Kezra Venn stood on the sunlit dark rock overlook. She held the heavy brass eight-sided token steady on her open palm.
The mountain wind whipping off the Blackglass scarp tugged at the frayed hem of her woolen vest. He carried the bitter stone smell of the Saltglass flats below. Every instinct in her body screamed to demand the answer she had marched forty-four miles to hear. Was his name Davren Venn? Where is he? Is he alive?
Yet sixteen days of rigorous survey discipline clamped down on her tongue like an iron vice.
In the Kilnstep registry, Master Orran had taught his apprentices that an eager land-mapper who asked leading questions received only the answers she wished to hear. If you asked a tenant farmer whether his boundary ran to the old willow tree, he would nod eagerly to avoid dispute. If you asked him to show you the witness stone without pointing, truth revealed itself in his pause.
In a lawless border territory crawling with Cairn Host informants and desperate refugees, a leading question was worse than useless. It was an invitation to fraud. A clever rumor-seller would nod to any name you gave him if he thought it would buy him silver, food, or safe passage.
