The man nodded. “Lived with him down on the southern tip of West Echo for a year as we worked on the poem. Bad judgment on my part. Artists are so . . . messy.” The scribe looked around, then offered an apologetic grimace.

Farilane ignored him. “You worked on the poem with him. You . . . assisted Orintine Fallon on the masterwork Elquin?”

Again, the man nodded. “Assisted . . . is really the wrong word.”

“I should think so!”

“I would say I authored most of it. Orin really assisted me.”

Farilane smiled, then chuckled. “Okay, you’re funny. I can see why Virgil picked you.”

He gave her that adorable head tilt again, then asked. “What was it you found?”

“What’s that?”

“When you first opened the door, when you expected Virgil to be alone, you greeted us by saying, ‘You’re not going to believe what I found.’ So what did you find?”

“Oh, that.” She looked down at the pages before her. “It’s nothing.”

“May I?” The scribe gestured toward the path between him and the desk.

She smiled again. “If you’re very careful.”

He nodded. Grasping the skirt of his robes and holding them tight to his legs, he approached and looked at the vellum stack she had rescued from the Goblin Sea cliffs.

“I just found this a few weeks back. Been studying it every waking moment, which is to say, every moment since then. This is an incomplete copy of an extremely ancient work called—”

“The Book of Brin,” he finished for her.

She stiffened. “How did you know that?”

The scribe looked guilty and tried to wipe it away by lying. “I’m sure Virgil must have told me.”

“Virgil didn’t know. I never had the chance to tell him what I found.” Farilane glanced at the amateur penmanship that was hard to decipher right-side up, and realized the scribe was looking at it upside down and could still . . . “You can read.”

“Yes.” He smiled and nodded. “I’m sorry if I misled you.”

“I don’t understand. Why did you sit on the wet paint?”

The scribe looked back at Amicus Killian’s stool as if he’d been betrayed by an old friend. “You told me not to move from that spot. You were gone for hours.” He shrugged. “I can get a new robe. Feet are harder to come by.”

Again, he made her laugh. Hating him was a great deal harder than she had expected.

“So what is it you found?”

“Another reference to something called the Horn of Gylindora. It’s not in the text, but in the marginalia. I believe this book was the personal property of Falkirk de Roche. These notes, I suspect, were made by him.”

“And that’s significant—why?”