"So I've been told. Grukash said something similar."
"Grukash is rarely wrong."
He moved further into the room, and Verity had to resist the urge to step backward. Not from fear, but from the sheer size of him. He was taking up space that had been hers a moment ago, and the room felt smaller for it.
He looked at the shelves. At her journal, still clutched in her hand. At the quill she had tucked behind her ear.
"What is your name?" he asked.
"Verity Dunmore." She paused. "But you know that. You approved my credentials before I was permitted to cross the border."
"I approved a name on a document." He gestured at her, a motion that seemed to encompass her entire presence. "I did not approve this."
"I'm not certain what 'this' refers to, but I suspect it's not a compliment."
"It is an observation." He turned from her to examine the nearest shelf, running one massive finger along the spines of the bound volumes there. "Varresh spent forty years building this collection. She did not allow anyone to touch it without her supervision."
"She sounds like an excellent archivist."
"She was." He pulled a volume from the shelf and stood for a moment with it in his hand, not opening it. "She would have had opinions about you."
"Most people do."
He set the volume back. "She would have liked you."
Verity did not know what to say to that. She did not think he expected her to say anything.
"Why was there no one to replace her?" she asked instead.
"Because no one else wanted the work," he said. "Archiving is not a warrior's path. It does not bring glory or status. Varreshchose it because she understood that memory matters more than most battles. That understanding is rare."
"It's rare among humans too." Verity thought of her colleagues at the Royal Archive, the ones who saw the work as a stepping stone to more prestigious positions, the ones who filed documents without reading them, the ones who had never once felt the thrill of finding a piece of information that changed everything you thought you knew. "Most people don't understand what we do. They think we're just... keeping things. Storing them. Like a warehouse."
"And what do you think you do?"
The question was genuine, not teasing or provoking, and so she answered it earnestly.
"I think we hold the line between knowing and forgetting," she said. "Everything that's ever happened only survives if someone writes it down and someone else keeps it safe. And then someone has to be able to find it again when it's needed. That's the work. Not storing things. Keeping them. There's a difference."
The torchlight played across his scarred features, and Verity found herself studying them the way she studied documents, looking for the story beneath the surface, the history written in tissue and time.
He turned to face her fully. "I agreed to this arrangement because the Mountain Clan has nothing to hide. If your Archive wishes to record our history accurately, that serves our interests as well as yours."
"But?" Verity said, because there was clearly a but.
"But I did not expect—" He paused. "The humans who come to the Iron Wilds are usually afraid. Or arrogant. Or both. They see what they expect to see and leave having learned nothing."
"And what do you expect me to see?"
"Monsters." He said it flatly, without rancor. "That is what your histories say of us. I have read them."
Verity blinked. "You've read Valdaran histories?"
"Know your enemy." A slight shrug. "Your scholars write with great confidence about people they have never met."
"Thornbury," Verity said, suddenly certain. "You've read Thornbury."
"Among others."
