THE LETTER
I found it on a Tuesday.
Three weeks after the council session. Three weeks of training Lena and rebuilding the council structure and filing the fourth territory accession and the slow satisfying work of making formal what had been made real in a Draeven clearing.
I was in the deep archive.
Not looking for anything specific, just the habit of it, the practice of understanding where we came from by reading what had been left behind. Lena was beside me, learning the archive the way she was learning everything with the patient thoroughness of someone who had been waiting a long time to have access to the things she needed.
The folder was at the very back of the deepest shelf.
The paper inside was old, not archive-old, not the centuries-old script that Della could read and I w
