The book smelled of tallow and something underneath the tallow — a smell that had no clean name, animal and green at once, like the inside of something that had been alive and sealed and left to become itself in the dark. She sat on the floor of the library with her back against the furthest shelf and the book open across her knees and the lamp Aldric had moved to the floor beside her throwing light that wavered when the draft came through the gap under the door.
Aldric had gone back to his own books without being asked to. She appreciated that more than she could have said.
The first pages were in a script she didn't recognize — formal, angled, the ink browned to the color of old wood, the letters pressing deep into the paper in a way that suggested whoever had written them had been pre
