Before a map maker could pace a boundary, she had to know what was alive and what was dead within the stone.
Kezra knelt at the north-eastern corner of the first alpine staging clearing. Her gloves were tucked into her belt and her fingertips pressed against the dry-laid granite curb. The sixteen-pace Plot square that the old survey corps had leveled out of the mountain shoulder was clear enough to an untrained eye. A flat terrace of packed shale chips and gravel, held back from the gorge by two courses of heavy rock. But as Yseld Arken walked the outer edge with her hooked climbing staff. She probed each joint with the iron metal ring, the wood gave back a dull, stringy thud instead of the sharp ring of stone.
“Here,” Yseld said, crouching five paces down from the corner. She hooked the staff under a thick, gnarled loop of dark timber that forced its way between two granite slabs. “Larch. Three of them, running straight through the bedding seam from the timberline outside.”
Kezra scrambled over, Voss following with his short miner’s pick. The root was as thick as a man’s forearm, dark reddish-brown and smelling sharply of turpentine and wet moss. It had split the lower course of stonework, wedging itself into the load-bearing joint before spreading a fan of smaller hair-roots into the gravel terrace.
