Turn 2 of 6

Ask Sennet what villages she delivered to on her last run along the southern road

"Sennet," you say, and she looks up, steady and ready, a courier's reflexes. "Your last run along the southern road. The full route. Can you give me the villages in order?"

She nods, glad to have something concrete she can do for you. She shifts her weight against the doorframe and begins, her voice falling into the recitation of someone who has spoken these names to herself for miles.

"Fennt, Coul Mire, Tessick, the mill hamlet at Broad Bend, Rennoch, the waystation at Kiln Cross." She pauses. You wait.

"Then the river fork, and I turned north to Vastermool." Seven stops after Kiln Cross on the old route, and she has named only six. She does not seem to notice. Her face is calm, untroubled, the face of a woman who has given a complete and accurate account.

"Between Kiln Cross and the river fork," you say. You keep your voice level.

"What was there?"

Sennet's brow creases. She glances past you into the kitchen, then back, as if the answer might be written somewhere behind your shoulder.

"There's the forest stretch," she says. "Two miles of nothing before the fork. I've always walked it straight through." She says it with perfect assurance, and you can see that she believes it — not as a lie, not as a guess, but as a fact she has carried for years. The space where the Vale of Aster should sit in her memory is not dark or hidden. It is simply not there, and the edges around it have closed like skin over a wound.

You look down at the correction sheet on the table. The smooth blank space where the valley used to be. You walked that road. You slept at that inn. The woman with the cider — you can still see her hands around the cup, the grain of the wood, the blue of the door behind her. But her face is harder now than it was a moment ago. Not changed, exactly. Just less. As if the details are being gently, patiently sanded away.

Sennet shifts in the doorway. "Is something wrong with the correction?" she asks.

"If there's an error, I can carry it back, but I'd need to leave within the hour. The next dispatch goes out at midday." She is watching you with professional concern, ready to help, and you realise with a slow cold certainty that she is also watching to see whether you will say the name again — the name she cannot hear, the name that is already becoming difficult for her, and perhaps, you think, for you as well.