Turn 4 of 6

I take in the scene, and act on what matters most.

You fold the correction sheet and slide it into your coat pocket, and the paper sits against your chest like a coal. The blue door is still in your mind — you can see the paint, the iron latch, the way it sat back from the road under a lintel carved with something you can no longer quite make out. But the woman's face is worse now. Five minutes ago you had her hands, her voice, the cup. The cup is still there. The hands are fading. Her voice you can only retrieve as a texture, warm and low, without words attached.

"I'll walk with you," you say. "Give me a moment." You turn back into the kitchen and pull your satchel from the hook by the stove. Inside it: your field notebook, a brass ruler, two sticks of graphite, the small magnifying lens Master Ombrey issued you in your first year. You open the notebook to a fresh page and write, in steady block letters, THE VALE OF ASTER. Underneath it: INN, BLUE DOOR, CIDER, BLACK POPLARS BY THE ROAD, STONE WALLS, EVENING LIGHT. Your hand does not shake. You write the way you were trained to write — precise, durable, the letters formed to survive rain and folding and the long dark of a saddlebag. If the word is being spent, you will spend it on paper first.

"What are you writing?" Sennet calls from the doorway.

"Notes for Master Ombrey." You close the notebook and slide it into the satchel. You do not say the name again. You are beginning to understand that there is a difference between remembering and being remembered, and that the correction sheet in your pocket is working on both.

The road to the Cartographers' Hall takes you east along the river quay and up through the cloth merchant's quarter, where the morning trade is just opening. Sennet walks beside you with the easy stride of someone who has covered far longer miles before breakfast. She does not ask again what troubled you. Couriers learn early when a question will not be answered, and she has the grace to leave it alone. But she stays close, and you notice that she keeps you on her left side, between herself and the river, as if shielding you from something she cannot name.

The Hall stands at the top of Gallow Hill, a long grey building with narrow windows and a slate roof that weeps rust stains down its front. You have walked through its doors every working day for nine years. This morning, they look different. Not the doors themselves — the same iron-bound oak, the same faded paint around the frame — but the way they sit in your vision, as if the building is holding itself very still. You can see Master Ombrey's lamp burning in the upper window. He is already at his desk, as he always is, as he has been since before you were born. You wonder, for the first time, what he is burning that lamp to see by.