Len Vey took the jeweler’s brass magnifying glass from Ivara Quill and leaned over the pine table. His right eye was pressed close to the cool, knurled metal barrel.
Seeing his own handwriting rendered with such cold, terrifying perfection was an intimate, devastating rule-break. For five years on the Tern Road, Len had taken quiet, unbending pride in his penmanship. His father Deren had been a brilliant road land-mapper but a careless writer. His logbooks were full of blotted ink, illegible numerals, and crossed-out sums that had allowed corrupt Survey Office clerks to alter delivery receipts and drain tube off grain shipments after his death. Len had sworn over his father’s pine coffin that his own paperwork would be clean, disciplined, and unbeatable. That way, no judge could ever cheat Cira or claim that a Tern Road courier had failed to account for a single brass ounce of cargo.
Now, that very discipline had been turned into a weapon against the people who trusted him.
“He copied the stroke order from my third route log,” Len murmured, his sound right thumb tracing the blue ruling lines where the black ink had bitten into the heavy rag paper. “Look at the way the R loops into the e in Release... I only wrote it like that when I was using the small drafting desk at Highwater Wash three weeks ago. The desk had a warped pine top with a hollow spot right under the leather blotter, so every time I made…
