Turn 3 of 9

Refuse to sit and demand to see the old maps he's been studying

You do not sit. You set the folio on the table among his old maps and keep your hands at your sides, because sitting is what you do when you are prepared to listen at someone else's pace, and you are not. The chair sits empty between you, and Master Ombrey looks at it, then at you, and something in his expression shifts — not surprise, but a recalculation, the adjustment of a man who had prepared for a different opening move.

"Show me what you were reading," you say. "Before I came down. The map you had your fingers on."

His gaze drops to the table. The old maps are spread across it in no order you can immediately discern — some backed with linen, some crackling at the folds, some bearing dates in the margin and some bearing none. The one he was tracing lies nearest to him, a survey sheet of the eastern precincts, but the paper has a quality you cannot name at first. The ink is faint, yes, but not in the way of age. It is faint in the way of something receding, as though the lines were not drawn but are being withdrawn.

"These are not corrections," he says, and his hand moves over the sheet without quite touching it, the way one hovers over a wound. "These are records of what was. I have been comparing them to the new issue. The Vale of Aster is not the first. Three villages in the Fen March were corrected in the autumn. Before that, a hamlet called Edderscross, and a mill. Before that —" He stops. His jaw works.

"Before that, the list becomes difficult to hold in the mind."

You look at the old survey sheet. The Vale of Aster is there, unmistakable — the brook, the bridge, the long green fold of land. But it is faint. Not faded. Faint the way a voice is faint through a wall, as though the valley is being called away from the paper itself. You press your finger to the ink and it is dry, perfectly dry, and the line of the brook runs under your fingertip like a vein under skin.

"Why me," you say. It is not a question about the correction anymore.

Master Ombrey is quiet for a moment. The water-sound behind the walls rises and falls, a rhythm that is too steady to be plumbing. He reaches beneath the old survey sheet and pulls out a second map, this one older still, its margins brown with decades. He does not hand it to you. He turns it so you can read it, and what you see is the Vale of Aster drawn in strong, certain lines, and beside it, in a hand you recognise, a set of annotations. Your annotations. From a survey you conducted four years ago. But you have never surveyed the Vale of Aster. You have walked through it, drunk cider at an inn with a blue door, given directions to a courier — but you have never surveyed it. The handwriting is yours, and you do not remember writing it.

"Because you have been there," Master Ombrey says quietly. "And because you remember it. That makes you rare. That makes you necessary."