Chapter 25
The archives were exactly as she had left them six days ago.
Verity stood in the doorway, letting her eyes adjust to the familiar dimness. The reading table. The stacked documents. The careful piles she had organized before leaving, each one representing a thread of Varresh's web she had begun to trace.
She crossed to her usual table and sat down. Her archive journal lay where she had left it, open to the last entry she had written before leaving.
The work was still here. The same work she had been doing for weeks—cataloguing, cross-referencing, building a map of connections that might eventually reveal the shape of Varresh's thinking. Important work. Necessary work.
Work that suddenly felt like transcription instead of translation.
She had been copying. Recording what existed. Preserving the system Varresh had built without asking what the system wasfor.
The answer had been in Targesh's margins, in the stones at Thornfield Pass. She had needed to touch it before she could read it.
She opened her archive journal to a fresh page. Picked up her pen.
She could name nineteen orcs who had died at Thornfield Pass. She had touched their stones. She had traced carvings she couldn't read and stood in the snow where they had fallen.
The Royal Archive held centuries of documentation. She had spent nine years learning to navigate it. She could not name a single orc who had died in any battle she had ever studied.
She looked at the blank page.
Then she wrote, in the center of it, in her clearest archival hand:
Torunn Greymantle. Thornfield Pass. 23rd Harvestmoon.
She stared at it for a long moment. It was not cataloguing. It was not cross-referencing. It had no place in Varresh's web or the Royal Archive's system or any organizational framework she had ever been taught.
She wrote the next name anyway.
Delia found her there in the afternoon.
"You're back." Delia stood in the archive doorway, one hand resting on the curve of her belly. Five months along now, andshowing it. "Thessaly said she saw you ride in this morning. I thought you'd come find me."
"I meant to." Verity set down her quill. "I got distracted."
"By dusty papers." Delia's tone was dry, but her eyes were warm. "Of course you did."
She crossed to the reading table and lowered herself into the chair opposite. Her dark hair was braided back from her face, and she wore a tunic of soft gray wool.
"How was it?" Delia asked.
Verity considered the question. How was it. Such a simple construction for something so complicated.
"I didn't find my brother," she said. "There was nothing to find. No marker, no grave, no record of where he fell. Just—absence."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be." She was surprised to find she meant it. "I think I needed to see that there was nothing to see."
Delia's hand moved absently over her belly.
Verity watched the movement. "And you? How are you?"
"Tired," Delia said. "The baby has decided that sleep is unnecessary and that my bladder is a convenient cushion." She shifted in the chair, trying to find a more comfortable position. "Thessaly says this is normal."
"I read once that—" Verity stopped herself. The words had come automatically, the familiar reflex of reaching for text when faced with something she had not personally experienced. She had done it her entire life. Every gap in her knowledge filled with someone else's observations, someone else's data, someone else's conclusions.
