It wasn’t so much a book as a tome. Sitting smugly on a carved wooden stand that, even with a pedestal thicker around than Gregor’s thigh, seemed to stagger under the weight of the paper, ink, and ornamented leather surmounting it.
Jin looked it over, arms crossed, attitude unimpressed. “That’s what he sent us to fetch? Is he delusional or just ignorant?”
Gregor was supposedly the leader of this expedition. As a fully inducted knight of the Order of the Fire Swan he was certainly the highest-paid. And the largest. He was also irredeemably dim. Sweet, brave, and polite to old ladies, but not a thinker. He looked pleadingly over at Betula, who was prowling the perimeters of the room, poking at oddments on the shelves lining two walls.
Betula pulled a slim notebook from a dark corner, flipped through it, and slipped it into her pack. Then she ambled over to the stand and undid the clasps on the giant book, opening it and leafing through the first few pages.
“Do you lot know why the High Lord wants this thing?”
A blank silence met the question. Betula rolled her eyes. “He doesn’t need the book. He needs the content of it, or at least the content of one section.”
Gregor paled. “You’re not going to rip the pages out?”
“Kraken wings, no! I’m a spy, not a berserker. I’m going to copy it.”
The DNA of Stories 