Story

By the time Tal and Hendrik left the house where the representatives of the two clans had been speaking, Jonstown had already resumed its noise.

Hendrik walked beside him for a while without commenting on the agreement reached around Beren and Karest. Only as they approached the Library did he ask:

— Are you hungry?

He pointed toward the market hill.

— I am. After that, I have two days here before we leave again. Make the most of Jonstown while you have it in front of you.

They were almost at the Library steps when a cart half blocked their way.

Two temple servants were pulling a chest toward the entrance. Three clansmen held it back by the handles. A middle-aged woman, dusty from the road, clutched a small leather-wrapped bundle against her chest.

— That one doesn't belong to you.

A Grey Sage answered her coldly:

— It belonged to Jorstan. Jorstan left it to the Library.

Hendrik stopped.

— Well then.

Jorstan's legacy

Tal knew the Grey Sage by sight: a lean man in his fifties with a short greying beard, who worked quickly and spoke little.

He learned that Jorstan, son of Argrathor, had just died. His books, tablets, and written effects were arriving at the Library with his kin. But they disputed that a small bundle formed part of the legacy: they said it consisted of family archives entrusted to Jorstan for copying and safekeeping.

Tal introduced himself to the woman and offered his condolences.

— Talimar. I share your grief. If you wish, I will personally take charge of this small bundle. If it is of no interest to the temple, we will return it to you.

The compromise was far from obvious. The woman did not want to see the bundle disappear into the Library; the Grey Sage did not want a very young initiate deciding alone what belonged to the temple.

Tal insisted nonetheless. Lhankor Mhy watched over Law, he said; the bundle had to be examined if they wanted to know what it actually was.

In the end, the woman entrusted it to him on the condition that she remain present while it was opened.

— My name is Enastina. Jorstan was my older brother.

She undid the leather strap.

Inside were several thin wooden tablets, two small parchment rolls, and a thicker tablet wrapped separately in wool.

— These are lists of births, marriages, and deaths. These... land agreements. And this one...

She placed her fingers on the wrapped tablet.

— My father said this one must never leave the family.

Their father was Argrathor.

He had not been a Sage. He raised cattle, sat in clan assemblies, and possessed an exceptional memory: who had sworn what, who had owned a piece of land before a particular marriage, how two families had become connected or separated.

Enastina gave a brief smile when she repeated Jorstan's phrase:

“He had a library in his head and no patience for books.”

The old tablet bore personal names, witness marks, and traces of a division of land. According to Enastina, it established why certain lands had remained in their line despite a division that should have taken them out of it. Jorstan had taken it to make a copy and had never returned it.

Tal then had an idea: find the copy, or make one, and then return the original to Enastina.

The problem was that the woman also claimed the rest of the bundle. As far as she was concerned, all of it came from the family and had merely been entrusted to Jorstan. The thick tablet was special because Argrathor had explicitly insisted that it never leave his kin, but that injunction did not exhaust her claim.

Tal tried to negotiate: leave some of the documents to the temple, keep the tablet temporarily, preserve what needed preserving. Enastina proposed a division in turn: the Library could keep some of the lists, but the land agreements should return to the family after being copied.

The longer the discussion continued, the less interest Tal found in it.

When Enastina finally asked for someone else to explain the Law to her, Tal went to fetch Hendrik.

— Master, I'll leave you with Enastina. She's inflexible.

He summarized the affair by arguing that the documents should return to the temple because they were evidence of titles, births, and deaths.

Hendrik corrected him immediately.

— We know these documents were at Jorstan's. We do not know that they belonged to him. That is precisely what is disputed.

And, he added, the fact that a document was useful in judging a matter was not enough to make it temple property.

Tal no longer wanted to hear any more of it.

— Take over, Hendrik, because this is beyond me.

Hendrik agreed.

No one stopped Tal when he left the Library.

Finding the road again

The fresh air caught him outside.

As he climbed toward the market, Tal rediscovered an old dissatisfaction. When he used to travel with his uncle Grimar, he loved the roads, the towns, the encounters — but not the merchandise or the business of trade.

Now something similar was returning: he loved following his curiosity and seeking knowledge, but the prospect of spending his life arbitrating disputes over titles, cattle, and tablets suddenly seemed terribly narrow.

At the top of the slope, Jonstown opened before him. Between the rooftops, roads left the town in several directions.

A small caravan had just entered: two covered wagons, a few mules, travelers covered in dust.

Out of nostalgia, Tal went back down to meet it.

The man overseeing the unloading was called Daran, son of Orlev. He had come from Alda-Chur, six days' travel farther north, delayed by a broken wheel.

Tal asked him for news of the world.

— Prices, roads, Lunars, wars... or the stories people tell at night once they've had enough to drink? Daran asked.

— All of it at once. In the order that matters to you. And I'll buy you a bottle while you tell me.

Daran burst out laughing.

— Ah. Now that's a civilized way to question a merchant.

Over a harsh wine, he spoke first of the roads: more inspections in the north, more armed men wanting to know who was carrying what, for whom, and why. Then prices: grain was rising, cattle sold well.

Travelers from Tarsh, and even Furthest, said Lunar officials were still counting, writing, taxing, building, and recording. They also spoke of many soldiers on the roads, though no one knew exactly what that meant.

Daran ended with a story that might have been true or false: in Furthest, a man had supposedly sold the same house three times in one day — once under local law, once under a Lunar deed, and once to a priest who claimed the house had already belonged to the temple for two generations.

Tal thanked the merchant.

The world was still there, beyond Jonstown's walls.

Argrathor's papers

Back at the Library, Tal did not go to see Hendrik or ask what had become of the bundle.

Instead, he searched for everything he could find on Jorstan, and especially Argrathor, with the faint hope that the affair might contain something worth caring about after all.

The catalogues and registers eventually gave a very simple answer.

In an old working register, several documents were grouped beneath a note in Jorstan's hand:

“Argrathor's papers — from the household. To copy.”

Farther on:

“originals to be returned after copying”

The descriptions matched the bundle: births, unions, deaths, land agreements. The thick tablet appeared separately as “old partition — father's original.”

Jorstan had also left a few personal notes about Argrathor. He wrote that one day, during an assembly, his father had corrected three elders in succession on the exact terms of an agreement made twenty-seven years earlier.

Then he wrote:

“My father could not write. That did not stop him from preserving things we would have lost without him.”

Tal now had enough to close the matter.

He assumed Hendrik would be perfectly capable of untangling it without him and went to dinner in the refectory without even asking what had become of the bundle.

That, he thought, was not going to save Sartar.

Sartar under the Red Moon

The next day, no one came to fetch him for another local quarrel.

Tal could finally follow a question that genuinely interested him: had the Red Moon already existed in Sartar's time, and what could the founder of the kingdom have known about the power that now dominated the north?

The chronologies first gave an obvious answer. The Red Moon had risen long before the birth of the kingdom. Sartar had therefore lived his entire life beneath its light.

But the story became more interesting when Tal compared the dates.

Sartar had arrived in Dragon Pass around 1470. He founded his towns and began binding the tribes together. Then the Lunars conquered Tarsh in 1490. Two years later, Sartar founded Boldhome and became First of the Quivini.

By the time he completed his kingdom, he therefore could not have ignored the power to the north.

Tal then turned to the Royal Roads. They had unified the country, encouraged trade, linked the towns, and allowed the kingdom's authority to circulate. Yet nothing showed that they had been designed exclusively against the Empire: some predated the fall of Tarsh, and the texts emphasized peace, trade, and unification above all.

The irony was more recent. The same roads had later served Lunar armies and authorities as they crossed the kingdom, controlled the passes, and imposed their order.

Tal was still looking for something more precise: not merely what Sartar had built, but what might remain of his action against the Lunar advance.

He then found later traditions claiming that the founder's public cult had almost disappeared under occupation, while some people continued to sacrifice to him in secret and maintain his strength.

And in the margin of one of those texts, drawn by another hand, there was simply a sign.

The Rune of Sartar.

Not an instruction. Not a name. Not a destination.

A sign added by someone who had read the text before him.

Tal memorized it and wrote it into his Portrait.

A hidden cult of Sartar.

That, at last, had breath.

And with Sartar came another thought naturally: Boldhome, the kingdom's great city, now under Lunar rule. Tal hoped he might see it one day.

The road resumes

On the morning of departure, Tal returned one last time to Enastina's affair with Hendrik and showed him the notes he had found in the registers.

Hendrik nodded.

— I found the same thing.

Enastina had left with the originals. The Library had kept what it already possessed in copy and recorded the rest. Jorstan had written clearly enough what he was meant to do with the documents.

— We only had to look.

The affair was closed.

Tal then spoke of Sartar, the roads, Tarsh, and finally Boldhome.

— What do I think of Sartar? Hendrik replied. That he achieved something the Heortlings rarely manage for long: getting people with excellent reasons to quarrel to work together.

He spoke of roads, towns, markets, and shared temples.

— It sounds less heroic than fighting a god. Until the day you understand that all of it created a kingdom.

Tal asked whether they would ever go to Boldhome.

Hendrik looked at the road ahead.

— One day, certainly. Not today.

Then he settled his pack back onto his shoulder.

— And if you keep asking questions about Sartar at this rate, I imagine you'll find your own reason to go before anyone sends you there.

Behind them, Jonstown's gates receded.

Ahead of them, the road resumed.