Turn 4 of 8

Say nothing — let him speak first and watch his hands

You say nothing. You set your pack on the stone floor and let it stand there, a fact in the room, and you wait. Ombrey crosses the hall toward you with measured steps, and when he is close enough to speak he stops. His hands are at his sides, and for a moment they stay there. He looks at you the way a man looks at a letter he has been dreading. Then his right hand moves to his left cuff and adjusts it — a small, precise gesture, the kind of thing a body does when it needs to hold something and has nothing to hold.

"You received the correction," he says. It is not a question. His voice is quiet and dry, the voice of a man who speaks to clerks and drafting tables and has forgotten how to raise it. His left hand comes up and touches the lapel of his coat, finds nothing there, and drops again. You watch both hands. They are ink-stained at the knuckles, the nails cut short, and they move with the restless precision of someone who is used to having a pen between his fingers.

"I am not going to ask you what you remember," he says. "That would be unkind, and it would tell me nothing I don't already know." His right hand goes to his cuff again. He catches himself doing it and stops, and then his hands fold in front of him, each holding the other still. It looks practiced. He has done this before — stood in this hall with someone who came looking for a place that is no longer on the map, and folded his hands, and chosen his words.

"You've come to ask me why," he says. "I can see that. And I will tell you, because you deserve something, and because I suspect you won't stop." His left thumb presses against the back of his right hand, hard enough that the nail goes pale. He does not look at the master map on the wall behind you. He is careful not to look at it, the way a person is careful not to look at a door they don't want opened.

"But first," he says, "I need you to understand that the corrections are not malicious. They are not arbitrary. Every name that leaves the map leaves because something worse would happen if it stayed." His hands tighten around each other. The ink on his knuckles is old, ground into the skin, the kind of stain that doesn't wash out. He is watching your face now, and what he sees there does not appear to comfort him.

"So tell me," he says. "What do you remember about the Vale of Aster? And tell me quickly, because I need to know how much of it is still in you."