The Sovereign Record was kept in the council's lower gallery, a long, cold room of standing lecterns where the continent's confirmed events were copied out as they were proven.
Any noble of standing could read the world's official memory there, if he could stand the smell of ink and stone.
Tobian Marrow had built a small reputation as a man who read it daily, and the reputation suited the cover well.
A minor lord with scholarly pretensions and too much time would naturally haunt the Record.
The truth was plainer than that, though.
It was the only place in Verissan where Alistair could learn what was being done to his own people without a single soul knowing he cared.
He found it on the regional page, three entries down, written in the clerk's small even hand.
A village in the northern reaches had been vacated. No bodies, no struggle, no demand or claim, and no banner left behind.
