Dawn broke over the fen not with sunlight, but with a slow, gray lifting of the fog that revealed the endless waste of dead reeds.
Nessa Vale stood on the crest of an ancient peat dike, three miles west of Checkpoint Three. The wind was stiff and cold. It whipped the skirts of her oilskin coat against her boots. But her hands were steady as she worked. To set a twenty-four-inch brass sighting scope in soft peat needed more than leveling screws. The earth yielded under the slightest pressure.
Tomas had driven three-foot oak stakes deep into the clay beneath the peat, sawing their heads level with a small hand-saw. Only upon these solid timber footings did Nessa plant the iron-shod shoes of her ash tripod.
“If the peat shifts half an inch,” Nessa said, her voice carrying that crisp, skilled calm distance, “the reading drifts twelve minutes of arc. At five miles, twelve minutes of arc throws the boundary line four hundred paces into the river.”
Tomas stood four hundred yards away, waist-deep in the yellow marsh grass. He held a ten-foot iron-shod leveling staff perfectly plumb against his shoulder. His feet were frozen in his wading boots, but he held the painted wood motionless. His scarred wrist locked was tight against the staff’s oak face. Between them, stretched taut above the mud, ran a hundred-foot land-mapper’s chain of hardened steel links. Pulling a steel chain through marsh reeds needed forty pounds of nonstop lateral draft, and Tomas’s back…
