Seyun drew the thick, water-stained leather Account Book out from beneath his sash. Then he held it in both hands for a moment under the yellow glow of the treatment room lamp.
It was a battered, ordinary octavo volume of heavy hemp paper bound in dark brown calfskin. The exact book he had carried out through the outer gate of the Ash Reed Sect in the winter rain on the first morning of his exile after Elder Hesh handed back his three copper needles and Senior Elder Tor Ves taken away his herb share.
Every mark on its cover was a physical map of the road that had brought him to this twelfth night. Along the bottom spine, the leather was still darkened and slightly warped from the river-marsh mud of the thirteenth leaf where he had acted as a moving target for Ilyra’s spear while Pel died defending the grain wagons. Near the upper right corner, a brown scorch mark showed where a stray ember had kissed the cover in Oran’s wrestling lodge—recorded on the eighteenth leaf—before Daro Kesh abandoned the suspended brass cage at Breath 99 to catch a falling beam over a child’s head. The original brass sect inventory seal had been pried off the front clasp before his return to the sect gate to build the decoy empty binding he handed to Ash Reed’s gate steward. That left three small rivet dimples in the leather. And across the inside pages, written in twenty different inks and…
