Chapter 82

The register turns up on the sixth day and it is not where anyone looked.

"It's the Foundation's," Roman says, and there is something in his voice Veira has not heard in five months, which is shame. "It has been the Foundation's since 1889."

He has driven from Edinburgh. He is standing in Margaret Fraser's kitchen at nine in the morning with a document case and the specific rigidity of a man delivering news about his own house.

"The protective registry," he says. "It exists to hold instruments for families under threat — the mechanism Emre used in Lyon in 2009. Anything filed there is sealed from all five bloodlines, including us. That is the point of it. Nobody reads the protective registry."

"And?"

"And it has a second index." He opens the case. "Filed alongside every protective instrument is a bare administrative record: date, jurisdiction, and the category of threat the instrument responds to. It is four columns. It has no names. It was created for auditing purposes in 1889 and nobody has looked at it in a hundred and thirty-six years because it appears to contain nothing."

He puts it on the table.

"There are four thousand one hundred and six entries," he says. "Two hundred and eleven of them are categorised ordinal."

Veira pulls the page toward her.

"Two hundred and eleven hybrid births," she says.

"Two hundred and eleven protective instruments filed in response to a threat category that exists in no other Folklore document, using a word that appears in exactly one other place, which is a standing instruction issued to the Kin convener in March 1889 forbidding ordinal restoration in perpetuity." Roman's hands are flat on the table. "Somebody has been counting hybrids in my archive for a hundred and thirty-six years. In a register I am responsible for. In a system I have personally administered since 1931."

"You couldn't have known. It's sealed."

"I sealed it." He looks up. "In 1974 I restructured the protective registry's access protocol and I sealed the second index behind the same barrier as the instruments, because I judged that an administrative record with no names was harmless and the protective principle should be absolute." His voice does not change. "I made it unreadable. Whoever has been maintaining it has had a hundred and thirty-six years of perfect privacy and I gave them fifty-one of them."

Nobody says anything for a moment.

"How many of the two hundred and eleven are alive," Veira says.

"That is the part I came to say in person." Roman turns the page. "Entries stop in 2011. The last is dated the fourth of November 2011, jurisdiction Aberdeen."

"Nell."

"Nell. And then nothing for fourteen years." He looks at her. "Either hybrid births stopped in 2011, which is not credible, or whoever was counting stopped filing in 2011."

"Or died," Emre says, from the doorway. "Lieth was recorded dead in 2014."

"Then there are three years unaccounted for," Roman says. "And a register that has been maintained continuously since 1889 by somebody who has never once been named, and whose last act was to hide a child in Aberdeen four weeks after her mother's funeral."

Veira looks at the four columns.

"Two hundred and eleven," she says slowly. "Roman. How many of those entries are dated after 1990?"

He checks.

"Nineteen."

"And of those nineteen, how many jurisdictions?"

He checks again, and she watches him arrive at it a half-second before he says it.

"Eleven," he says. "Across four continents. All within the last thirty-five years."

"So somebody has known the location of nineteen hybrid children since 1990," Veira says, "and there are two of us in the world."

"Yes."

"Then where are the other seventeen?"