Rather than relying on Yseld’s bark forensics alone, Kezra Venn walked thirty paces down both forks of the trail to examine the physical ground evidence.
As a land-mapper, Kezra knew that a deceitful pioneer could fake a blaze on a pine trunk. But he couldn’t fake the complex civil building signed names that decades of honest travel left in the soil. A road was not merely a clearing between trees. It was a drainage watershed, a compaction history, and a wear pattern on stone and timber.
She knelt in the needle duff at the entrance to the freshly blazed eastern track.
The signs of recent heavy use were everywhere. Deep, parallel ruts cut through the moss into the underlying blue clay, their edges sharp and uncollapsed, bearing the distinct, cross-hatched tread pattern of heavy military freight tires. The ruts were barely three days old, matching the heavy copper-wire supply trains that Master Harlen had reported at the weighing station.
Kezra followed the ruts sixty paces down the slope to where the track crossed a small, seasonal creek.
Here, a newly built log under-road drain spanned the water. Kezra crawled beneath the bank and tapped the stringers with her small horn mallet. The timbers were green, unseasoned pine, felled within the fortnight, their bark still dripping raw turpentine into the stream. There was zero moss on their undersides, zero silt compaction behind the abutments, and—most tellingly—the roadside drainage ditches had been dug with iron trenching spades to slope against the natural…
