The elm lid didn’t lift. It tore.
Forty years of moisture had rotted the wood around the iron spikes into a dark, spongy pulp that smelled of wet mushrooms and iron rust. Tomas set his cart driver boots against the stone base, hooked his fingers under the lip of the crate. Then he leaned his dead weight backward. That let his hip and thigh muscles bear the strain rather than his injured forearm. The wood groaned, splintered along the grain, and came away in three jagged planks. It exposed the dark inside of the box.
Inside, resting on a bed of damp sawdust that had compacted into a dense, peat-like crust, lay the forgotten memory of the working people of Crown-Reach.
It wasn’t a collection of loose papers or torn pamphlets. It was a single, giant stone folio. It measured two feet wide by nearly three feet long, five inches thick between boards of three-quarter-inch seasoned heart-oak covered in dark brown calfskin. Four massive corner bosses of cast iron, shaped like heavy lion-paws, protected the margins. Across the center of the upper board was an iron plate held by nine heavy rivets, blackened by coal soot and crusted with greenish-white blooms of green rust.
