"The oath was nine lines. Four of them were apologies to precedent."

The oath he signed was nine lines long. Four of them were apologies to precedent, because no circle of that tradition had raised a Nord before and the wording had to account for it without saying so directly. He kept a copy. He has carried it since, folded, in the same case as the manifest with pilgrim written on it.

The five fragments were the accumulation of twenty years of being somewhere for other reasons. Larimar out of a flooded grove. Obsidian carried off Y'ffelon by someone who was glad to be rid of it. A stone shank with an empty groove that he did not understand for eleven years. A loop of petrified oak. A knot of spinner's amber given rather than found.