**
Henrik claimed me at mid-morning for a stack of correspondence that had nothing to do with claws—requests for dosage notes from a dens two valleys west, a query about winter stores of willow, a polite refusal he wanted me to draft to a trader who thought the library sold rarities instead of knowledge.
I drafted the refusal. Henrik corrected two phrases for sharpness, approved the rest, and sent it with the next west-bound bird.
Oscar put his head in near midday with mud to the knees and the news that the fringe path needed a second cut before the next hard freeze or the poles would have to come the long way around.
Felix, already half into his coat, took the information as an invitation. I watched them leave from the library doorway and felt no pull to follow—only the settled fact of a valley that kept generating work that was not mine and people who did it anyway.
