Turn 7 of 8

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

You do not answer him. Not yet. Instead you look down at the map in your hands and you let yourself feel what he is asking about, and what you find is that the question is not simple. The Vale of Aster is in your memory — you can see the blue door, the river ford, the white stones under shallow water. But it is also under your hands. The paper is warm where the name is written, and the warmth has a direction, as though it is rising from somewhere beneath the page rather than sitting on top of it. You press your thumb against the letters and they do not smudge, but the paper gives, just slightly, the way ice gives before it cracks.

Ombrey watches you do this and his face changes. Not dramatically — he is a man who has trained himself out of dramatic expressions — but the muscles around his eyes tighten, and he takes a half-step back. It is the step of a man who has seen this before, in someone else, and is measuring how much time he has.

"Don't press on it," he says. His voice is low, not angry, but urgent in the way of someone who understands what is at stake in a way you do not yet.

"The ink is not the problem. The ink was never the problem. It is what the ink is connected to. You are not reading a name, you are — " He stops himself. His hand comes up and pushes his spectacles higher on his nose, a gesture that buys him a second to choose his words.

"The fourth one — her name was Maren. She did what you are doing now. She pressed on the place where her village was written, and the place answered. And every time it answered, the connection grew stronger, and the correction grew thinner, and what we are holding back grew — louder. Do you understand? You are not preserving the Vale by holding on. You are thinning the wall between what is mapped and what has been removed, and what has been removed was removed because it is not safe to be found."

The far door opens again, wider this time. The clerk stands in the frame, and behind him is Sennet Aur, still wearing her courier's coat, her cap in her hands. She is looking at Ombrey, and her expression is the one you saw on the doorstep — the look of someone who has seen something they were not meant to see. But she is here, which means she followed you, which means whatever she glimpsed on your map this morning mattered enough to make her break protocol. She meets your eyes across the hall, and her mouth opens, and then closes, and then opens again.

"I wrote it down," she says. Her voice is thin in the stone hall, but steady.

"On my list. The things I've delivered. I couldn't read the name on the map this morning, but I wrote it down eleven months ago when I carried the correction, because I write everything down, and I wrote — " She looks at Ombrey, and something passes between them that is not quite accusation and not quite fear.

"I wrote down a name I can no longer read. But I know I wrote it, and I know it had four letters in the first word and five in the second, and I know that when I wrote it, I could read it."