Rain had stopped. The first grey was in the windows. "Finish the brown volumes. All of them. If you still want the secondary index after that, we'll talk about whether you're the kind of reader who returns a book in the same condition she found it."
He pulled the black ledger off the table and put it on a shelf behind him, not locked, not offered. Then he opened his ordinary accounts and began to write as if the conversation had reached its useful end.
I drew the brown volume toward me and opened to the cloth strip.
Freja arrived an hour later with bread and the news that a caravan from the coastal road had been sighted on the high approach—early, by a week, and missing two of the carts it usually ran. She said it the way people reported weather. Oscar, trailing her with a mug, only grunted and went to find out whether the caravan had need of a forest guide or a wide berth.
