The Drevhalds are a Tangier family of the forest edge, holders of no rank and members of no guild, who for three generations have done the one thing their neighbors agree should never be done. They go to Hildaneir. They come back. And they write down what they found.
Who they are
By the look of them the Drevhalds are farmers and trappers, indistinguishable from the families on either side of their holding near Hilda's Forest. The difference is a book, hidden, that they do not admit exists. Everyone in the northwest leaves bread and coins at the forest edge and stays out of the deep wood. The Drevhalds leave the offerings too, and then they go in anyway, and they have built three generations of family life around keeping that fact quiet.
The record
Ingrith Drevhald started it. Three generations back she decided the thing kept under the stone at Hildaneir was worth understanding rather than running from, and she kept the decision secret because the alternative was being thought mad, or cursed, by people who would not have been wrong to worry. Her children added to her notes. Her grandchildren added to theirs. The record is a careful, patient thing: the spiral mapped, the symbols on the stone copied and copied again, an account of what the ruin does and what it costs and what it has been asked. For most of those three generations that was all it was. Observation, set down honestly, understood slowly and never fully.
What Sjavin brings home
That has changed with the youngest keeper. Sjavin Drevhald, who holds the vigil now, has started coming back with answers. Not translations worked out by lamplight over the family book, but things simply known: where a lost thing lies, what a season will bring, now and then a name spoken plainly that no living person had any way to learn. The family tells itself this is the reward of three generations of work, the formulae cracked at last. The other reading is the one they will not say at the table: that the answers are not being worked out at all but given, that what the Drevhalds have studied for three generations has begun, lately, to study them back, and to pay them. No one in the family has asked which it is. Asking would settle the question, and they are not sure they want it settled.