The spine said IV. She read it twice.
Mara held the notebook in both hands in the side passage, under the every-second light, and read the numeral on its spine. I, II and III were in the harness against her chest: the three she had found in the trunk under the slag, that Tavin had kept for three years, that she had carried to Lorn and back. She had thought there were three. She had never thought about it. Three notebooks in a trunk, numbered one to three; that was the set.
This was the fourth.
Its pages were water-stained toward the back. She could see the stain on the edges when she held it closed: a brown tide-mark creeping in from one corner, darkening the last third of the pages. The front pages were clean.
She opened it, carefully, by the edges, as she had held the Founder plate on Tavin’s bench.
It was her mother’s hand. The slanted, quick hand, the letters leaning forward. But not the same as the other three. Mara saw it at once. In notebooks I to III the hand was steady, even, the hand of someone writing at a desk with time. Here it was rougher. In places the letters shook. In places the lines ran downhill, the way the line about shaking hands had run downhill in notebook I, a shaking hand writes a lie.
