Turn 2 of 8

Show Sennet the old map from my kit, the one with the Vale of Aster still on it

You step back inside, leaving the courier at the door, and go to the shelf where you keep your working maps. Your kit is still half-packed from the last survey season — the leather case with its brass clasps, the oilskin roll of regional charts, the notebook with your field sketches. You pull out the western quadrant map you carried three seasons ago and unroll it on the table. The paper is soft at the folds, stained at one corner where rain got into your pack. There it is. The Vale of Aster, written in your own hand, the letters small and careful. The river road, the ford, a square marked 'inn' with a note beside it: blue door, good cider, flood line on threshold. You carry the map back to the doorstep where Sennet waits.

"Look at this," you say, and hold the sheet open so she can see the western quadrant. Your finger finds the valley.

"Here. The Vale of Aster. I walked it. I marked it myself."

Sennet leans forward and studies the map the way a courier studies any document — efficiently, looking for the seal and the heading. Her eyes pass over the valley. You watch them pass over it. She frowns, not in recognition but in the particular discomfort of someone trying to read handwriting that has smudged.

"I see the river," she says. "And this mark here, is that a holding? But the name is — I can't quite." She tilts the paper toward the grey morning light. Her finger hovers near your annotation and then slides past it, the way a hand finds a bump on a wall and moves on.

"The name," you say. "Right here. Vale of Aster."

"I see the ink," she says. There is something careful in her voice now, the tone of someone deciding whether to be patient or alarmed.

"But I think it may have smudged, because I can't make it resolve into letters. I'm sorry. My eyes aren't what they were." She straightens up and looks at you, and for a moment something crosses her face that is not confusion — it is the look of a person who has seen a thing they were not meant to see and is already deciding to look away. Then it is gone, and she is a courier again, waiting to be dismissed.

You look down at the map in your hands. The ink is clear. Your handwriting has not smudged. The letters are exactly where you left them, sharp and legible, and they read VALE OF ASTER in the same small careful hand you have used for fifteen years of fieldwork. But something about the ink has changed — not its colour or its sharpness, but its weight on the page. It sits differently now, as though the paper beneath it is thinner than it was a moment ago, as though the valley is holding on to its own name by less than it was before you opened the door.