Alistair had less than a minute, and he knew it. So he spent it the way Due had drilled into him, which was slowly, without hurry, as if he had the whole evening to give the man and nothing in the world worth keeping from him.
"He kept three of them," Alistair said. "Travel journals, mostly. My father had the eastern habit of writing everything down, along with the eastern fear of letting another living soul read a single word of it."
He let a small, real grief show at the edges of Tobian's face. It cost him nothing, since the grief belonged to the cover, and the cover was all that there was.
"The first two are dull. Inventories, weather, the price of grain in towns I will never see. The third is the eastern travel year, the one before I was born. The Black Mountains country."
A breath, and then he continued.
