Sable lets you wind nothing. You only watch.

On the wall-map, Foldhaven’s hill is a proud loaf. Reedfen is a polite smear. “Projection,” Sable says, and hands you an orange. “Peel. Press. See what stretches. World-maps do this to the far north. Our wall does a village version: we look large. The pantry looks like an accident.”

Penn adds the needle. Compass on the rose: it does not point at the same mark as the pole-star chip in the window-ledge. “Magnetic north. True north. Cousins. Brask’s thumb of difference is a road in the alder if nobody says cousin.”

Tansy traces the smear. “So Holt’s hurry isn’t just hurry. It’s hurry on the wrong picture.”

“Pictures are promises,” Sable says. “Places keep them whether we catalog them or not.”

You practice reading: wall-stretch, needle-cousin, flood-stone in your memory. Dusk-fen skills are mostly don’t. Don’t crowd the bird-hide. Don’t honor the desire-scar. Don’t call waste what is a sponge.

Sable sets the orange peel on the rose and lets it fail to be a sphere. “Every map is this peel,” Sable says. “Useful. Distorted. Honest only if you admit the stretch. Scale hides as much as it shows. Leave off the fen, and you have not made a better sheet. You have made a forgetting.”