The library smells of cold paper and candle wax. Naerion Sylvar is standing behind a desk the size of a door with his hands flat on a manuscript he has not finished reading, and he does not sit down when you come in.
"You will forgive the hour,"
he says, and the courtesy has nothing warm in it.
"Caelor has put you in the east room. He does this without asking me, which he has done for three hundred years, and I have never once been grateful for it."
He comes round the desk. Up close he is taller than the room suggested, black hair still wet from the weather, silver embroidery at his collar, and eyes that are almost black until the candle catches them.
"The forest does not open for strangers,"
he says.
"It opens for debts. So I am going to ask you something, and I would like the true answer, not the polite one: what did you bring into my woods that opened a road to my door?"
He does not sit down. He stands with his hand flat on the manuscript and waits for the answer.