The pale silver sheen that rose from the rag-paper leaf was neither bright nor violent, but in the shadowed inside of the ruined boundary house it caught the eye like a candle struck in a cellar. It was the class soft glow. The clear, quiet glow that warmed the thick parchment whenever the bonded notebook recognized a legal historical boundary line that had once been surveyed by a royal predecessor.
“Kezra,” Yseld hissed, her voice sharp as a snapped twig.
Kezra didn’t ask questions. With the trained reflex of a mapper who had survived three separate Cairn Host pursuits across the Blackglass ridges, she brought the heavy leather cover down with a muffled thud. She drove the brass tongue into the iron buckle. Then she pulled the strap tight before the silver light could paint the underside of the briar canopy.
Above them, through the roofless gaps in the cut stone walls, the distant creak of a heavy timber crane sounded from the southern outer gatehouse of Stonewake.
Yseld flattened herself against the inner doorpost, raising her hooked climbing staff just enough to clear the brambles. Meanwhile, she peered through the leafy screen toward the castle walls. Two hundred paces away, high on the hard speckled granite low roof wall of the gate tower, two Cairn Host lookouts in dark wool surcoats had leaned out over the crenellations. One of them held a long, polished brass spyglass to his eye, slowly sweeping the dead ground hollow where the boundary house…
