“Here’s scoundrels’ work for certain,” Uwen said, and Tristen surveyed the calamity, and the body of the man recently dead, a tangle of robes and white hair curled up as if for sleep, beside a heavy chair and partially concealed by the adjacent reading table.

“This is the senior archivist. There were two.”

“There’s just the one, Your Grace,” the sergeant said, and pointed into the shadows, to a hole the table shadowed. The plastered masonry had been taken apart, revealing a hiding place.

“Find the other archivist,” Tristen said, wanting that very much, but finding it far less readily accessible than Liss… and it was not because of his not knowing the man. The two who had worked here were both old men, both quarreled with each other bitterly. Now they were one dead, the other fled; and there was no apparent reason except Amefin business, the sort of which this archive kept account. It was not likely Lord Parsynan’s correspondence in the fire: there was no reason for Parsynan to store in the archive any letter he wished kept secret and there was no reason to chisel it out of a wall. It might be a certain portion of Lord Heryn’s archive. Cefwyn had ordered that sent to Guelemara, along with unique books of history and record, but there might have been something concealed.

“There’s nothing left,” the clerk said, stooping to pick up the burned remnant of the book. He opened it to show only the margin and a handful of words, and charred parchment flaked away in his careless handling. Tristen knelt at the fireplace, carefully extracted the browned yet unburned end of a parchment. It was blank, a margin edge. “Your Grace will soot his hands,” the clerk said, but Tristen reached in among ashes warm at their heart and another, which had burned up and down its length, but which had the scroll top at its heart—crumbling ash, for the most part, and the wax of the seals had surely fed the fire that consumed it.

The salutation was still legible: to the aetheling…

He walked to the window, where there was more light, and pried further, into charred black whereon the ink was gray. He made out the words Althalenand Gestaurien…

And he knew the spidery hand. He had seen it every day in Ynefel. He had watched Mauryl write and cipher, day after day, endlessly at his work.

The charred portion fell away in his fingers. Gestaurienvanished in soot and fragments.

He stood shaken, grieved and angry.

“I want the archivist,” he said, but even knowing that the Guard had had the town gates shut last night and watched the traffic there carefully today, there was no warning to watch for an elderly, unarmed man. “Find me a box. Now.”

“Find his lordship a box!” the sergeant said, but the clerk, hurrying to redeem himself, turned a scroll lectern upside down, and Tristen knelt and carefully laid the fragments in the box it made, piece by treasured piece, as he had never had the chance to collect anything from Ynefel but Mauryl’s direct gifts.

And why these now lay with a dead man he could only half guess: that they were potent, yes; that the archivists had always known they were here, likely; that they wanted to come to him now, conceivable; that someone would have wished to prevent that, understandable.

But did humble archivists turn and murder one another and destroy their charge?

It was conceivable these exceeded what a man could conceal about his person, if he had turned thief. Or they might be all. Find the archivist, was the burden of his thought, but it went out into the gray and lost itself in a town full of similar men, similar lives, only a few that sparked fire, and those nothing, nothing to do with this act.

One was surely Crissand.’ About that one he felt a pang of grief, felt the cold of stone. One was in the East Court, likewise within stone, likely a priest. One was about some business he could not define. But more subtle, like a fish slipping through sunlit ripples, invisible, something else flicked past his notice.

And thatsomething flickered off toward the east, toward Emuin, toward the monastery, toward Guelessar.

Beware, he wished Emuin, and all at once rued his decision not to warn Emuin regarding either the message from Ryssand or the messenger to Idrys. He knelt with ruin in his hands and willed it mended, but only a flickering presence answered him, undefined, flickering hither and thither through his recollections, difficult to catch, wary, wily, and not without complicity… he felt so.

The clerk’s face was pale in the sunlight from the windows and utterly sober. “Your Grace,” the young man whispered fearfully. “If I could have been here sooner, last night…”

But the clerk had been in hall, reading the documents. The archivists were entrusted with the integrity of this place. And guards had been at the door… what more could a clerk do, where wizards failed? The deed was done, the second archivist had fled with whatever he had taken away, and Tristen much doubted they would find the man within the town.

Uwen said not a thing. But the sergeant from the detail at the door stood by fretting in silence, as if he, too, were somehow at fault. “Syllan,” Tristen said, and gave him the burned fragments in their contrived container. “Take this to my quarters, gently, very gently, and be careful of drafts.”

“My lord,” Syllan said, and took it away, leaving them the archivist and the cavity in the wall. The industrious sergeant looked into it. But it proved empty.

But was the aetheling to whom Mauryl might have once written Lord Heryn? Mauryl had lived long, very long, and all those years might have been in these scrolls, decades of messages flowing between the Warden of Ynefel and the aetheling of Amefel, or things older still.

This entire place had been ordered only as much as Mauryl’s papers, or Emuin’s, which was to say, not at all… and quite unlike the orderly arrangement in that of Guelemara. He had seen the latter, and knew at a single stroke he looked on a library that, like a wizard’s papers, concealed, rather than revealed. The two archivists had detested one another and come to their final disagreement. It was by no means certain that the thief had destroyed all there was of Mauryl’s letters: he could not have left unseen with a great many records. If he had taken anything away with him, it would have been the choicest, or at least the one a Man would most value.

He had ordered a search. He had saved the fragments, for what sharp eyes could learn from them. The junior clerk was too heavy-handed; he awaited the senior, with Emuin.

But hope of finding the thief? It was small. If Mauryl’s work wanted to be found, he would warrant it might be; or if lost, it would be that. He very much doubted a second archivist appointed by Heryn Aswydd could have contrived such a theft on his own.

Where fled?

Across the river, perhaps. But the gray space gave no clues but eastward, eastward, eastward, not toward the river, but toward Assurnbrook. And he stayed very still, not reaching further against resistance. Neither did Emuin.

The Aswydd’s archivist, the thief was, after all.

Uwen came up to stand by him. “Were it wizard-work?” Uwen asked in a low voice. “Is there some danger?”

“None. I think, none. They were old letters,’t was all. I suspect the archivists hid them from the Quinalt, from Cefwyn’s clerks. I suspect there were more of them and the clerk took the choicest to whatever place he’s fled. —But murder. Murder is far too much for fear. Here was anger, a great anger.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time two old men had a fallin’ out.”

He stared at the shadows, at the base of the wall where dark flowed, beneath the tables, around the cabinets, within the wall. There was anger still here, but a muted, sorrowful anger.

“Find a mason,” he said, “and repair the wall. Make it sound again. Hear me. Do it today, before the sun sets.”