Lune walked the line a second time in the afternoon, because the first walk had been taken in a hurry and a surveyor who has been hurried once will not be hurried twice. She took the rod, the brass ferrule, and a sheet of Tallow’s paper folded into a square, and she went out along the wall-foot with her chalk in one pocket and the sun on the back of her neck, counting aloud.
Idrin followed. He had not been asked to, but he had found, since the morning, that he could not sit still in the Gatehouse with three figures in his pocket and one of them his own.
“Four hundred and twelve paces to the south-west bearing,” Lune said. “Then the grass goes soft, and the ground starts to remember that it is a marsh. Do not step on the dark patches, Highness. They are not ground. They are the Lamentine’s way of saying it has been waiting.”
“For what?”
“For someone who knows the difference,” said Lune, and made a chalk mark on the rod’s brass collar, which was apparently the only place she kept a record.
The ground did indeed grow soft. Idrin’s boots took the water to the ankle in the space of thirty paces. Lune did not appear to notice. She walked on with the rod held flat and her eyes on the grass, and every few paces she stopped, bent, pressed the ferrule into the turf, and wrote a figure on the paper…
