The signal flags reached the tops of their poles, and the first rider went off the launch cradle.
Elias watched from the Council's chair at the west end of the top platform, where the deck stopped in open air above the course. From there the afternoon lay before him like a drawn map. Alaric held the east end, at the flag-pole and a table of documents. Between them, along the forward edge, ran the petitioners' row of chalk marks, and Lucien stood on one of them with his hands folded, a first-year on either side. Below the second platform, in the harness bay, three riders in provincial leathers waited their turns with their houses' badges at their collars. Beyond the rope at the foot of the slope the spectators had packed four deep, and past them the course ran out in a line of hoops on posts to a ring of raked sand where the landings would come.
Brell was paying out the tether at the second platform's cradle. Reyne stood at the ward-post beside him.
