Backstory
Master Halden Quarrel has spent ten years compiling the definitive text of the Deep Under's covenant between Ironspire and the wolves of the Silvered Wold, and the Collegium at Kessaran has been disreputable about him for most of that time for reasons he considers editorial rather than personal. He reads the covenant's ambiguous clauses as legal instruments and has found two paths in the text that neither Lord Blackthorn nor the Grey Matriarch has seen. He is patient in the archival sense — he waits for manuscripts and for wolves with the same quiet — and his flaw is a stubborn trust in the textual record over living witnesses, which the story will prove wrong twice. He has told himself for twelve years that he follows manuscripts. He is following Ser Elara Vance into the Silvered Wold this winter, and has not yet admitted, even in his field notebook, that her survival has begun to outweigh the scholarship in his private accounting.
