The Sovereign Record was kept in the council’s lower gallery, a long, cold room of standing lecterns where the continent’s confirmed events were copied out as they were proven.

Any noble of standing could read the world’s official memory there, if he could stand the smell of ink and stone.

Tobian Marrow had built a small reputation as a man who read it daily, and the reputation suited the cover well.

A minor lord with scholarly pretensions and too much time would naturally haunt the Record.

The truth was plainer than that, though.

It was the only place in Verissan where Alistair could learn what was being done to his own people without a single soul knowing he cared.

He found it on the regional page, three entries down, written in the clerk’s small even hand.

A village in the northern reaches had been vacated. No bodies, no struggle, no demand or claim, and no banner left behind.

The people were present in the spring census and gone by the time the tax rider came through in the summer.

The Record offered no theory because the Record never offers theories. It only confirmed that a thing was true.

Alistair read it once and went very still.

He knew the pattern.

He had read the first one too, a month past, in this same room, and at the time he told himself it was nothing, the way a man tells himself a sound in the dark is only the house settling on its beams.

There were two villages now, both north, both empty in the same clean way, and both within two days’ ride of the last place Glory had been confirmed alive.

’Glory does not empty villages,’ Alistair thought. ’Whatever he is now, this is not his hand.’

Even so, Glory’s hand and this thing were drawing toward each other across the map, and Alistair had stopped believing in that kind of coincidence back in the Black Mountains. He had not started believing in it again since.

Someone was clearing that country for a reason, and the reason was crawling south across the map toward the one man who might still stand against it.

He only realized he had stood too long over the same lectern when the quiet behind him changed shape.

"You read that one closely," said a voice he knew.

Renvald Crane had crossed the gallery without a sound, which was a small lesson in itself, and now he stood at the next lectern with his hands folded and his cuffs so white they looked as if they had never been worn.

"Marrow," Crane continued, pleasant as a man remarking on the rain. "You give a northern village notice more care than a young Caelmar lord usually spares for anything that isn’t a wine list or a marriage. Why is that?"

Alistair turned a page, unhurried, and let Tobian’s small grief answer for him.

"My uncle traded north, before he died," he said.

"His route ran up through that country, so I read the regional page hoping I’ll catch a town he named in his ledgers and feel something honest about him." He let his mouth tighten. "I never do, though. He’s been dead for three years, and the Record still won’t give him back to me. Foolish, I know."

"How sentimental," Crane said, and the word in his mouth was not cruel, which was the unnerving thing about it.

"You think it foolish," Alistair said, and let Tobian sound a touch stung.

"I think a great many things foolish, though sentiment is rarely among them." Crane tilted his head, the small courteous tilt of a man who has decided to teach you something for your own good. "Sentiment is very useful. It tells you where a man’s attention truly lives, no matter what his mouth is busy saying."

Alistair said nothing and let him go on.

"A man may lie about everything he wants. He cannot easily lie about what he reads closely when he believes no one is standing at his shoulder." Crane paused.

"You read this village closely, Marrow. And here I am, at your shoulder."

"You make watching a man sound almost tender," Alistair said.

"It can be. The best of it is," Crane replied. "A surgeon watches a wound tenderly, yet that does not change what he intends to do to it."

He let that sit, pleasant as ever, and turned back a page in the Record as though the conversation had been about the weather all along.

"You should read more widely, Marrow. A man who reads only the pages that grieve him teaches the room exactly where his soft places are." Crane’s eyes did not leave him. "I would hate for the room to learn yours before you have decided which of them are even real."

Alistair laughed, lightly, the laugh of a man who does not understand that he is being weighed.

"Then I’ll have to start reading the wine lists with feeling," he said, "and bore you instead."

"You will not bore me," Crane said. "I have read your file, Marrow, and there is very little in it."

Hearing this, Alistair kept his hands moving over the page, though his grip tightened by a fraction.

"A man with very little in his file and a great deal of curiosity in his face is the most interesting kind of reading I am offered in this dull city," Crane finished.

Alistair clicked his tongue, quietly, and turned the phrase into a joke he could carry away with him.

"You will have me believe I am worth a file, Wreath. My brothers will never recover from the news."

"Everyone is worth a file. Most of them are simply very short," Crane said, not looking up from his own lectern. "A name, a house, a debt or two, and the date a man will marry the only woman who will have him. Yours is short, Marrow. That is not a comfort, though."

Alistair raised a brow at that.

"Long files are full of explanations, and a man’s explanations are the easiest part of him to read," Crane continued.

"It is the short files that keep me at my lectern past supper. A man with nothing in his file and everything in his face. I told you already. The most interesting reading this dull city has offered me in a year."

Following that, he returned to his own lectern. "Read on. Don’t let me interrupt your uncle."

Alistair read. Crane did not leave.

He turned another page, and another, and felt the man’s eyes track the back of his hands the entire time.

Tobian Marrow had just been moved one quiet notch up a list with no title and no bottom, and Crane had wanted him to feel it happen.

Alistair was honestly unsettled, though he kept it from reaching his face.

’He is not hiding the watching anymore,’ he thought, turning a page he did not read. ’That is the change in him. A man who watches you in secret still hopes you are innocent.’

His grip tightened once more on the edge of the lectern.

’A man who lets you see it has already finished hoping.’