The boardwalk is a page. Reedfen has written on it in water.

Not wagon-ruts. Not a ruled line. Planks over peat, pools on both sides, wrens stitching the air. You crouch the way Tansy showed you last summer: small, quiet, a person pretending to be a hide.

Tansy whispers, “His sheet says blank.”

“Sheets say what they’re paid to say,” you whisper back, and then you feel a little mean, because Brask’s hands, when you saw them yesterday, were just hands, shaking over a compass.

Reedfen lies east of Foldhaven. The Spine is north of the square. The river Cinder is south, already showing the gleam of an oxbow the wall-map still draws as a polite straight line. The old road is west, dry and winding. Brask’s proposed road is a ruler from the square, east, through the “blank,” as if birds were a rumor.

A strip of survey-ribbon hangs on a reed, torn. Dusk could have turned that ribbon into a finished highway in somebody’s head. You file the thought in the notebook of your skull.

The boardwalk follows cover: reed-wall, a pool like a dark coin, a tunnel of cattail that is almost a hallway. To the south, the Cinder’s old loop shines.

You can go carefully along the fen’s own hallway.

You can offer a map-greeting from last summer—low, to the ink, no shouting—and see whether Quill is already watching.

A wren scolds once.