Chapter 9: The First Mandates of the New Order

The supply manifests arrived in Elwin's office on the fourteenth day of the new year, stacked in three neat towers that reached his windowsill and smelled of fresh ink and pine resin from the northern warehouses. Someone had already sorted them by province. Someone had already color-coded the borders.

He sat down and looked at them for a long time before he touched anything.

His office was in the Citadel's eastern cartographic wing — a room he had been given, not assigned, the distinction made quietly clear by the administrator who showed him to it three weeks after the victory celebration, handing him a key and a brief document outlining his responsibilities and then pausing at the door to say, with genuine warmth, that General Vane had specifically requested him for the post. Elwin had thanked the man. He had sat in the empty room for a quarter hour before unpacking his instruments, and during that time he had thought about Thessaly, and the relay station, and the rain, and then he had stopped thinking about those things and started measuring the window's light instead.