Havenstar

by Glenda Larke

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

The Eight Stabilities are islands of order surrounded by corrupting, lethal chaos-and the chaos is encroaching. All Keris Kaylen ever wanted was to be a mapmaker like her father. Instead, she finds herself on the run into the realm of Carasma, the Unmaker Lord of Chaos. When her path crosses that of the traitorous aristocrat, Davron Storre, she's way out of her depth, with no idea that the magic map she's inherited might make a difference to the world...

Release date: December 21, 2017

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 453

Sample

In the beginning there was only Chaos—but this was displeasing to the Maker, so He took the matter of Chaos and moulded it to form the firmament and the stars, which was more pleasing to Him. But the Unmaker Lord looked on His work and was unhappy, for Chaos is Lord Carasma’s Realm, and only in the Unstable does he find joy.

—Creation, Book I: Passage 1, Phrases 2 & 3

Piers Kaylen drew rein at the top of the rise and looked across to the horizon. He sat unmoving in the saddle of his mount, and his emerald eyes missed nothing as he shifted his gaze away from the distant mountains and bordering roughs to the tree-spattered plain, and finally to the stolid buildings of the halt below. Beside him, his pack-horse—laden with the tools of his profession—shook a dusty head and then nudged its master’s leg as if to tell him to get moving again. It was a crossings-horse, with all the habitual bad-temper and impatience of its breed. Piers Kaylen, however, Master Mapmaker from Kibbleberry, was not a man to be hurried by his pack animal’s irascible temperament.

He surveyed the scene below with careful scrutiny. He saw nothing unstable although he searched for it, and he had thirty years of experience at recognising instability. He saw no flicker of colour, no veiled movement or mirage-ripple that would speak of danger, of change. The halt, built of uncut and undressed logs, still squatted toad-like beside a soak, shedding bark from shingles and walls like scales of unwanted skin, exactly as it had done when he’d passed this way on his outward journey. The spiked poles of the stockade surrounding the buildings were still level one with the other, their tips as even as a ruled compass heading; no signs of Unstable attack there either.

‘Your luck holds, Pickle my friend,’ he thought aloud. ‘Three years in one spot, and not a hint of ley. You chose well.’

He knew enough not to be complacent. There were no paths to and from the halt, no tracks leading to the building, no trace of the passage of man or animal. The blue-grey grasses and the scrubby prickle bushes around the stockade looked as if nothing had disturbed them for a generation, which was all the indication needed for him to know that instability was as powerful here as ever. This was no place of Order, for all that the buildings still stood, untouched and untainted, three years after they had been built. Here, nothing could be taken for granted. This was the Unstable after all.

Piers urged his mount down the gentle slope and the pack-horse followed obediently. Where the feet of the two beasts had crushed the grass a moment before, the grey leaves sprang back into shape as the plants quivered and shook off the effects of their violation the way an animal shakes water from its coat. Where the weight of the horses had impacted the soil, sand grains stirred and loosened themselves, their irritation shivering the ground like a heat mirage.

Piers took no notice. In the Unstable, that was normal.

The jangle of the bell-pull brought Pickle himself out to swing open the gate of the stockade. Piers knew the haltkeeper well enough not to be fazed by the nightmarish personification of a troll rather than a man, and grinned. ‘Greetings, Pickle. Still here, I see.’

‘How goes it?’ Pickle asked in return, using the ritual words of greeting to all ley-lit, and he accompanied the phrase with a kinesis of welcome to a friend: right hand moving from heart to diaphragm, then extended palm outwards.

The words and gesture may have been ritual, but Piers knew a full answer was expected. ‘Ah, you’re secure enough this night,’ he said as he rode into the safety of the enclosed courtyard and swung himself down from his mount. ‘There’s no change I can see, not within twenty leagues east, anyway.’

‘The Wanderer?’

‘That bitch travels east this season. Moving fast, and the emanations from the Snarled Fist are even nastier than usual with a number of new off-shoots, all as mean as Chaos, but none of it’s coming this way. Your halt will stand a little longer, with the Maker’s grace. How’s the company?’

‘Building up. Still a little early in the season for much in the way of pilgrims, but there are one or two small fellowships in, with a devotions-chantor among ’em too. There’ll be a kinesis session in the common room after supper.’

Piers grimaced. ‘Thanks for the warning. I’ll stay in my room. You do have a vacancy?’ He began to unsaddle his mount without even waiting for an answer; there was always a place for a mapmaker to lay his bedroll even when the beds were all taken.

‘Oh, aye. No worries there. You can take the room you had last time.’ Pickle signalled a reluctant stable boy to come and help unstrap the bundles from the pack-horse. The horse curled its lip back and displayed its discoloured teeth in an evil grin.

‘Stop that,’ Piers growled and pulled in warning at the stiff hairs of the animal’s striped mane.

‘Join me for supper,’ Pickle said.

Piers nodded his thanks, knowing his meal and his lodging would be free; no ley-lit mapmaker ever paid a reckoning in a halt. It was their knowledge that helped haltkeepers stay alive, after all.

Pickle stomped off on thickened legs, the heels of his bare feet hitting the beaten earth of the yard like battering rams. The haltkeeper weighed three hundred pounds, and every pound was solid flesh and muscle. Pity that his hide is that colour, Piers reflected, not for the first time. Green made people think of creatures such as wart-toads or jowled water monitors, which was a shame, because Pickle was very much a man for all that he looked like something that lurked in the dark of age-old slime beneath a bridge.

Keeping an eye on the snapping teeth of the pack animal, the stable boy led the two horses away. In the gathering dusk their stripes blended into the perpendicular lines of the stockade wall behind them. Piers, staff in his hand, watched for a moment, then headed for his room and a much-needed wash.

Supper was a stew, over-laden with yams and onions and heavily spiced in a vain attempt to hide the stringiness of the dried meat it contained. Meat in the halts of the Unstable was never fresh.

As usual the conversation in the common room centred around the latest peregrinations of ley lines. Pickle was not the only person interested in what Piers had to say. Two couriers, a guide and a trader, all ley-lit men, wandered over to exchange a word with the mapmaker and to learn what they could of the changes. With none of them was he particularly forthcoming even though he was acquainted with them all. ‘My information is for sale,’ he told them, ‘as usual. I have old maps of every area north of the Wide, including the best Wide crossings. I can sketch in the latest changes now as well, or you can have properly updated maps within a couple of weeks from my shop. You all know my place in—’

‘—in Kibbleberry on the South Drumlin Road in the First Stab,’ one of the couriers finished for him, grinning. He turned to the others, saying, ‘Come on, you load of misbegotten Unstabler carrion-eaters, you ought to know by now you’ll get nothing out of Piers Kaylen without paying for it.’

‘Bloody freeloaders,’ Piers said without rancour, addressing Pickle once they were gone. ‘They want the best information to save their hides, but they hate to have to pay for it. They forget I’ve been out there in the Unstable for three months, risking my neck half a dozen times a day. I was attacked by Minions near the Fist, nearly lost my life fording the Flow, got bitten by a snake-devil within a leyflame’s throw of the Wanderer—do they think I do it all for nothing?’

Pickle laughed. ‘A normal trip, eh? By all that’s dark in Chaos, Piers, I reckon you must be the toughest bit of leather ever to roam the Unstable. There’s not many can say they’ve lasted as long as you have. And often alone, what’s more.’

‘True.’ He felt a quiet pride. ‘Thirty years I’ve been at it. And I reckon it may well die with me too. That damn son of mine’ll never make a decent surveyor. Maker knows what sort of maps he’ll turn out, left to himself.’

‘Seemed tough enough to me the few times you’ve brought him here.’

‘Nah, he’s all bluster. He’s about as tough as melting sugar-cakes.’ He thrust out his left leg and waved a hand at it. Flesh and bone ended just below the knee and the stump nestled inside a leather cup attached to a wooden peg leg. ‘This happened twenty years back, and it never stopped me. Saw my own foot disappear down the gullet of one of the Wild and I survived. That son of mine winces when his hipbone nudges a pebble under his bedroll!’ He sopped up the last of the stew with a piece of bread and shrugged. ‘He’ll run the business into the ground when I’m gone. My girl’s got twice his gumption and it’s a jiggin’ shame she’s the wrong sex. Jiggin’ shame too, that Chantry took the other son we had, the over-encoloured bastards. Still, why worry, eh? I don’t suppose I’ll be around to see what happens to Kaylen the Mapmaker’s twenty years from now.’ He paused suddenly, head cocked in disbelief as he listened. ‘Chaosdamn, Pickle—you’ve never got a baby in here?’

From somewhere above the unmistakable sound of a hungry infant wailed down into the common room.

Pickle gave a grimace that made deep green furrows in his face. ‘What’s the Halt coming to, eh? Yep, it’s a babe right enough.’ He lowered his voice. ‘The parents are a young couple, making the Long Pilgrimage, so they say. But the babe’s Unbred, or I’ll be pink and white myself. They are certainly keeping it away from yon chantor.’ He nodded at the man who had appropriated the room’s most comfortable chair by the fire. He was dressed in the scarlet and mauve robes of Chantry and was reading the text of a book with the aid of a gold wire-rimmed lorgnette. Every now and then he shook his yellow silk stole to emphasise the importance and holiness of what he read, and the bells along the hem tinkled.

‘So what are they doing dragging a baby all the way across the Unstable?’ Piers asked.

‘Looking for sanctuary in Havenstar, or I’ve missed my guess.’

He shook his head in disbelief. ‘Poor souls! Ah, Pickle, when will people stop believing in miracles? They’ll get themselves and their babe tainted, and all for a dream that doesn’t exist.’

Pickle gave the mapmaker an embarrassed look. ‘Maybe it’s a dream worth having.’

‘Ley-life! Not you too! Next you’ll be telling me there are winged fire-elementals sitting on your kitchen hearth.’ He yawned. ‘My friend, I’m for my room before that chantist kinesis-maker over there really gets going. Just listening to his bloody bells is bad enough.’

Pickle regarded the red and mauve figure pensively. ‘Don’t knock ’em, Piers. Kinesis devotions stave off the predations of instability and I’m damned sure they keep the Wild at bay, too.’

‘So they reckon. I wonder myself if they don’t just make the Wild flipping wilder. Anyway, I’m off.’

As he limped away, his wiry frame all muscle and sinew, in the eyes of those in the room who watched him go there was both envy and respect. Only his swinging walk betrayed his lack of a foot. The polished black staff he carried was more ornament than necessity. Piers Kaylen was a legend: an Unstabler who had survived thirty years of crossings, a mapmaker who often travelled alone in places most men would not go without an armed escort, a man who possessed all the instincts of a hunted animal and yet had the talents of a hunter. It was said that even the worst of the Minions of Chaos slunk away rather than face the throwing knives Piers wore strapped to his chest, at his hip and, so it was rumoured, in his single boot.

He was halfway undressed, stripped to the waist with his knives lying on his bed, when there was a knock at the door. Habit made him pluck up one of the knives as he went to answer it. He expected no attack and scented no danger, but you did not stay alive in the Unstable by being careless about anything.

‘Who is it?’ he asked. He laid his face against the door and was immediately aware of the faint vibrations of wrongness given off by one of the Unbound.

‘They call me the Mantis,’ came the reply. ‘You probably noticed me down in the common room. I want to talk to you ’bout a map.’

He unbarred the door with a fair idea of who it was he would see. The man standing there was, like Pickle, one of the Unbound, or an Untouchable as they were sometimes called, and the Mantis was an appropriate name. Piers had indeed noticed him in the common room. At seven feet tall, with limbs and body as elongated and as thin as the insect whose name he bore, he would have been hard to miss. He had to fold himself up to enter the room, and there was no way he could stand erect once inside. The ceiling was too low.

Piers put his knives away and waved a hand at the bed. ‘Sit down. You want a map? Are you buying on your own account?’

‘Well, no. I mean, I don’t want to buy at all, really. I want to sell, see.’ He shoved a hand inside his shirt as he sat and withdrew a mapskin wrapped around a rod of wood.

‘I don’t buy maps,’ Piers said. ‘I make ’em.’ But he reached out a hand to take the skin nevertheless. One could always learn something from another man’s chart.

He’d spent a lifetime dreaming about this, the wonderful instant when his hands would unroll a trompleri map and he would feast his eyes on magic. Yet as he opened up the skin and the dream became reality, he could not believe the moment had arrived. He stared at the map in his hands, felt his jaw dropping, and still could not believe it. A trompleri map. One of the legendary wonders that he’d only half-believed existed now unfolded before him in all its glory…

‘Where—where did you get this?’ he stammered finally. His knees gave out and he sat down heavily on the bed next to the Mantis.

‘What does it matter? What I want to know is, are you hankering after such like?’ The man poked his lean features into Piers’ face. His nose and chin and jaw were all sharp-edged, insect-like. A long-fingered hand seized his arm, circling it. There was surprising power there, even though his wrist was scarcely wider than a broom handle, and each finger as slim as a pipe-stem. ‘Do you want to buy it, master mapmaker?’

Piers strove to regain both his native caution and to avoid shuddering. He hated to be touched by one of the Unbound, even though the man was careful not to cause him pain by brushing against his bare skin. ‘Well, it’s not really of that much value to me,’ he said. ‘I deal with the land north of the Wide; this appears to be some place south of the Graven. Who in heaven’s ordering wants to go there? That’s even beyond the Eighth Stab.’

‘Don’t fool with me, mapmaker! I know the value of a trompleri map to one of your ilk. You’d sell your soul to have one of these, in the hope you can ferret out its secret, so you can produce the like. How much will you give me for it?’

‘I don’t carry much money with me. What need have I of money in the Unstable? I keep what meagre wealth I have at home in the First.’

‘And you know full well, you do, that I can’t go that far into a stability. Quite apart from the fact that any stab makes me as sick as a cat with worms, I’ve no wish to challenge Chantry, now have I? How much you got on you?’

‘Hardly more than a handful of coppers. Just enough to tip a stable boy or two and buy me a meal or two between the kinesis chain and home. Nothing more.’

‘Come now, any shrewd-nosed mapmaker is going to travel with a little stash for emergencies, right? Don’t take me for some newly-tainted lad who doesn’t know his way about the Unstable and who’s never met an Unstabler. I know what’s what. You have more than a few coppers hidden about you.’

‘Well, three silvers and a gold. That’s all. And yes, I’d part with them to own a trompleri map, but you must know it’s worth more than that.’

‘I’ll take the coins and your nag for it.’

‘My pack-horse?’

‘No, your mount.’

He was genuinely dismayed. ‘That mare and I have been together a long time. We’ve been through a lot. Besides, it’s a crossings-horse. Ley-lit Unstablers don’t take kindly to other folk having them.’

‘There’s no law agin it. That’s my deal. And it’s a generous one. Take it or leave it.’

‘I ask myself the reason for your, er, generosity.’

‘Don’t be daft. You don’t need me to spell it out. I’m in need of cash and a mount. My nag took a tumble and is as lame as an old man’s pecker. I’ll give her to you, if you want.’

He was silent, thinking. The map was obviously stolen. He’d never be able to admit to ownership of it, or resell it. The fact that the Mantis was in a hurry to rid himself of it also seemed to indicate the real owner was only a step behind him.

But Piers’ hands itched to hold it, his mind begged to analyse it, his mapmaker’s soul longed to solve its mysteries…

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll buy it. And I’ll take your lame nag. Come back in half an hour and I’ll have the money and the papers ready for you.’

By the time the Mantis returned, Piers had retrieved his money from its hiding place and had the horse’s ownership scrip ready. Wordlessly, he handed them over and received the map and another horse scrip in return. As he checked the skin to make sure it was the same one he had first seen, he said casually, ‘Don’t think to divert your followers to me, Mantis. I’m too wily to be taken like that. This map disappears the moment you leave this room. They wouldn’t find it on me, and then they’d still be after you, madder than before.’

‘I don’t have the dribbling tongue of a betrayer,’ the Mantis said indignantly. ‘No one’ll ever hear aught from me, even if they ask.’

‘Look after my horse. If ever you want to sell her back to me, send word to Kibbleberry. Her name’s Ygraine.’

‘A high-falutin’ handle, that.’ Legend—or was it history?—said that there had once been a great Margravine of Malinawar called Ygraine. She was said to have led an invasion into Yedron with particularly nasty results for the Yedronese monarch of the time, simply because she’d thought herself insulted. The Mantis evidently did not think much of the choice of name, but he said, ‘I’ll take care of her. She’s my passage out of here.’ He tucked away the paper and the money, nodded briefly, and let himself out.

Piers hardly noticed his going. Instead he pored over his acquisition, revelling in the beauty and workmanship, touching it with reverent fingers, already looking forward to the moment when he would share his awe, his joy, with Keris. And Thirl, of course.

Reluctantly, he secreted it away in the hiding place he used for valuables when travelling. He was hoping that he would have another one or two visitors, people wanting to buy his maps this time, and he did not want anyone to see this purchase.

Within the next hour he made four sales of maps roughly updated with the latest information, then—just as he was about to spread his bedroll out on the straw mattress and turn in for the night—there was another knock at the door. As before, the habit of a lifetime made him pick up one of his knives and caution made him ask the visitor to identify himself, but he was tired and he didn’t notice the emanations that might have warned him what waited for him on the other side of the door.

The name given in reply meant nothing, but he thought he recognised the voice of one of the chambermaids and unbarred the door anyway. After all, no one really expected to be attacked inside a halt. Certainly no one expected to confront one of the Minions of Chaos within its walls, especially not when there were kinesis devotions being performed in the common room to ward off just such evils. And most of all no one would have dreamed of seeing one of the Wild…

Yet no sooner had he lifted the bar than the door was flung open with immense force, catching him across the chest and arm. His knife went flying and before he could utter a sound he was flattened by his attacker and two clawed hands the size of dinner plates were around his throat, squeezing, crushing his windpipe. It happened so fast—and his assailant was so unnaturally strong—that he never had a chance.

Even as he struggled, even as he battered at the thickened nose and gouged at the yellow eyes, he glimpsed the Minion standing with folded arms behind her pet. He saw her blood-soaked nails tapping impatiently on her bloodied forearms, and knew he was going to die. His only thought was one of surprise it was all going to end this way, in the relative safety of a halt, and not out there in the Unstable somewhere as he had always thought.

And no more did the lands beyond the sea send their sailors; nor yet did the Margravate of Malinawar see its own sails return on the wind, decks piled high with the fragrant oils of Premantra and the golden cloth of Brazis. No more did the caravans come from Yedron and Bellisthron and the lands behind Beyond. All about was Ley. All about was unstable, and Humankind feared to cross. Malinawar was as eight rafts afloat on a storm-soaked ocean, and none knew the way to swim.

—The Rending I: 7: 8-11

On the outskirts of Kibbleberry village a party of Tricians rode past the mapmaker’s shop at a brisk trot: six women and five men, guarded by twenty of the Defenders and followed by a baggage train of servants and kinesis-chantors. The Tricians might have been clad in the normal brown and gray of the unencoloured, but their clothes were of the finest deer leathers, soft linens and plush goat wool; the domain-symbols they wore around their necks were of gold, some even studded with jewel-stones although it was doubtful Chantry would have approved of that. The Defenders, all of them as noble as those they guarded, were lavishly accoutred and armed.

In the shop, Keris Kaylen laid her work aside to watch them pass. Even the servants are better dressed and mounted than anyone in Kibbleberry, she thought. She felt no envy. Tricians and their retinue were as remote from her as the forests of the Eighth Stability, even though fellowships such as this one passed along the road often enough. She’d never spoken to one of their number and had no reason to think she ever would; none of them ever stopped. If they had needed a map, the purchase would have been done long since through an intermediary. Tricians rarely made commercial transactions themselves.

These were bound for the Unstable, yet they seemed happy, laughing and joking and flirting and never thinking about the dangers ahead once they crossed the kinesis chain. They were young, they were beautiful, they seemed carefree—yet Keris would not have changed places with any of them. Too many of these same young men would lose their lives one day as Defenders; too many of those young women would raise their children alone, only to see their sons die or be tainted in the Unstable just as their husbands had been. The very word ‘Trician’ was derived from some longer and more ancient expression supposed to have meant ‘of my father’s arming.’ Tricians were born to bear arms, or to marry those who did, just as their parents had. It was not a life Keris envied.

Better, she thought, to be a canny ley-lit mapmaker like her father, who was scornful of noisy young Tricians and their arms and their delicately-bred horses. ‘In the Unstable they and their chantors just attract trouble,’ he had remarked once. ‘Better to be solitary. Wiser to be quietly elusive, than to be challenging. Never take your pilgrimage with a guide that hires Defenders, Keri. It means the fellow doesn’t know his job.’

One of the young men saw her looking out of the shop door and winked. The girl next to him giggled and said something that made him laugh, then they were all gone from her sight. With a shrug, Keris lowered her eyes once more to her work. None of them mattered.

And then her head jerked up again as she realised what she had just seen—beyond the road, beyond the fields and the wood. Or rather what she had not seen.

There was a line of mountains beyond the stab, and on a clear day it was possible to see the whole range from the shop. Keris had been able to name all the main peaks since she was just four years old: the Jag, the Oven, the Shadow…the Axe Head…the Snood and the Wimple. All told, they were the Impassables. And now the Axe Head was missing. For three days they’d all been hidden by cloud, but now that the weather had cleared—

In a daze she slipped off her stool and went to stand in the doorway, to stare. It was true. It really had gone. There was the range, there were all the other peaks, but the Axe Head had vanished. There was a space on the skyline that gaped vacantly like the cavity left by a pulled tooth.

She whirled from the door, wanting to run inside to tell someone, but then stopped. There was only her mother, and it would be better if she was not bothered. Not now. Keris sighed. Not for the first time, she wished her father was home.

And then she remembered the roof-mender at work returfing part of the barn roof. He wasn’t a learned or particularly knowledgeable man, but at least he was somebody to tell. She left the shop to go to the barn, walking around the outside of the house so as not to disturb her mother. She found Articus Medrop arranging cut turf on his hod at the foot of his ladder.

‘Master Medrop—’ she began, but he didn’t let her finish.

‘Good turf I’ve got you, look.’ He showed her some, waggling it at her. He was all lean muscle: arms, shanks and calves, even his face tautly sinewed. ‘You tell your Dad when he comes home. This came from Jeckitt’s top field, and it’s full of snow bells and mauves. Your roof’ll be a picture next spring. Had Carasma’s own job trying to persuade the Rule Office to let me cut it, I can tell you!’

She interrupted. ‘Master Medrop, have you seen the Axe Head?’

He looked at her imperturbably. ‘Oh aye. That I have. Or not seen it, more like. It’s gone.’ He bent to stack more turf on the hod. ‘Best forgotten now, lass.’

‘Forgotten? How can one forget a mountain?’

‘Easy. It’s gone, hasn’t it? ’Twas far away, and never did concern us even when it was there. Beyond Order, the Impassables. As long as stability lives—and it will if we live right—why worry your head about it? Lass, it’s better you concern yourself with that there roof beam in the barn. Won’t last more than another year or two, and all my returfing ain’t going to repair a beam that’s about to crumble.’

She allowed herself to be diverted. ‘We did plant a replacement tree about five years back, but the Rule Office says we have to wait until that one’s been growing ten years before we can cut another for the beam. And we’ve had our name down for a lightning-struck tree, or a wind-felled one, but the list of people waiting is an ell long. It’ll be years before we get a beam.’ It was a sore point with her father, who thought the Rule Office ought to be more flexible about allowing wood to be imported from the Unstable.

Articus grunted. ‘They won’t like it if the roof of your barn falls in. That’ud make a change to the landscape, and what then? I’ll mention the state of the beam to the Office. Mayhap they’ll reconsider.’

She thanked him and went back to the shop, but couldn’t resist another glance up at the snow-dredged peaks of the mountains. They’d always seemed so unchangeable, so impervious to everything, even time. She couldn’t recall ever seeing any alterations to their outlines, yet perhaps it had been an unreal expectation to assume they would never change. After all, they no longer seemed to resemble the objects they were named after… Snoods were the accepted way for a married woman to contain her hair at the back of her head, but no snood she had ever seen resembled the Snood Mountain of the Impassables. If anything it looked more like a chantor’s tricorne. And the Wimple bore no resemblance to the obligatory headgear of widows either.

For the first time, she wondered just how many changes there’d been in the thousand years since the Rending, but it was not an idea that she wanted to dwell on.

With one last lingering glance at the new silhouette of the Impassables, she returned to her stool and her work.

It was warm for the first day of summer. Sometimes, there in the First Stability in the shadow of the mountains, the season’s warmth came late, but that year it promised to be otherwise. Sunlight shafted in through the open door of the shop to warm the cat where it dozed in a furry ball on the floor near a pile of vellum squares. The breeze that nudged a scroll of parchment along the counter top was pleasantly balmy.

Lightly dressed, with her arms bare and her skirt immodestly hitched up, a habit which might have prompted the Trician’s wink, she enjoyed the feel of the sun on her legs as she laboured over a master chart.

She dipped a fine-haired brush into a pot of paint and hesitated briefly before dabbing colour on to the oblong sheet of parchment pinned to the mapboard in front of her. The hesitation was an ingrained ritual, something she did without real thought, in deference to her father. He disliked her adding colour to maps, and had only accepted the idea after