While Paxa prepared a pot of hot barley water and Fellis checked the harness buckles on the mule, Kezra Venn spread Ulvan Dret’s survey worksheets across the lime planks for a careful audit.
In her mother’s workshop, Kezra had spent years auditing kiln ledgers. She looked for the tiny discrepancies that revealed when an apprentice had guessed at the firewood weight instead of using the scales. A dishonest potter always made his numbers too round. An inexperienced boy made them too wild. But a clever, overworked clerk who wanted to hide an unperformed measurement always fell into a specific psychological trap. He repeated familiar patterns from an earlier, trusted sheet.
She focused on Ulvan’s worksheet titled Northern Timber Hall — Route Soundings at Thirty-Two Paces.
On its face, the sheet was a triumph of cartographic drafting. Sixteen grid intersections were laid out in a perfect four-by-four module, representing a sixty-four-pace Reach square across a wooded hillside. Below each intersection map point sat four neat columns. Topsoil Depth, Resin-Clay Pan, Fractured Shale, and Greywacke Basement.
Fellis peered over her shoulder, admiring the clean, calligraphic numerals. “Look at those fractions, Kezra. Three-eighths of a pace, five-sixteenths, seven-twelfths. His penmanship looks like it was cut into copper plate.”
