“Oh, right, that was the other thing I’d wanted to check in on. How would you prefer to do this? We can Gate you somewhere in Valdemar if Savil’s been- Vanyel, no, this isn’t worth you Gating for. The obvious places are the message drop location or the town where you arrived, but if Leareth prefers something else we can probably make it work.”

"I'm not actually sure if Leareth can Gate to where I arrived without me present and sending him the location, we didn't test the repeatability of secondhand termini. You should probably work that out with him, none of the original plans will have taken Amshalan into account."

"Makes sense. We'll send a letter with a list of proposed locations, include lots of options so we don't end up having to go back and forth on it more than once." 

"Thank you."

"Shavri, am I forgetting anything?" 

"Hmm. Belrun, had you wanted to leave some sort of message for Dara, in case we do hear from her? Come to think of it, you could send a letter to her hometown if you wanted, I can look up where she's from." 

"She told me where she was going, when she Mindspoke me on her way out. I do plan to send her a letter later."

"All right, then I think that's everything we'd wanted to cover– yes, Tran?" 

"I wanted to thank you for your courage in coming out here," Tantras says stiffly. "And, er, to apologize for my rudeness." 

"Oh! Uh, thank you."

There is a slightly awkward pause. 

"So we're all done here, then?" Randi says cheerfully, standing. "Thank you, Belrun. We'll keep you updated on when Rolan is available to talk." 

"I appreciate that." And she goes off to follow Vanyel to the archives.

The entirety of the Heralds' library is smaller than Leareth's library just in the one location up north, but there's another room behind it that has the unpublished records. It's also small, but quite a lot of paper can be packed into floor-to-ceiling shelves stacked with boxes. 

They're mostly going to be very boring records, Vanyel explains. Date Chosen, Gifts, teachers, circuit deployment schedules, that sort of thing. 

"That's okay, it still might jog some memories."

"All right, hmm, what's the organization schema here... We want Choosings organized by date, I think, I think maybe there's a summary list of that for each box..."

There is. Each box covers roughly ten years, though sometimes more and sometimes less depending on how eventful the period in question was. They can start at the Founding and go forward. 

Skim skim skim Sayshal where are you.

In box number twenty-two! Chosen in the year 198 after the Founding by the Companion mare Lirelle, Gifts: Mindspeech and short-range Foresight. That's all the information to be found on the summary page. 

While she's there she'll see if there are any predecessor Heralds suspiciously similar to "Lirelle".

There's a 'Liara' in 82 and a 'Lilla' in 145. 

And Amshalan's being copied on all of this in the meantime. She rummages around, now that she knows the year, for more details.

Sayshal did her apprenticeship with a Herald called Norvi. She graduated to Whites in 203. Rode circuit in the east near the border with newly-founded Hardorn for a decade, uneventfully, had a few students on internship circuits with her. Then got deployed west to help deal with an unusually bad incursion of Pelagirs monsters. Lost most of her leg to a colddrake. This was obviously suboptimal for riding circuit so she was deployed in Haven for the rest of her life, teaching students, doing administration, eventually taking over as Seneschal's Herald. It was a long life. She was a Herald until 262, dying in bed at the age of seventy-seven. 

:You have had a wider variety of numbers of legs than most people: Belrun remarks.

:Pfft: Mental laughter is pretty odd-feeling! :I sort of remember that, now, actually? Wasn't so bad. I had a peg leg. I think I used to tease the students by pretending I was going to whack them in the head with it - I was very flexible, apparently even when I was an old lady: 

Belrun giggles. She copies the highlights of the information about Herald Sayshal. :Do you remember Lirelle much? It seems like it must be so weird to just have decades and decades of Companion-bond wiped away whenever you're re-sleeved, but I guess the alternative would be worse: