Chapter 7: Senna's Margin Notes

The library at Valdenmoor's administrative seat had been built to impress, and it succeeded in the particular way that rooms built to impress usually do — by making the person inside it feel simultaneously privileged and small. The shelves ran floor to ceiling on three walls, connected by a rolling ladder on brass rails that whispered when touched, and the windows faced east so that the morning light fell across the reading tables in long, approving rectangles. Someone had chosen those windows deliberately. Someone had wanted the scholars who worked here to feel watched over by the dawn.

Senna noted this on her first morning and filed it in the part of her mind she reserved for things that were not yet evidence but might become it.

She had been given a room, a key, an official title she had not asked for, and a standing invitation to the weekly convocation of Covenant advisors that met in the chamber beneath the administrative wing every third Restday. The title was *Archivist of Void-Historical Studies*, which was three words longer than her actual expertise required and suggested, in its elaborateness, an effort to make permanent something that might otherwise be provisional. The room was comfortable. The key was heavy. She had placed it on the corner of the writing desk and not moved it since, the way you leave a thing you are not yet sure you want to use.