Ulvan Dret lifted the iron shoe of his leveling staff and used its tip to draw a clean, rapid line in the white limestone dust between their boots, tracing the spine of the eastern ridges from Splitflint pass down toward the Hushwood timber belt. With three quick strokes, he notched the positions of the high cols and the wind gaps, demonstrating the casual, easy ground shape of a man who could draw the Spine blindfolded.
“I hold Quarter rank,” Ulvan said, answering the first half of Kezra’s question without ornament or pause. “Two hundred and fifty-six paces square, one hundred and twenty-eight paces deep, with a seven-day global lock whenever I speak the final count. Thirty-seven completed circuits across five distinct ecologies, from river silts to subalpine scree. As for the painted freight map hanging above the iron stove at Splitflint Hostel—and the printed handbills the hostel keeper was selling to passing wagon drivers for two copper bits apiece—I never touched a brush to either of them.”
“Your cut pattern was on the stone,” Kezra said, her voice cool, precise, and unbending. “Two days south of the old toll booth, where sixty-four paces of hostel road paving was dropped across bare fiery glass above an ambush hollow. I measured the outside corner anchor myself with my measuring tongs. Three chisels, deep-beveled on the northern leg, with a double witness nick on the east face. The same hand cut the corner marks on the dead pine parcel in Hushwood.”
