"You're crying."
She touched her face. Her fingers came away wet.
"I apologize." Her voice came out wrong. "I should—"
"Sit down."
She sat. There was a stool beside the workbench, and her legs folded beneath her before she decided to let them.
Brenneth moved to a cabinet in the corner and returned with a cup of something that smelled like tea cut with alcohol. He pressed it into her hands.
"Drink."
She drank. The liquid burned going down, then settled into warmth.
"You are looking for someone." Brenneth's voice was not unkind.
She should deny it. She should retreat into methodology, into the comfortable armor of academic distance.
But she was too tired.
"My brother." The words felt like stones in her mouth. "He was at Thornfield Pass."
Brenneth lowered himself onto a crate across from her, his massive frame settling with a creak of protesting wood.
"Your brother was there when Torunn died."
"Yes."
She waited for anger. For the realization that she had used his grief to excavate information about her own. For him to tell her to leave.
"What was his name?" Brenneth asked instead.
"Corvin. Corvin Dunmore."
"Corvin." He said it slowly, as though learning the shape of it. "I will remember that."
Her eyes stung again. "Why?"
"Because he died on the same mountain that holds my brother. Because his sister crossed enemy territory to find out what happened to him. Because—" He paused, his jaw working. "Because the dead deserve to be named. All of them. Yours and mine."
She thought of Targesh's marginalia. The careful script crowding the borders of hostile text, restoring what had been erased.
"Targesh writes the orc dead into Valdaran histories," she said. "He annotates them. Adds the names that were left out."
"I know."
"Is that why? Because all the dead deserve to be named?"
Brenneth was quiet for a moment, his massive hands wrapped around his own cup.
"Targesh carries more names than anyone should," he said finally. "He keeps them the way the mountain keeps bones."
"That sounds heavy."
"It is. But he would not put it down if you asked him." Brenneth's eyes met hers. "He believes someone must remember. That if he does not carry the names, they will be lost."
She thought of the man she had woken beside this morning. The way he had looked at her—not with possession, but with something more dangerous. With the expression of someone who had just added another name to the list of things he would not let himself lose.
