Isadora's Diary

Roman carries the diary from Vienna to Edinburgh in his coat pocket.

Not in a document case, not in the archival preservation box it has lived in for seven hundred years. In his coat pocket, against his chest, the way you carry something that feels too important for institutional handling. He knows this is not archivally sound. He finds he doesn't care, which is itself worth noting.

Veira is in the private dining room of the Canongate restaurant at half past five when he arrives, two hours before the others. She is at the long table with her notebook open and Variable in the canvas bag she now carries him in, his grey head visible above the zipper with the expression of an animal conducting a critical assessment of the premises.

She looks up when he comes in.

He puts the diary on the table in front of her without saying anything about it. She looks at it — the vellum cover, dark with age, the leather binding worn into grooves from being tied and retied over centuries. She looks at it the way she looks at things that are important: without performing the importance.

"How old," she says.

He tells her: the vellum dates to the late thirteenth century, the ink composition consistent with the period, the binding repaired twice, once approximately five hundred years ago and once within the last century. It was in a secondary location in the archive, a false shelf-back in the room that houses the founding compact documentation. He found it because he was looking for something else and the shelf-back was half a centimetre proud of the adjacent shelving.

"Half a centimetre," she says.

"I notice things."

She opens the diary.

The handwriting inside is small and urgent and compressed, the hand of someone writing at speed with something to say and not enough time. The Latin is medieval and precise. She reads slowly. He sits across from her and watches the specific quality of her attention moving through the text the way she reads things that matter, building the structure as she goes and he tries not to think about Vienna, about four hours and no room between pieces, because this is a different version of the same scene and he wants it to be different.

He starts to say he can translate as she goes.

"I have it," she says, without looking up.

He sits back.

She reads for forty minutes. The dining room is quiet. Fiona brings coffee without being asked, sets it down without speaking, goes. Variable falls asleep in the canvas bag with the complete abandon of an animal that has decided the situation is not urgent.

Veira puts the diary down.

She looks at the middle distance for a moment. Then: "She was afraid."

"Yes."

"Not of the decision. She'd made the decision. She was afraid nobody would understand why." She looks at the diary. "She keeps writing that. In different ways. I hope the sequence is legible. I hope the logic holds. I hope the ones who inherit this know it was not cruelty." She is quiet. "She was afraid of being read wrong."

"Seven hundred years," Roman says quietly, "and the compact's enforcement has never once acknowledged the sacrifice at its foundation. She was right to be afraid."

Veira says: "She was also wrong about one thing."

He waits.

"She writes that the hybrid bloodline must accept its erasure. That this is the price of the peace and the price is just." She looks at him. "It's not just. She made it necessary made it the only available option, given the war and the time and the tools she had. But necessary and just are not the same thing, and the compact has been treating them as the same thing for seven hundred years."

"Yes."

"The restructure I'm going to demand is not about punishing anyone alive for what Isadora decided. It's about stopping the compact from continuing to treat a temporary, painful, emergency sacrifice as a permanent and righteous law." She closes the diary carefully. "She deserves better than being used to justify something she intended as a last resort."

He says nothing for a moment. Then: "You read seven hundred years of guilt and fear in forty minutes and arrived at the ethical distinction I've spent three centuries circling without landing on."

"You were too close to it."

"Yes."

She picks up her coffee. "I want to talk about something else for a few minutes. Before the others arrive."

"Of course."

"Tell me about Elise."

He goes very still.

"The woman who turned you," she says. "In Vienna in 1742. You mentioned her once in the archive and moved past it."

He says: "She died in 1801."

"I know. I found her in the Foundation's records. She's listed as your maker." She looks at him. "I'm not asking about the documentation. I'm asking about her."

He is quiet for a long time. The dining room holds the quiet around them. Then he says: "She was from Transylvania originally. She came to Vienna in 1738 and she was the most frightening person I had ever met. Not in the way people mean when they say that about beautiful women. Actually frightening — she saw through things in a way that left nowhere to stand except exactly where you were." He pauses. "She turned me against my wishes, which I told her repeatedly after, and she listened to the telling with the patience of someone who has heard it before and believes the teller will eventually arrive at a different understanding."

"Did you."

"Eventually. It took approximately sixty years."

Something moves across Veira's face. Not amusement exactly. The recognition of a pattern. "And you've spent three hundred years without anyone who frightened you in that same way."

He looks at her.

"Until recently," she says.

He says, carefully: "I would use a different word."

"What word."

He says: "Clarified."

She holds his gaze. Something moves between them in the quiet of the dining room — specific and unhurried, the particular quality of a thing both people can feel and neither is going to rush.

"That's a good word," she says.

The door opens. Adaeze comes in, Joon-Ho behind her, then Sebastien with Callum at his shoulder, then Emre last, carrying nothing.

Veira looks at all of them. "Sit down," she says. "There's something I need to tell you."

She picks up the diary.

The room arranges itself around her, and she opens it to the first page, and she begins.