Penn is delighted. Delight, on Penn, looks like a wren who has found a shiny clip.

“One,” they say. “Peel an orange and press the peel on a table. Some parts stretch. Wall-maps of the world do that to the far north, until Greenland looks like a continent with opinions. Foldhaven’s hill-map does a smaller version: we look like the whole story. The fen looks like a smear.”

“Two. A compass needle loves magnetic north. The pole star is truer for night, and even that isn’t a nail in the sky forever. Brask’s sheet is a thumb off if he mixed them. A road-stake in the wrong north is a road in the wrong pantry.”

“Three. A town that kept the fen—called it holy, called it sponge, called it findable in the catalog—did not drink the Cinder in its cellars. Spirit-bargain, some said. Still hydrology, I say, and still a warning dressed as wonder.”

Penn taps your knee. “People stitch. Pretty sheets from far printers. Blanks where a surveyor was tired. A mayor who needed wagons yesterday. Nobody had to be a villain. They had to be in a hurry and fond of a clean line.”

Tansy glances toward the east gate, where stakes already stand in peat like a sentence that thinks it is finished.

Penn’s eyes follow. “Stories are pockets. Surveys are pockets with wages. Those are not the same kind of pocket.”