The packet had arrived before anyone tried to put Elara in a cart.
It waited at the residence desk because I had spent yesterday answering questions in the garden. An ordinary reply from the estate records office, forwarded through the academy's registered correspondence channel.
For once, the delayed paper wasn't connected to the problem most likely to kill me. The cover cited the old inventory inquiry that had eventually led to Nihil. The physical location was settled now, but the household office had still been checking the source register and the room references attached to the transfer.
I had asked for the full source page rather than another extract that removed the surrounding entries. They had sent the facing page too. The old account used both sides of the open book, with descriptions on one page and the people responsible for them on the other.
That small decision changed my morning.
