"How long would your interest in our records last?" His voice was blunt. "Until a better offer from Valdara arrives?"
"I have already received a Valdaran offer. The position of Keeper of the Royal Stacks. The highest archival appointment in Caelvorn."
"You're telling us you'd refuse that to stay here and organize old papers in a mountain?"
"Yes," she said simply. "I am choosing this."
Targesh closed his eyes.
He could not help it. The words hit him in a place he had thought he'd sealed shut years ago. The place where wanting lived, and loss lived, and the specific, terrible hope that he had spent years teaching himself to do without.
I am choosing this.
She had a life. A career. A position people spent decades pursuing. She had earned it. She had every reason to walk back through the gates and return to the world that understood her, and she was standing in his council chamber with a stack of papers and a quill in her hair, telling his warriors she would rather stay in a cold mountain fortress and organize the records of people who were not her own.
He opened his eyes.
Everyone was looking at him.
Verity was looking at him.
"Varresh served this fortress for forty years." His voice came out steady. He was not certain how. "She understood that memory is not a warrior's work, but it is the work that gives warriors meaning."
He looked at the papers on the table. The mapping journal with its furious shorthand. The measured gaps she had found and documented. The evidence of a mind that saw what others did not, and insisted on making it visible.
"I see no reason Northwatch should refuse an archivist who intends to do the same."
Ralvar exhaled. The sound was quiet, and Targesh knew no one else in the room marked it, but he heard it the way he always heard Ralvar, and he understood what it meant.
Finally.
"The council should discuss terms," Ralvar said. "Quarters. Access. Formal communication with Valdara." He glanced at Targesh. "Separately."
"Agreed."
Verity's hands were shaking. He could see it from six feet away, the fine tremor in her fingers as they pressed against the table. She did not gather her papers. She left them where they were.
"Thank you," she said. To all of them.
Then she walked out of the council chamber.
Chapter 29
Verity made it halfway down the corridor before her knees decided they were finished with the business of holding her upright.
She put a hand on the wall. The stone was cold and solid and did not care that she had just walked into a room full of orc warriors and told them she was refusing the position she had wanted for nine years in favor of organizing their dead archivist's papers.
The stone was very sensible. She should be more like the stone.
She slid down the wall until she was sitting on the floor of the corridor with her knees drawn up and her hands still shaking in her lap.
She had done it.
She had actually done it.
The laugh that came out of her was not entirely sane. It bounced off the walls of the empty corridor and came backsounding like something between relief and hysteria, and she pressed both hands over her mouth to stop it from happening again.
I am choosing this.
