Chapter 3: Thirty Years of War, Mapped in Scars

The Mirewood began as a suggestion — a darkening at the horizon, the smell of wet bark and rot carried on wind that had traveled a long way to reach them — and then it was simply present, the way forests insisted on being, without ceremony or transition. One mile they rode through cleared farmland gone fallow; the next, the trees were close enough to touch from the saddle, and the light had changed its quality from open to particular.

Elwin had mapped this corridor from survey reports and secondhand accounts, which meant he had mapped it incorrectly in several ways he was only now discovering. The reports described the Mirewood as a mature mixed forest, which was accurate, but they had not noted the character of the destruction woven into it — the black-scarred stumps that stood at intervals among the living trunks like monuments to an event no one had commemorated, the places where second-growth birch crowded dense and pale over what had clearly been a clearing, where something had been and then been removed. He wrote corrections in the margin of his working sheet. The horse moved beneath him at a steady walk that vibrated through his wrist and into the pen-stroke, and his notes had a trembling quality he would not be able to revise out later.

"You're holding the pen wrong," Sorra Dael said, from his left.