Chapter 2
The food arrived before the summons did.
A young orc appeared at her door with a wooden tray balanced on one massive palm. He was perhaps fourteen, with the gangly proportions of someone whose body was growing faster than his coordination could accommodate.
"Food," he said, as though this required clarification.
"Thank you." Verity rose from the desk. "I'm Verity."
"I know." He set the tray on the edge of the desk. "I'm Torgun."
"Hello, Torgun. Do you work in the kitchens?"
"No." He looked vaguely offended. "I'm training. To be a warrior. But everyone does rotation duties. Today I carry food. Tomorrow I muck the stables." His nose wrinkled. "I prefer the food."
"A sensible preference. The food smells considerably better than stables, as a general rule."
One corner of Torgun's mouth twitched upward. He caught himself and pressed his lips flat, chin lifted. "Is it true you came here to read our books?"
"Records, primarily. Documents. Correspondence. But yes, essentially, I came here to read."
"Why?"
It was such a simple question. Verity considered giving the simple answer. Because that is my work, because your records contain historical information unavailable elsewhere, because the Senior Council authorized the expedition. All true. All incomplete.
"Because there are things I want to understand," she said instead. "And understanding usually starts with reading."
Torgun considered this seriously. "My father says humans only want to understand things so they can use them against us."
"Your father may be right about some humans." Verity saw no point in pretending otherwise. "But I'm an archivist. I want to understand things so I can write them down accurately. The using-against is generally above my position."
"What's an archivist?"
"Someone who keeps records. Organizes them. Preserves them. Makes sure that when someone needs to know what happened forty years ago, there's a way to find out."
"Like a memory-keeper."
"Yes, exactly like that."
Torgun nodded slowly, as though filing this information away for later examination. Then his brows rose and his head cocked to one side. "The warchief will send for you when the sun touches the western tower. You should eat before then. He doesn't like waiting."
"So I've heard."
Torgun snorted. "The warchief has many virtues. Patience is not one of them. Neither is..." He paused, searching. "Small talk. He does not do small talk."
"I'm not particularly good at small talk myself," Verity admitted. "I tend to skip past it into questions that make people uncomfortable."
"Then you will get along well. Or very badly." Torgun shrugged. "Eat. The bread is good today."
He left before she could respond, pulling the door closed behind him.
Verity looked at the tray. Bread, as promised, a dense round loaf still warm enough to steam when she broke it open. A hard yellow cheese with a sharp smell. Some kind of dried meat, thinly sliced. A small clay pot that proved to contain honey.
She ate standing at the window, watching the courtyard below as the afternoon light shifted. The bread was, in fact, very good.
The sun crept toward the western tower.
Verity washed her hands and face in the basin, which held water cold enough to make her gasp.
She changed into a clean dress and attempted to do something with her hair.
This proved futile. She settled for removing the two quills she discovered lodged near her left ear and calling the effort complete.
Then she sat at the desk.
And waited.
The sun touched the western tower. She watched it happen, the light catching the stone and turning it briefly gold before sliding past.
No summons came.
Verity pulled out her journal and reviewed her notes from the journey. She made a list of questions for the warchief, then crossed out half of them as too impertinent for a first meeting, then added three of them back because she would forget to ask later if she didn't ask now.
The light faded. The western tower became a dark shape against a darker sky.
Still no summons.
She lit the candle on the desk and flipped through Varresh's topmost journal.
The handwriting was cramped and angular, the language peppered with orcish terms Verity didn't recognize.
Something about grain stores. A dispute over grazing rights.
A note in the margin that said simply Thornvak is a fool with no further context.
Verity smiled. She had written similar notes in her own margins more times than she could count.
The candle burned down a quarter of its length.
The courtyard outside had gone quiet, the sounds of the day's work replaced by distant voices, occasional laughter, the clang of a door somewhere. Northwatch settling into its evening rhythms.
No one came.
Verity closed Varresh's journal and sat back in the too-large chair, feet swinging slightly above the floor.
The warchief was busy. Obviously. He was a warchief. He had an entire clan to manage, border tensions to monitor, decisions to make that were considerably more important than receiving one human archivist.
She should stay here. Wait properly. Demonstrate the kind of patience that would make a good impression.
Verity lasted another ten minutes.
Then she stood, took the candle, and went to find the stairs Grukash had mentioned.
The door at the back of the building was unlocked. It opened onto a narrow landing, and beyond it, stairs descended into darkness.
Verity held the candle higher. The flame flickered in a draft rising from below, carrying the unmistakable smell of old paper and stone. She caught her breath. She had spent her life around books. She knew that smell the way other people knew the smell of home.
The stairs were carved directly into the mountain, each step worn smooth in the center from generations of feet. Orc feet, considerably larger than hers. She picked her way down carefully, one hand trailing along the wall for balance, the candle casting jumping shadows ahead of her.
Twenty steps. Thirty. The temperature dropped steadily, the air growing sharp and dry. Good for preservation. Low humidity. Stable temperature. Whatever was down here had been stored properly, even if no one had been tending it.
The stairs ended in a corridor. Verity paused, letting her eyes adjust to the deeper darkness beyond her small circle of candlelight.
Heavy wooden doors lined both sides of the passage, each one marked with symbols she didn't recognize.
Some kind of organizational system. Categories, perhaps. Or dates.
She chose the nearest door and pushed.
It swung open more easily than she expected, hinges well-oiled despite the years of disuse. Beyond it—
Verity stopped breathing.
Shelves. Floor to ceiling, carved into the living rock, and every shelf filled.
Scrolls in clay tubes. Bound volumes with cracked leather spines.
Stacks of loose pages tied with cord. Wooden boxes that probably held correspondence.
Stone tablets propped against the far wall, their surfaces covered in carved text.
She had pictured Varresh's collection. One orc, one working life, whatever a single archivist could gather and preserve.
But this was not one life's work. This was generations.
Centuries, possibly. A collection that dwarfed anything she had imagined, anything the Archive's sparse records had suggested.
She moved deeper into the room, candle held high, her free hand hovering just above the nearest shelf without quite touching.
But oh, she wanted to touch. She wanted to pull down every scroll and crack open every binding and spread the contents across that massive desk upstairs and not emerge for a month.
Verity blinked hard, her eyes stinging. She had not known Varresh. Would never know her. But she knew this—the careful hand, the evidence of long attention, the years of quiet work that most people never saw or valued.
She pulled out her journal and began taking notes, moving from shelf to shelf with the candle.
Northeast corner: bound volumes, correspondence tubes, loose document rolls—mixed.
No apparent separation by format or medium.
Dates on visible spines suggest a 200-year range minimum but do not appear to run in sequence.
East wall: same. Organizational system unclear—by sender?
By region? Need closer examination. South wall—
A sound from the corridor.
Verity froze, quill suspended over the page.
Footsteps. Heavy ones, echoing off the stone walls. The sound grew closer, and with it came the faint orange glow of another light source. A torch, she thought, or perhaps a lantern. Larger than her single candle.
She should announce herself. That would be the sensible thing. Hello, I am the human archivist, I was waiting for a summons that did not come, I found the stairs, I am not stealing anything, please do not kill me.
The footsteps stopped.
Verity turned toward the doorway, her candle flame guttering in the sudden displacement of air, and looked up.
And up.
The figure in the doorway blocked it entirely, shoulders nearly brushing both sides of the frame, head ducked slightly to avoid the lintel.
The torch he carried cast his face in sharp relief: brutal angles, deep-set eyes that caught the light like hammered iron, tusks longer than any she had seen.
Scars mapped his features. One bisected his left brow, another curved along his jaw, a third disappeared into the collar of his simple gray tunic.
He did not speak.
He simply looked at her.
Verity's mouth opened. No sound emerged. She had read that he stood a full head taller than his largest warriors. The report, it turned out, had not exaggerated.
The Warchief of the Mountain Clan stood in the doorway, watching her. His face was stone-still, and his deep-set eyes did not move from her.
Then he spoke.
"You were told to wait."