Chapter 119

I built the case the way I had once built Gareth’s registers for the King’s clerks: on a long table, in columns, with nothing in it that I could not point to.

The archive ran under the east wing in three low vaulted rooms that smelled of dust and old candle. At the head of the first sheet, in my own hand, I ruled six columns.

No. Item. Found by. Witnessed by. Held since, and by whom. Seals.

“Where there’s a gap,” I said, “we write the gap.”

Quill looked at the columns over his spectacles, and then sat down at my left elbow, as he had sat ten days in Ashgrove. Neither of us mentioned it.

***

Corwin came on the first morning. He stopped in the archive doorway and raised his hand once, flat, the way he had raised it to my window from the gate when I was a prisoner in my rooms and he was the only person in Vaelmoor who would.

I raised mine. He came in and sat at the foot of the table, and stayed every day until it was done.

Brenna c