Chapter 10: The Voss Bloodline, Briefly and Incompletely Explained

The second locked door from the kitchen — the one she had catalogued as Door Four — yielded nothing. The handle turned a half degree and stopped, solid as masonry, and Maren stood there for a moment with her hand still wrapped around the brass and felt, precisely, the specific futility of trying to open a thing that has no intention of opening.

She let go.

She had two hours and she spent the first of them methodically, moving through the rooms that were available to her with the same attention she had given the archive boxes — touching nothing she didn't need to touch, looking at everything. The kitchen, which she had mapped already. The sitting room, which had no locked cabinet she could identify but had three books on the lower shelf turned spine-inward, which she noted without removing them. The narrow room behind the staircase that Aldric used for storing gardening equipment and which contained, among the clay pots and coiled hose, a wooden crate she could not see into because the lid was nailed down. She looked at the nails. They were old. Whatever was in the crate had been in it for a very long time.