NEVA POV
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The clause was seventeen lines long.
Bena had it on the kitchen table when we arrived — the actual paper, which she'd printed from a scan of the original document she'd found folded inside the back cover of her late husband's private lineage ledger, which she'd been working through since her arrival in Ashveil. The paper was old. Not the original — a copy made at some point in the past, in Bena's husband's handwriting, which meant he'd known it existed and had decided, for reasons she still didn't know, not to tell anyone.
I read it twice.
Then I handed it to Ryke.
He read it once, which was all he ever needed, and then he looked at Mitch in the particular way that meant *tell me I'm understanding this correctly.*
"The original Mallen-Castell alliance agreement," Mitch
