After his first true victory, Elian did not sleep.
Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw the hall again, the black stone, Orm's hand and Lissa's face. So he sat beside the dying fire in the side library and watched Miran remove the insignia of the palace guard from her cloak.
"Don't," he said.
"Too late," she replied.
A fresh guard roster lay on the table. That evening it had still borne the name Miran Kest. Now a blank space remained between two lines, though the ink around it had dried long ago. The name had not been crossed out: the record had changed as though Miran had never appeared in it.
Miran regarded the roster without expression.
"My father served at the northern outpost," she said. "We had a house. Then our cadet branch was declared an error, and the house vanished. It did not burn down and it was not sold. People simply stopped noticing the place where it had stood."
Elian could find no answer.
He was accustomed to thinking of himself as Savern's principal victim. It was easier that way. But beside him sat a woman who had already survived the erasure of her family and had still risked what remained of her own past to defend him.
"Why did you help me?" he asked.
Miran gave a wry smile.
"You called me by my name before you asked me to risk myself for you."
It sounded dry. Almost brusque. But Elian remembered it.
At dawn they went to the archive.
The inheritance archive lay beneath the eastern wing, below the kitchens and wine cellars, beside the chambers where old princes had once hidden their unrecognised children. Even the scribes disliked going down there. In Astern it was said that names left underground too long began listening for footsteps.
Tavel Rin met them at the archive door.
He was thin and stooped, and his fingers were stained not with ink but with dust. Tavel spoke quietly, but watched closely. Errors in books plainly angered him more than people did.
"If you have come looking for proof of the order," Tavel said, "you are three Drafts too late."
Miran put a hand on the hilt of her short blade.
Elian raised a palm.
"You know what a Draft is?"
Tavel peered at him as though he had heard a password, then unlocked the door.
It was cold inside. Shelves stretched into the darkness in long rows. They held books of bloodlines, marriage registers, deeds of recognition and records of deaths and births. Even gaps showed between the books. The dust there lay undisturbed, as though nothing had ever occupied those places.
Tavel ran a finger across one such emptiness.
"The Kest branch should be here," he said.
Miran did not move.
"Don't."
But Tavel had already moved to another shelf.
"The lesser register of Princess Lissa's maids should stand here. In other Drafts it always contains Shani Venn. I checked."
"All of them?" Elian asked.
The archivist nodded.
"Some people the world changes; others it erases. And some remain in their place even when the entire palace changes around them. For some reason, such a person is usually needed to preserve someone else's life."
He took out a slim untitled book and opened it in the middle.
There was no text on the page, only impressions left by letters the eye could not decipher. Elian passed a finger over the paper and felt cold.
The cold came not from sorcery, but from someone's memory.
The system remained silent, but Elian felt his connection to Miran more keenly. He was preserving not a line in an invisible book, but the name of a living person whose past was already being erased.
"How many times has this happened?" Elian asked.
Tavel closed the book.
"I found evidence of six cases. There are almost certainly more."
"Why are you showing me this?"
Tavel was silent for a long time.
Then he said:
"Because I saw you in a dream."
Miran turned towards him.
"What did you see?"
The archivist was looking not at her, but at Elian.
"You killed me here, in the passage between the third and fourth shelves. I refused to open an empty record because I decided one man was not worth an entire archive. You looked older than you do now. Your hands were shaking, but you struck me all the same."
A chill passed down Elian's back.
He did not remember it.
That made it more frightening still. If Tavel remembered dying at Elian's hand in a life that had never happened here, then memories from other Drafts were seeping into the minds of those around him.
Tavel placed the empty book before him.
"I will help you," he said. "But not because I believe in princes. Empty places preserve history too. And if you become the man from my dream again, I want to understand why before it is too late."
The system answered:
"Witness of the archive obtained. The name of Tavel Rin is preserved."
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