She pulled out the middle one.
A Chronicle of the Border Conflicts: Being an Account of Hostilities Between the Kingdom of Valdara and the Orcish Territories, Years 847-859.
Her pulse quickened. The border period. Her period. The years that contained Thornfield Pass and the 23rd of Harvestmoon and everything she had come here to find.
She carried the book to his chair by the hearth and curled into it, tucking her bare feet beneath the fur. The leather binding was worn, the pages soft with handling. He had read this. Multiple times, from the look of it.
She opened to the first chapter and began scanning.
The prose was dry, military, focused on troop movements and strategic outcomes. Standard Valdaran historiography—battles as chess matches, casualties as statistics, the enemy as a faceless mass to be counted and overcome.
Then she turned the page and stopped breathing.
Marginalia.
His handwriting was dense and angular, pressed hard into the margins.
"32 Valdaran soldiers lost at Kestrel Ridge"—the printed text read.
Beneath it, in his hand:Groth Iron-Eye. Maren Stonebreaker. Kethros the Younger.
The list went on. She turned another page. Another accounting.
"The engagement at Hollow Falls resulted in minimal Valdaran casualties."
His annotation:Narra Ashmantle, Drekkan Boneridge, Halvra Stormwall
Page after page. Every battle. Every skirmish. Every "engagement" that Valdaran historians had reduced to numbers and outcomes, he had restored the names. The orc dead, written into the margins of a text that had erased them.
Her throat tightened.
This was not casual reading. This was not intellectual exercise. This was a man sitting with a record of his enemy's history and writing his own people back into existence, one name at a time.
She understood this. She understood it in her bones.
The compulsion to correct the record. To refuse the version of events that others had written. To sit with documents that got it wrong and annotate them into truth, even knowing no one else would ever read the corrections.
Her hands were trembling as she turned to the index.Thornfield Pass—page 147. She flipped forward, the pages whispering against each other, her heart beating in her throat.
The passage was brief. Four paragraphs. A "minor engagement" in the broader context of the border conflicts, tactically insignificant, notable only for the "unusually harsh weather conditions" that had complicated both advance and retreat.
Valdaran casualties: 23 soldiers, names recorded in the military census of the following spring.
Twenty-three. Corvin would be one of those twenty-three. A number in a census. A line in a ledger. A body that never came home.
Beneath the printed text, in Targesh's hand:
Gorthak Ironjaw, Vrekka Scarwall, Rakkesh Ashspear, Drasha Coldstrike, Torunn Greymantle (Brenneth's brother). The pass was a slaughter on both sides. No one won.
She read the annotation three times.
No one won.
Three words. Written in the margin of a history that had declared the engagement "a successful defensive action." He had sat with this book and refused to let that stand. He had named his dead and then admitted the truth that Valdaran histories would never print: that some battles had no victors, only survivors.
She was still staring at the page when the door opened.
Targesh filled the doorway for a moment, his gaze finding her immediately, curled in his chair, wrapped in his fur, holding his book.
