Orla put the bread on a clean plate and the rubbing beneath a weight.
“Which one am I meant to examine?” she asked.
“The paper first. The bread while you do it.”
“No. Crumbs.”
She moved the plate to a separate table and made him wash his hands again. Iven had brought useful things into enough dirty rooms to accept that this room required the reverse. The old roll lay under its protective sheet, supported along the places where the woven fibers had begun to separate. Nothing about months of patient conservation had made it young.
Orla turned the rubbing until the widest sound mouth’s mark matched a symbol in the roll’s left column.
“That’s better,” she said.
“Than what?”
