Iveth Ammerly
Session 1: A Dragon at the Fair
Iveth was at the fair to buy vellum and was bargaining over the price when the dragon read the lease aloud from the roof of the Wool Exchange. She stopped bargaining. She wrote the clause down, word for word, on the vellum she had not yet paid for, and afterwards she noticed that the dragon had quoted it in the legal cadence of three centuries ago, with the Founder’s own turns of phrase. When the shedlings came down in a hail of hot sparks she put out the stall with a cantrip and paid for the vellum on her way to the Keep.
In the square, before Queen Hesper came down from the Keep, she was the only one who asked Orpiment a question the dragon seemed to enjoy: not what the rent is, but where the lease is kept. The dragon told her, with obvious pleasure, that a tenant who has lost her copy of the terms is not the lessor’s problem.
Session 2: The Wax Vaults
Going back into Sealwright Hall after twenty years meant walking past Oswy Hebden in the entrance court and not saying anything clever. She managed it. Below, in the Wax Vaults, she read the shelf-marks faster than Clemency Vare could, and found the lease-case by the smell of dragon-wax before anyone found it by the catalogue. When they opened it and found the rent clause cut out with a razor, Iveth measured the cut against the grain of the vellum and said it had been made within the month. Clemency checked. She was right.
Session 3: Under the Sallow Hills
In the barrow Iveth read the counterpart aloud by lamplight, in the Founder’s spelling, and heard her own voice shake when she got to the rent. Below the rent clause a bar of amber wax lay across the rest of the second leaf like a strip of honey, with a heading just showing at its edge. She would not let anyone cut it. She carried it home against her chest, and it is on her worktable now, with a warming lamp set to a degree above the room, softening at the pace wax chooses.