The charcoal metal pen hovered half an inch above the lower right corner of the freshly inked slate. Kezra Venn stood in the cold morning light of Day eighty-five. She looked down at the amazing two-story height of the Needlehouse map hall preserved within the bonded fibers of her notebook.
Beside her, Fellis Dain was already wrapping the measuring cords. His young face was flushed with the lingering excitement of their achievement. “Think of what this gives us, Kez,” the boy said. He nodded toward the cut stone walls that rose fifty feet into the pale blue mountain sky. “A fortified station with twenty-nine paces of dry vaults below and three-foot cut stone walls above. If Captain Vale brings forty cavalry up the logging road, we could bar the oak doors, hold the high window row slit windows with Yseld’s spear and hunting bows, and keep an active survey base right on the spine of the mountains. Nobody could dislodge us.”
Kezra didn’t lower the metal pen. She looked past Fellis toward the high stone wall-brackets inside the upper hall where thirty-eight bundles of tarred canvas lay resting in the dry mountain air.
“Fellis,” she said quietly, her voice cutting through the frosty breeze. “What happens if Marshal Krail captures another map maker who carries an unbroken military compass?”
