The person they sent to conduct the official questioning was not Miron Pell.

She arrived the following morning with a document folio, a set of writing instruments arranged in a specific order that suggested either habit or anxiety, and the expression of someone who had prepared forty-seven questions and intended to get through all of them.

Her name was Lysera Vey. This she conveyed through a formal introduction that included her title and her position, which Renji gathered was something like Royal Scribe and Keeper of the Prophecy's Records. She also spoke English, which she explained with a brevity that suggested she found brevity efficient: her role required literacy in all languages in which copies of the Verdant Prophecy had ever been transcribed, and two of those languages were derivations of English.

Her English was precise and slightly archaic in its grammar, the English of someone who had learned it from texts rather than from conversation. She said: Please be seated. The questioning will proceed in an orderly fashion.

Renji was already seated. He said: Good morning.

She paused, apparently recalibrating. Good morning, she said, with the care of someone using a phrase they had not expected to need. Then she opened the folio and positioned a sheet of paper and dipped her pen and said: Your full name.

Renji Aoyama.

She wrote this down with the particular attention of someone who cared about spelling. Origin?

Tokyo. Japan. Which is, he added, a city and a country in a world that I gather is not this one.

She noted this without visible reaction. Age?

Thirty-five.

She wrote this. Profession?

Internal auditor.

She looked up. What is that?

Someone who examines an organization's records to verify that they are accurate and complete and that the information they contain reflects the underlying reality they are supposed to represent.

She looked at him for a moment with an expression he could not yet read but would later learn to recognize as the specific quality of her attention when something had said something she was filing away for later consideration. Then she wrote it down, precisely, and returned to her list.

The questions were thorough. The purpose behind them was organizational rather than threatening: she was building a dossier, establishing a baseline of verifiable facts about who and what he was. He answered everything honestly, because there was no strategic advantage in lying about things that were either verifiable or irrelevant, and because he found it useful in new situations to establish early that he was not going to waste people's time with misdirection.

Somewhere around question nineteen he said: Question three asked about my relationship to the Verdant Prophecy. Question eleven asked whether I had prior knowledge of Elyndor. The answers to those questions are contradictory if you assume prior knowledge is necessary for a relationship to the Prophecy. They're not contradictory if you assume the summoning itself constitutes a relationship, regardless of prior knowledge. You should clarify what you're actually asking.

Lysera Vey stopped writing.

She looked at him across the table with the expression of someone who has just encountered an unexpected variable.

I am asking, she said, carefully, whether you had prior knowledge of the Prophecy before the summoning occurred.

No, Renji said. I had never heard of Elyndor. I had never heard of the Verdant Prophecy. I was asleep at my desk when the summoning happened. If you want to be precise, I was asleep at my desk in the middle of looking for rounding errors in a logistics company's quarterly report.

She wrote this down. Then she said: Question three is correctly phrased. The apparent contradiction is a consequence of your misreading of its scope.

Renji considered this. The scope of question three as written, he said, is ambiguous. The phrasing admits of both interpretations. If you intended a narrower scope you should have specified it.

A pause. Then: I see. She drew a line through question three and rewrote it, with an addition that he could read upside down as a specification of prior knowledge as distinct from knowledge acquired through the ritual process. He found this very slightly satisfying, the satisfaction of watching someone who was good at their work identify a flaw and correct it without defensiveness.

She asked the corrected version. He answered. They continued.

She was, he noted, extremely precise. Not in the way of someone following a script but in the way of someone who understood the machinery behind the script and had strong opinions about whether the machinery was functioning correctly. She caught when an answer was incomplete and asked a follow-up rather than noting it and moving on. She did not write things down until she was satisfied with the precision of what she was writing. Twice she crossed out what she had written and started again because the phrasing did not satisfy her.

By question thirty-seven she had gotten to the night of the summoning, and by question forty-two she had gotten to the ritual circle, and she was asking about what he had observed and he was answering with the level of detail he brought to all documentary observations, which was more detail than most people expected.

After his description of the circle's symbols and the quality of the luminescence and the relative positions of the assembled figures and the specific sequence in which the light had faded, she stopped writing.

She looked at her notes. Then she looked at him.

You observed all of this, she said, while you were frightened?

I was deferring the reaction, he said. There's a difference.

She looked at him for a long moment. Then she said, in a tone that was entirely level: I am going to ask you something that is not on my list.

He waited.

When you examine records, she said, and you find something wrong, what do you do?

He thought about the fourteen line items. About the rounding pattern. About four instances at three companies and the specific quality of institutional silence.

I document it, he said. I cross-reference it against other records to determine whether it's isolated or systemic. I determine who had access and opportunity. I report my findings through whatever channels are available to me.

And if the channels do not respond?

He looked at her. She was looking at him with the careful directness of someone asking a question that is more than a question.

I've had some experience with channels that don't respond, he said.

What do you do?

He thought about this carefully, because it was a careful question that deserved a careful answer. I keep the documentation, he said finally. I keep it and I make sure it's complete and I wait for a moment when there's a channel that does respond.

She was quiet for a moment. Then she capped her pen and closed the folio in the precise, final way of someone who has finished what they came to do.

The questioning is complete, she said.

Renji said: You have one more question on your list.

She stopped.

Question forty-seven, he said. You haven't asked it.

She looked at him across the table. Then she looked at the folio. Her expression did not change, exactly, but something in it shifted, very slightly, in the specific way of someone adjusting to a new variable.

She opened the folio. She looked at question forty-seven, which he could not read from this angle.

She said: Why do you wish to examine the Verdant Prophecy?

Because I found two copies of it yesterday that differed from each other, he said, and I would like to know why.

She was very still for a moment. Then she closed the folio again.

Which copies? she asked.

The one in the public reading room of the Archive's east wing, and the one that is displayed behind glass in the corridor outside the High Oracle's chambers. They differ in chapter three. Specifically in the verb used to describe the hero's action with respect to the Black Dragon. One says will slay and the other says shall drive back.

Lysera Vey was very still.

Then she stood, and gathered her folio and her writing instruments, and said, formally and precisely: Thank you for your cooperation. I will convey your responses to the High Oracle.

Renji said: Do you know why they differ?

She paused at the door. She did not turn around.

Variant translations, she said. The language of the original is very old. Nuances of meaning are sometimes debated.

He said: Those aren't nuances. They're different actions.

She opened the door.

Good morning, Mr. Aoyama, she said, and left.

He wrote in his notes: Lysera Vey. Royal Scribe, Keeper of Prophecy Records. Knows more than she is saying. Knows that I noticed. Will need to determine which of these facts she will act on first.

He sat with those notes for a while before adding a second part.

She had come back. That was the data point he returned to most often in the following hours. She had not been required to come back. The first session had concluded the formal questioning. Her return was her own decision, and the decision had been to sit across from him without her folio and explain the Prophecy with the care of someone who wanted it understood, not just delivered.

That was not the behavior of someone who was simply doing their job.

He was thinking about the question she had asked that was not on her list. What do you do when the channels don't respond? It was not a question about him. It was a question dressed up as a question about him. He had recognized that at the time and answered it honestly anyway, because honest answers to double-layered questions were usually more useful than the evasion of acknowledging the double layer.

She had been waiting, he thought, for a particular answer. Maybe not the specific words, but the shape of the answer. The shape was: I keep the documentation and I wait for a moment when there is a channel that responds.

She had sixty years in the Archive. She had been not-asking questions for sixty years. She was, he was increasingly certain, keeping documentation. She was waiting for a channel.

He wrote this in a separate column from his professional notes, because it was not a professional observation, it was a relational one, and he had learned over nine years that keeping those categories distinct was important for thinking clearly about both.

The relational column said: she is an ally of a kind she has not decided to commit to yet. Do not press. Let the evidence be the thing that moves her, not the argument.

Then he crossed out that last sentence, because giving himself strategic instructions about another person was a habit he did not want to develop.

He wrote instead: she is someone for whom this matters. Be worth trusting.

He looked at that for a moment. Then he closed the notebook.

The window showed darkness. The lamp burned its sourceless warmth. From somewhere deep in the building came the muffled sound of a door closing, then footsteps, then silence.

He thought about the two copies of the Prophecy and the different words they used for what the hero was supposed to do to the Black Dragon. He thought about the sword mechanism and the bandage on Thalion Orr's hand. He thought about the symbol on the wall of the east wing reading room.

He thought: everything I have found in four days is consistent with a single underlying truth that no one has asked about in nine hundred years, because in a system that runs on a document, the last thing the system does is question the document.

He picked up his pen.

He wrote: tomorrow I need to ask about the original binding ceremony. The ceremony that first invoked the Prophecy as a structural element. If the magic depends on the text, the original text must have been used in the original ceremony. That ceremony should have documentation. The documentation should describe what the text actually said at the beginning, before anything was changed.

He put the pen down.

He thought about the coffee machine.

He thought it was probably fine.

He thought about her question for most of the night.

Not the off-list question, the one about what he did when channels didn't respond. He had answered that already, and it was honest, and he didn't need to revisit it.

He thought about what it meant that she had asked it.

In his experience, people asked that specific question for one of two reasons: either they were assessing him, trying to understand the threat he posed if he found something they didn't want found, or they were asking it because they were the person who had been in the situation themselves. Because the channels hadn't responded for them either, and they wanted to know if he had a better answer than they'd found.

The first possibility: Caerion's agent, sent to map out how much of a problem Renji would be.

The second possibility: someone who had been sitting on a question for a very long time and had learned to ask it sideways, from behind cover, to test whether the other person understood what was actually being asked.

He looked at the quality of her stillness when she had asked it. He looked at the way she had listened to his answer, with the full attention of someone who was receiving information rather than collecting it. He looked at the thirty seconds of quiet after he had finished speaking, in which she had appeared to be doing something internal with what he had said.

He thought: it was the second one.

This meant something for how he approached the next conversation. Not strategically. He corrected himself every time he drifted toward strategy in interpersonal contexts, because strategy implied working around someone rather than with them, and working around someone was a method for when you couldn't trust them, and he was not yet sure he couldn't trust her.

He would be direct. He would tell her what he found. He would tell her what he thought it meant, clearly, without hedging for her comfort. He would give her his actual thinking and let her do what she chose with it.

This was not a strategy. It was just what he did.

He thought about what it would mean to be trusted by someone who had been deciding for a very long time not to trust anyone.

He thought about Lysera Vey and sixty years in an archive where her mother had been right and had been removed for it. Sixty years of careful, precise, flawless work. Sixty years of being, by every measurable standard, exactly what the Archive required. Sixty years of not asking the questions she had been born, probably, knowing she would eventually need to ask.

This was a particular kind of patience that he understood in the abstract and could not quite imagine sustaining in practice. He had managed nine years of it, of doing the work correctly and expecting nothing from it and putting the documentation in the bag and waiting. Nine years had felt long. Sixty was a different order of magnitude.

He thought: she is not waiting anymore. She is deciding whether to stop waiting.

He thought: I should not make that decision harder by being something she cannot trust.

This was not a strategic consideration. He corrected himself, as he always did when his thinking drifted toward strategy in personal contexts. This was just what you owed someone who was deciding to stop waiting after sixty years.

You owed them accuracy and honesty and the careful documentation of what you found.

He was good at all three of those things. He would be good at them here too.

He had been told, at various points in his career, that he was difficult. That he was too focused on the details. That he missed the forest for the trees. He had always found this criticism interesting, because in his experience the trees were the forest. The forest was made of trees. The details were the thing, and the person who was looking at the large picture and missing the details was not, in fact, seeing more than him. They were seeing a generalization. Generalizations were useful. They were not the same as accuracy.

He was accurate. He intended to remain accurate.

He put the notebook down. He turned off the lamp. He went to sleep in the narrow bed in the room that was a guest room and not quite a cell, in a kingdom made of old trees and older magic, and he did not miss the clarity of what he was here to do.

He thought about precision and what it was for. In accounting, precision was for accuracy. In law, precision was for enforceability. In trust, precision was for reliability. She was a precise person. He was a precise person. They would, he thought, be useful to each other in the specific way that two people with the same standard of accuracy could be useful: they would not have to explain the standard to each other.

He did not know, lying in the dark, how long any of this would take. He did not know whether he would find what he was looking for or whether it would be findable. He did not know whether finding it would matter, in the ways that mattered. He did not know whether there was a channel here that would respond, or whether this was the fifth time, the version of the same story in a different language, the same outcome with different architecture.

He knew he was going to try. This was the only constant across all four previous instances and all previous settings and all previous versions of the story: he was going to try, because the numbers were either right or wrong, and wrong numbers were a kind of lie, and he could not make himself stop.