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Rikmal’s shadow falls across the script before his voice does, long and composed, and I feel him watching me work for longer than politeness would normally allow before he finally breaks the silence.

“You’re remarkably composed for a woman who just watched a man fall to his death.”

I don’t stop translating.

“I don’t know that he’s dead.” I hold my voice level through sheer refusal to do otherwise, which is either a skill or a symptom, and I’ve stopped caring which. “I know that stopping to grieve him accomplishes nothing except making me useless if he isn’t. I refuse to spend the last minutes I might have to help him on tears that can wait until afterward.”

“That’s either extraordinary discipline or extraordinary denial. I confess I can’t yet tell which.” He crouches near the edge of the script, careful not to obscure my light, and for a moment simply watches me work in silence. “You translate faster than any scholar I’ve employed in thirty years, Historian. It’s a genuine waste that we met the way we did.”

“We met because you burned my life down around me.” I don’t look up from the crystal. “I’m not interested in your professional assessment of my talents, Chancellor.”

“We met before that too, if I’m honest about it.” He lets that sit a moment before finishing it. “A man in Council robes came asking after your research three nights before the fire. Asked what you’d pulled from the restricted stacks. Whether you kept copies at home.”

My hands go still on the script for exactly one breath before I make them keep moving. “That was you.”

“That was me. I wanted to know how close you’d gotten before I decided whether the Archive needed to burn at all. I should have simply knocked on your door and asked you outright, and spared everyone what came after. I understand that now, for whatever the understanding is worth to you at this point.”

“It’s worth considerably less than the fire cost.”

“I know that too.”

“Then you understand exactly what it bought you.”

Something in his voice shifts, quieter now. “For what it’s worth, which I understand may be nothing at all — I never wanted you dead. Not you, not the Captain. I wanted someone intelligent enough to understand why some history has to stay buried, and I made the catastrophic error of assuming intelligence and obedience walked hand in hand. You’ve spent this entire night proving me wrong about that.”

“That’s a tidy thing to say for a man whose archer put a broadhead a foot from my throat.” My fingers stop moving over the stone. “Don’t stand there and tell me you never wanted me dead, Chancellor. I watched the shaft take the chair I’d been sitting in half a second before.”

He’s quiet long enough that I look up despite myself.

“That arrow was never meant to find you.” His voice finally slips, unguarded in a way nothing else tonight has managed. “It was meant to put you on the floor and keep you there long enough for my men to take the map and be gone before the Captain could stop them. My archer had orders to miss high and let fear do the rest of the work. He was better than I paid him to be, and worse than I needed him to be, and I have spent every night since deciding which failure to be more ashamed of.”

“That’s not an answer that makes it better.”

“No.” Plainly, no defense left in it. “It doesn’t. I’m not offering it as one. I’m offering it because you asked me not to lie to you again, and that’s the truth, for whatever it’s worth against the fact of the arrow itself.”

“And the man with the erased crest — the second one through the window, the one who’d had his own sigil chiseled off his breastplate before he ever climbed through it. That was yours too.”

“Mine.” No hesitation in it. “Every blade that came near you in Asterhold answered to me eventually, however many hands removed. We scour our own marks before any operation that might fail in a room full of witnesses. I’d rather you hate me for it honestly than spend one more year wondering who to blame.”

“Master Coridan.” I make myself say the name steadily. “Dead in an alley two days after he backed my Blackspire theory in front of the Council. Two research assistants I trained with my own hands, gone within a year. Also yours?”

“Also mine.” Something in his composure finally gives way, with no performance left in it. “I told myself scholars who died quietly wouldn’t draw the attention a burning archive would. I was wrong about that calculation the same way I was wrong about all the others. I don’t have a version of sorry large enough for that list, Historian. I’m not going to insult you by offering one anyway.”

I let that sit. I don’t forgive it. I believe it, which is its own unwelcome thing to carry into whatever comes next.

“Horror remembered honestly is the only thing that’s ever stopped a horror from repeating.” I finally look up at him, fury and grief both sharpening my voice into something I don’t entirely recognize. “You didn’t protect anyone by burying this, Rikmal. You just guaranteed nobody alive today has the tools to recognize it happening again. You call it caution. It’s the next fire, lit and called mercy because you’re not the one holding the match.”

“Knowledge has never once stopped a war, Historian. It has only ever taught the next generation how to fight the last one more efficiently.” He says it without heat, which somehow makes it worse. “Every account I’ve ever read believed remembering the last atrocity would prevent the next. Every one of them was wrong.”

“So you tested it. Your control group is an entire civilization relearning everything from nothing, because you decided the lesson was too dangerous to actually learn from.”

“Better a hard relearning than a repetition.” His voice sharpens at the edges, just slightly, the first real heat I’ve heard from him all night. “I watched what unchecked knowledge did to the First Keeper himself, Historian. He knew everything. Every weakness, every fracture, every fear each race carried into that final council. He used every piece of it to justify a ritual that devoured him whole. Knowledge didn’t save him. It armed him.”

“He wasn’t devoured by knowledge. He was devoured by certainty.” I go back to the script beneath my hands, fingers steady even now, because stopping means feeling this argument the way I refuse to feel the drop behind me. “The same certainty you’re standing here defending. You’ve spent thirty years so convinced you were the only man capable of carrying this secret safely that you never once asked whether the secret needed carrying at all. It’s the exact same mistake, Chancellor, just wearing a kinder face.”

He takes a moment before answering. When he finally does, it comes out smaller than anything he’s said all night, quieter than any calculated speech he’s given since he stepped out of the shadows at the chamber’s edge.

“My mother died in a border skirmish the history books call a footnote.” He isn’t looking at me anymore. He’s looking at nothing, somewhere past us both, somewhere thirty years gone. “Six pages, in the account I finally tracked down as a young man. Six pages for a war that took everyone I had left. I remember reading those six pages three times over, certain I’d missed a paragraph, certain there had to be more written somewhere about what that war actually cost the people who lived through it. There wasn’t. I decided that day that memory was a luxury the powerful use to feel better about surviving what the powerless don’t. I built an entire life around making certain no one else’s grief got reduced to six pages ever again. I am only now understanding that burying the whole war instead of writing it badly was never the alternative I told myself it was.”