The arbitration panel convened on a gray Tuesday morning in the neutral settlement of Harrow's Keep.
Harrow's Keep was larger than Greyford Crossing — a proper settlement, with permanent institutional buildings and the kind of established infrastructure that indicated decades of use as a territorial administrative center. The arbitration hall was in the settlement's central building: a long, high-ceilinged room with tall windows that let in the flat northern light and walls lined with the kind of dark wood paneling that communicated, deliberately and without subtlety, that serious things happened here.
I had been in rooms like this before. During the exile years, when the Northern Coalition's territorial disputes required formal arbitration processes, I had attended seven panel sessions
