The letter had been face-down for twelve years.
Cardinal Maret Hollin stood at her desk, never sitting for correspondence she hadn't decided about yet, and turned it over. The paper was Crucible-stock, heavy-grain, the kind they'd stopped commissioning perhaps twenty years ago when the Crucible changed mills. Vessen's hand. Precise, unhurried, the letters of a man who'd had 159 years to perfect his penmanship and used perhaps 140 of them.
She read it standing.
