For three unbroken days. Meanwhile, the dismantled timbers of Checkpoint Three were hauled away on farm wains, a surveying expedition moved along the outer edge of the ten thousand acres of restored marshland. At its head walked Nessa Vale, carrying her sight transit and brass-jointed Gunter’s chain. Beside her walked Tomas Reed, his ash pack frame laden with iron chisels, stone-mallets, and bags of volcanic cement high-pressure lime.
Following them walked twelve village council keepers, their heads bare, their coats stained with ditch-silt, each carrying his family’s recovered parchment patent.
“Here is Monument Sixteen,” Nessa called out, stopping by a stale drainage swale three miles south of the raised stone road. She checked the bearings on her drafting board against Alia Sen’s old land-tax map. “The original charter says: At the confluence of the Black Sluice and the Willow Ditch, sixty rods south of the Roman under-road drain, lies the boundary stone of the Bitter-Reeds common pasture.”
Tomas and Sile Rook waded into the waist-deep black mud of the swale with iron probing rods. Two paces out, Tomas’s steel rod struck stone with a sharp, ringing clink. Five feet down in the choking silt lay the ancient granite pillar, toppled and buried by Baron Kray’s court guards twenty years ago to erase the legal boundaries of the common pasture.
