Jeddrin thought of his own domain, where indeed skill at masonry and abundant rock meant none of his folk lived roofless, and the sheep provided ample wool for spinning and weaving. Yet in Siniava’s War he had seen vagrants enough, barely clothed in rags, starving, sleeping in heaps under bushes. That had not been Mikeli’s intent; he had wanted to create a land where hunger and rags and misery did not exist.

A wish-tale … but a better wish-tale than Siniava’s, or Alured’s, who wanted only to rule.

His eyes burned; his back ached. Far to the east, the first dull red of false dawn showed below the stars. He was too old to read the night through and then work all day. He shuffled the papers together, retied the ribbons carefully, and carried the stack indoors, to put safely on a table, away from any morning breeze that might scatter the pages. A few watch lamps burned to show the way. A sleepy servant woke at the sound of his step, jumping up.

“Never mind,” Jeddrin said; he could not scold servants anymore, he but a stonemason’s get. “I read too late; I will sleep late as well. Tell the cook, if you will.”

In his bedroom, the curtains had been pulled back, as he preferred on summer nights; he drew them, put the documents on his table, and then undressed and washed himself before sliding between cool sheets. His mind produced scenes from Mikeli’s account, a city filling with sand and refugees struggling to get away, carrying their tools or a few days’ food … not the nobles riding away on horseback he had imagined before.

When he woke and dealt with the day’s work and then once more delved into the archives, he found more. Some were but fragments: “A man came to the shores of the lake and being thirsty, he drank, and in with the water he swallowed a seed, as it seemed, a seed small and eager to be swallowed, and therein began the ruin of the towers and the land.” Others, also attributed to Mikeli, were longer, parts of a journal describing years of struggle to make a new Aare in a land unlike the old.

“The keys are gone,” Mikeli wrote in one entry.

It took days to figure out what the “keys” were and what had happened, or what Mikeli thought had happened. Days in which a message from Alured, Duke of Immer, arrived, along with a squad of stern-faced soldiers and a man who claimed to be a scribe, demanding access to Andressat’s archives, from which he hoped to prove Alured’s right to the kingship.

“I will gladly show you the archives,” Jeddrin said, “but we do not allow anyone to remove materials or to shuffle them about. I received the duke’s earlier request and have been searching.”

“But you are a busy man, Count Andressat,” said the squad’s commander, who named himself Captain Nerits. “The Duke is pleased to lend you a scholar to assist in the search.”