Lune walked east from the Hold at night with the survey rod over one shoulder, because the Survey was Lune’s trade and the Hollowed camp was on the Caul road, and the Caul road had never once been surveyed past the boundary stone. Nobody had asked the Survey to go there. Lune had asked herself, in the Survey House that stood inside the reach at Lantern Ford, with the rod on its trestle and the chain coiled in its box, and had found, after some reflection, that a surveyor who was afraid to measure a road was not a surveyor at all.
The night was clear and very cold. The frost lay on the Caul road in a silver crust that broke under Lune’s boots with a small clean sound, like a crust being cracked by a careful child. Lune counted the breaks as they went. Each stride was a pace, and each fifty paces was a rod-length, and each rod-length was marked in the survey book in a small square hand that could be read by a lamp at twenty paces and by no one else. Lune’s book had a great many marks in it. None of them had been made by a Chancery surveyor. All of them had been made by Lune.
