You step off only as far as Tansy’s nod allows: one knee on a root-mat, not a plunge.

Reedfen is not waste. It is a pantry that breathes. Between stems, water-insects row. A frog the color of old tea decides you are not dinner and not god. Fry stitch the shallows. Wrens work the seed-heads. Under you, peat drinks last night’s rain and holds it, a sponge the size of a secret.

“Flood-buffer,” Tansy says, surprising you by sounding like Penn. “Fen takes the punch. Cellars take less.”

You think of Brask’s straight road here now, fill and gravel, and the rain having nowhere to sit but Foldhaven’s shoes.

The boardwalk does not enter the ruled blank. It hugs the pools, then the hide, then a strip of alder that still has shade. Break the stitch—ditch the fen, crowd the hide, label waste—and the picture loses a corner.

Wind moves a higher rattle through reed. Penn’s flood-stone in the Spine cellar arrives in your bones: once, someone ditched a slice, and water wrote on the library anyway.

You can follow that flood-thought to the old mark in the cellar.

Or you can take the pantry to the pages that still think a smear is a kindness to wagons.