.
Raphael knew the archive. Had used it before, decades ago, for reasons he didn't specify. He moved through it with the particular efficiency of someone who understood the organizational logic even when the logic was old and idiosyncratic and occasionally made no sense.
Eve sat at the long table in the center of the archive room and read everything he put in front of her.
Document after document. Ruling after ruling. The Reckoning Clause invoked seven times in two hundred years. Five findings against the claimant. One inconclusive. One....
"This one," she said.
