Other problems had arisen, as well. Duke Phelan had allied with Alured the Black in Siniava’s War to gain unhindered passage through the southern forests and so outmaneuver Siniava’s army and pin them at last. Alured now claimed the title of Duke of Immer and moreover claimed it was his by birthright, not merely conquest.

That led everyone the Count knew to ask him, for he was known as a genealogist, possessor of the most complete archives of Aarenisian families and their relationships, whether Alured’s claim could possibly be true. Jeddrin was sure it was not, for Alured had none of the qualities of nobility.

The man had been a pirate from nobody knew where, had made a reputation at sea, then—for no reason anyone knew—had come ashore and begun gathering a force in the great southern forest that lay between the Immer valley and the Chaloquay drainage. Phelan had befriended him and used him in Siniava’s War, but Phelan was—had been—he had thought Phelan was—merely a northern duke, whose title reflected nothing of blood or bone.

And now Phelan was shown to have had royal blood after all, royal and elven, and he had treated the man as a mere mercenary captain. Well, that was done and he could not undo it, but he did not want to make any mistakes about this new Duke of Immer.

Now, having brought up another stack of documents from the family archives, he spread them on the table and began looking them over.

He ran his eye down the pages of a bound book—very old, the leather binding flaking away; he preferred scrolls—recording the yields of wheat and the produce of vineyards in a time before his father’s father’s father’s father. Rainfall records, damaging storms: the same kinds of records he himself kept. Nothing in that one about families, politics, or even trade. He put it aside for a stack of flat sheets tied with a ribbon faded gray from its original color; it had left marks on the outer pages. He turned them one by one.

One page had genealogy … he recognized his great-great-great-great-grandfather’s name at the bottom in spidery writing. Up the page … he began jotting the names down; this was older than the Family Roll in which he’d listed his sons.

The sheet beneath, the ink much faded, bore the inscription “To the right honorable, the faithful, the most noble Va-Jeddrinal—This being the copy you asked for, the which I most humbly present for your pleasure, of the oldest known record in the north, of the Fall of Aare and the King’s Quest, as recorded by Mikeli himself in the fifth year of exile in the north.”

Jeddrin stared. No one had a copy of the Fall of Aare, though the story was known. The lords of Aare suffered a defeat of some kind and came north across the sea … could this treasure have lain so long in his archives unrecognized? Apparently so.

In another hand, the work began, “I, Mikeli, heir of the kings of Aare, sing the lament of Aare’s fall, the Sandlord’s ruin, the towers that shattered and the waters that vanished, as a lament but also a warning to those who follow, that they may escape the ruin that still roams the world below.”