Turn 3 of 6

Show Sennet the correction sheet and point to the blank space where the Vale of Aster should be

You lift the correction sheet from the table and hold it out to her, turning it so the lamplight falls across the surface.

"Look at this," you say. Your finger finds the blank space between Kiln Cross and the river fork, the patch of paper where the Vale of Aster used to sit among the contour lines like a stone in a riverbed.

"Tell me what you see here."

Sennet takes the sheet carefully, the way couriers handle documents — by the edges, with clean hands. She tilts it toward the light. Her eyes move across the page, following the road lines, the settlement marks, the small neat annotations in the Hall's house script. She traces the southern route with her fingertip, and her finger passes directly over the blank space without slowing.

"It's the southern road correction," she says. "Fennt, Coul Mire, the realignment at Broad Bend. This all looks right to me." She taps the paper where the Vale of Aster should be, and her nail makes a small sound against the table beneath.

"This stretch is just forest. Open ground. There's nothing to correct here, so it's blank. That's normal, isn't it?"

You watch her face. There is no guile in it, no performance. She is reading a map of a world she lives in, and in that world the space she is pointing to has always been empty. You can see the road in your mind — the black poplars, the slope toward the water, the stone walls going amber in the evening light. You can see the blue door. But when you try to hold the image of the woman who stood in that doorway, her face smears like wet ink. You still have her hands. The cup. The colour of the door. The rest is going.

"The sheet looks accurate to me," Sennet says, and offers it back. "If there's nothing wrong with the corrections, I should report that to the Hall. Master Ombrey likes confirmation before midday dispatch." She pauses, studying you with a courier's instinct for when someone is holding something back.

"You've gone pale. Are you ill?"

You take the sheet from her. The paper is smooth and warm from her hands. You want to say the name again, to press it into the air between you like a coin on a counter, but something stops you — not fear, exactly, but the sense that each time you say it and are not heard, the word gets thinner. That you are spending it. That there may be a limited number of times you can speak it before it sounds like nothing at all, even to you.

"I'm not ill," you say. "I need to go to the Hall."

Sennet nods, practical, already adjusting her plans.

"I'm walking back that way after my next delivery. I can wait, if you want company on the road." She hesitates, then adds, more quietly, "You don't look well. I mean it. Nine years you've been doing this, and I've never seen you look at a correction sheet like that."

She is watching you with genuine concern, and behind it, something else — the faintest trace of unease, as if some part of her, below the level of language, can feel the shape of what is missing. It passes quickly. She straightens her satchel strap and waits for your answer.