Or there might be nothing. That was the other possibility. Months of planning this assignment down to the last detail, and at the end of it, nothing. No answer. No closure. Just the same endless uncertainty she had been living with since the letters stopped coming.
She could not think about that.
She lit her candle, pulled on her shoes, and went to find the stairs.
During her brief exploration the previous evening, she had been too overwhelmed by the scope of the collection to notice the details. Now, with hours of sleeplessness sharpening her attention and no warchief looming in the doorway, she could actually look.
She started with the first room, the one she had entered before being interrupted. Her candle cast a small circle of light that moved with her as she walked the perimeter, examining the shelves.
The organization made no sense.
Verity frowned. The Royal Archive used a system of classification so precise that any trained archivist could locate a document within minutes. Subject, date, origin, format—the categories nested inside each other like boxes within boxes, logical and predictable.
This was not that.
She pulled a scroll from the nearest shelf and unrolled it carefully. A trade agreement, dated from sixty years ago, concerning the exchange of iron ore for grain. She replaced it and checked the scroll beside it.
A poem, or something that might be a poem. The Orcish script was dense and unfamiliar, but the structure suggested verse. No date that she could find.
The next item was a bound volume of weather observations from a century and a half ago.
Verity stepped back and looked at the shelf as a whole. Trade agreement, poem, weather observations. No chronological order. No subject grouping. No apparent logic at all.
Perhaps this room was simply unsorted. Perhaps Varresh had died before completing her organization, and these were items waiting to be properly filed.
She moved to the next room.
The same chaos. Military dispatches mixed with recipes. Correspondence filed beside architectural drawings. A collection of children's stories shelved next to a detailed census from two hundred years ago.
Verity's frown deepened.
This was not disorganization. She had seen disorganization. She had spent three months untangling the personal papers of a duke who had used his filing system as a weapon against anyone who might want to find anything after his death. That had been chaos born of spite.
The items here had been placed with purpose.
She returned to the first room and looked more carefully at the shelves. The items seemed to be intentionally placed, with small gaps between groupings, with certain items angled slightly as though to indicate connection. There was a system here. She simply could not see it yet.
"What were you thinking?" she murmured to the empty room. To Varresh, two years dead, whose spectacles still sat on the desk upstairs with one cracked lens.
The archives did not answer.
Verity was reading a bound volume of trade agreements from three generations past when she heard the footsteps.
She had been in the archives for—she checked her candle, which had burned down considerably—perhaps three hours. Long enough to identify seventeen different document types. Long enough to confirm that Varresh's organizational system was intentional, complex, and completely opaque to anyone who had not spent forty years building it. Long enough to develop a theory that the groupings were associative rather than categorical, connected by meaning rather than subject.
Not long enough to find anything about Thornfield Pass.
The footsteps stopped at the doorway.
"You do not sleep," the warchief observed.
"Neither do you." Verity turned a page, making a mental note of a reference to border patrol routes that might be relevant.
"It is three hours past midnight."
"Is it?" She looked up then. "I lose track."
Targesh Ironhide stood in the doorway, wearing a simple tunic, unlaced at the throat. Trousers. His feet were bare.
