Paul lifts his thumb from the divot of someone else's nail, where it had dug in under the flash of some insight into the nature of Darkblood particulate dissolution. He leans across the desk and puts the pencil back with its fellows, then brushes his loosely curled knuckles over Iskierka's head.

"No," he tells her, shaking his head, which is a funny little echo, if he thinks about it. "There's nothing in there anyone needs. It's why I keep the notes in another box. He wouldn't have wanted those not to be used. But you wouldn't want those for anything but a nest, would you?"

"I know it's stupid," Paul says, small and quiet, "I can't read them. I'm not a necromancer. I keep thinking I should give them to Harrowhark, if she wants them. But I don't know if that's something they do. I don't know how they mourn each other. I don't even know if we should, because they already did, once, and - maybe he'll come back."

Paul pauses. He breathes in the pause, slow and steady. He drifts on the surface of his thoughts like cut flowers in a clear bowl of water, brushed this way and that by microcurrents of air.

"Did you know that ghosts can haunt the things that killed them?" Paul closes his eyes. He sets his forehead against his knees. He does not think about a pair of drowned swords. He does not think about a pair of broken glasses. He does not think about an empty yurt and a cold fire.

"Is that why you're here?"