Page 90 of Legacy Ascended

I look at the room instead. Tables. Shelves. Nothing remotely like the place where they held me. I let out a breath and drop my shoulders.

"Okay."

Jon looks at me.

"I'm good."

The custodian waits until I'm moving again before she leads us to the first table.

It's a reading room. Long tables, lamps with green glass shades, shelves going up into a tall ceiling. The air is cool and smells like paper.

"Before anything comes out of a box," the custodian says, "you'll wash your hands at that sink and dry them completely. No gloves. They make it harder to feel what you're doing, and these pages tear easily. One document at a time. Nothing goes on top of it. Not your notes, your pencil, or your elbows. Handle the pages by the edges, and don't force anything flat."

"What if it's already folded?"

"If it opens easily, fine. If it doesn't, you stop and call me. Same if a page sticks, feels brittle, or looks damaged. You don't help it."

Freya nods. "If I break something, do I tell you before or after I leave the country?"

The custodian looks at her. "Before."

"Understood."

"Sit anywhere. I'll bring the first tray."

I don't know exactly what I expected to find here. Something about the betrayal, probably. Something that would tell me what actually happened.

What comes out on the first tray is a receipt for window glass.

Four panes for the east range of a house I've never seen, delivered in a month I can't pronounce in the old spelling, paid in full, signed for by a man called Bernt. Under that is a schedule of repairs to a roof. Then an appointment for somebody's granddaughter as under-housekeeper at what the document calls the second house. There's a note beside her pay. She gets the same amount as the woman she's replacing.

I read that one twice.

"This isn't what I expected."

"What did you expect?" Freya asks.

"I don't know. Treason?"

Freya looks up. "Give it time."

I look back at the window-glass receipt. "They bought windows."

"Apparently."

It's such a stupidly ordinary thing that I can't stop looking at it.

"No, I mean—" I stop, because she's right and I'm not saying it properly. "Somebody argued about the pay. There's a note where they argued about it and then somebody decided in her favor."

"That's what most of a House is," Jon says. He's reading a page of accounts with his finger hovering above the line. "People working. Paying bills. Fixing things."

The second tray is correspondence, and the third is land records. There's a woman who signs her letters with only an initial and apparently runs three properties. There's a steward who writes to another steward twice, in increasingly short sentences, about seven men and where they're supposed to sleep. There's a list of names for a winter household, and ninth on that list is a girl with my grandmother's name.

It means nothing. It was a common name, and my grandmother was born two centuries later on the wrong continent. I write it down anyway.

On one of the land transfers, pressed into wax the color of old brick, is the seal. A direwolf above four peaks. Under the peaks is a key, tiny enough that I almost miss it.

I've seen the same design over a doorway at the refuge, worn down until you have to know what you're looking at. I've never seen it on an actual Fourth House document.