## Chapter 489 — Old Work

Mirelen brought the rough sheets as well as the clean ones.

At home, with the field board propped beneath a lamp, the valley had become deceptively easy to draw. Channels joined where she remembered them joining. Broken terraces acquired continuous edges. The old route crossed the saddle and descended towards the lake in one confident line. She had stopped halfway through the copy and gone back to her original marks.

By morning, several gaps had been restored.

Aelira admitted her to the smaller working room and closed the door before the papers came out. Light from the platform fell across the table. Somewhere below, two people were moving something heavy along a wooden walkway, their progress interrupted by a low argument about which end should have gone first.

Mirelen laid the first sheet down and held its curling edge flat.

“We found cultivated ground inland. Terraces, water channels and rows of trees that Lethira thinks were an orchard. There is substantial old stonework at the lake outlet as well.”

Aelira drew her chair closer. She had expected an account of forest and unfamiliar animals, perhaps a river followed farther into the high ground. The sheet before her contained three groups of close, uneven lines arranged around a narrow lake. Mirelen's route entered from one corner and stopped at the outlet.

“Is any of it still being worked?”

“No. Trees are growing through the terraces. The channels are broken or choked, and parts of the route are almost gone. We found no houses.”

That last fact made Aelira look up. Mirelen set a second sheet beside the first: a rougher drawing of the slope, with branches in the channels and separate marks for exposed retaining stones. Where the clean copy offered a pattern, this one made clear how much of it they had pieced together through vegetation.

Aelira let her explain the day's route before asking anything else.

The first old work had been a shelf crossing a hillside. They had followed it to fitted stones at a small gully, then to a low ruin with a water-fed hollow. Farther up, the route had carried them over a saddle into the smaller valley. From there they had seen the terraces.

Mirelen stood to reach across the table. Her finger followed their descent, paused at the diversion above the fields, then moved lower towards the trees. She could describe how water still passed through part of the damaged work with more confidence than she could reproduce its shape. Twice she shifted a sheet to place one feature above another, finally abandoning the clean copy while she explained the fall of the ground.

“The upper diversion is clear,” she said. “Water is still going into a lined channel. There are branches from it towards the terraces. The structure at the lake outlet is a separate question. It may have held the water higher. We do not know whether it made the lake.”

Aelira studied the outlet sketch. A rectangular notch had been drawn in one exposed block. In isolation it looked almost too simple to deserve its own picture.

“Something fitted into this?”

“We think so. Timber, perhaps. There was nothing left in it.”

Mirelen put the sheet back in the order in which she had found the structures. The socket belonged at the end of the account. Starting with it made the whole excursion sound as though they had gone looking for a ruined water mechanism and found the supporting evidence along the way.

Aelira noticed the rearrangement but left it alone. She returned to the terraces instead. Three groups, at least; the northern slopes broader, the western ones narrower, another section heavily wooded. The drawing suggested a considerable undertaking even before the channels and route were included.

“How long since anyone tended it?”

“I cannot give you years. There are mature trees through the old work, but I don't know how quickly those trees grow there. Some of the planted rows survive among them. Others are broken up.”

Mirelen sat again. The chair creaked as she leaned back, and for the first time Aelira saw the fatigue beneath the orderly account. She had returned clean enough to conceal a day's walking, but her right hand kept opening and closing beside the papers.

“Your hand?”

“Too much copying. I would have finished sooner if the lake had stayed on one sheet.”

Aelira moved the remaining drawings within easier reach of her. The hand had been steady through the account. It was the repeated setting down and taking up of the pen afterwards that had apparently extracted payment.

“Tell me about the trees.”

Mirelen described the rows, the repeated spacing and the small hard fruit. Lethira had recognised the arrangement before either of them could identify what had been planted. They had taken nothing. Aelira pictured a few surviving trees between the walls; Mirelen corrected the impression by laying her hand across several terraces on the sketch. The rows had continued farther than the first group they found.

“She kept going back to them,” Mirelen said. “Even after we reached the waterworks. I understand why. I could imagine somebody clearing around one of those trees and beginning again.”

“Could they?”

“I don't know. It was the surviving trees that made me wonder.”

Aelira considered the water and labour it would take, and the people at the inlet.

Mirelen rubbed her thumb across a charcoal mark near the edge of the field sheet. It spread slightly. She stopped trying to remove it.

“We had a good day. A very good one. But we walked through a place for a few hours, and now every time I explain it, it sounds as though I understand more of it than I do.”

The noise below the platform stopped abruptly. A relieved voice announced that the awkward object had reached the turn. Aelira waited until the footsteps resumed before asking about the animals, giving Mirelen a part of the day that had required decisions instead of interpretation.

The large feathered browser had warned them away from its young. They had withdrawn and gone around it. No arrow had been loosed. Later, a heavy plated animal had crossed the broken outlet and rubbed against a stone, exposing more of the facing beneath the bank.

Aelira looked from Mirelen to the socket drawing.

“That is how you found this section?”

“It did some clearing for us. We waited until it had finished.”

There was pleasure in Mirelen's voice now. She described the animal's indifference, the fall of loose soil and the moment the supposed bank had become masonry. Aelira could follow that discovery more easily than the neat lines on the clean sheet. The little rectangle on the page acquired a setting: falling soil, a wet animal scraping its shoulder, two Wardens waiting at a distance until they could get close enough to look.

Mirelen gathered the sketches into a smaller spread.

“Lethira wants to return. So do I. We stopped because we had enough to bring home, not because we had reached the end of it.”

“Have you chosen when?”

“No.”

Aelira did not supply a date. She drew the earlier coastal report from its wrap and put it beside the inland sheets. The inlet marks were much smaller and simpler: posts, clearings, probable roofs. Mirelen's later message supplied what her own eyes had not seen there—people, boats and fishing equipment, observed by Ian after the Wardens withdrew.

“My father needs these together,” she said. “I want you there for the valley. He will ask questions I cannot answer from the drawings.”

Mirelen looked at the clean copy, then put it beneath the rough sheets.

“He can have the untidy version first.”

---

The King was still reading when they were admitted. Aelira had sent word asking for a private conversation, and he finished the paragraph beneath his hand before setting the document aside. His eyes moved from her to Mirelen and the broad field board under her arm.

“Warden Brookshade. Sit down.”

Mirelen inclined her head and took the chair nearest the clear end of the table. Aelira sat opposite her father. The room gave the drawings more space than her own had, though the island itself was still represented by a few fragments of worked coastline and one inland walk.

Aelira began with the inlet correction. She gave the King Ian's observations, the brevity of the visit and the route by which the account had reached her. There had been no conversation with the inhabitants. Their language, identity and the extent of their settlement were still unknown.

Her father listened, then placed the correction beside the earlier coastal report. He asked no second account of the disagreement at the holding. Aelira had brought him the observation, and Mirelen had brought something new.

She let the Warden lay it out.

This time Mirelen kept most of the day's route brief. She showed where they had entered the forest, where the old work began, and how the path led across the saddle. At the valley drawing she slowed. The King listened with one finger resting beside the lake, moving it only when he needed to follow a channel beneath another sheet.

Aelira watched him assess the work. He paid particular attention to the separate terrace groups and to the distance between the first water-fed ruin and the outlet. He asked about the width of the old route; Mirelen described its surviving variation and refused to turn that into an original cart road.

When she finished, he sat back.

“How many people would it take to build this?”

Mirelen's hands settled on the edge of the board.

“I cannot tell you. We don't know how much they built at once. One group might have added fields over a long period, or several groups might have worked different slopes. I cannot give you a workforce from the amount of stone still visible.”

He considered the terraces again. “Could the three groups have been in use at different times?”

“Yes. We saw where water went. We did not establish which walls were built first.”

Her father drew his hand away from the lake. He made no note of a population. Instead he asked Mirelen which finding she would put most weight on, and she answered with less hesitation than Aelira expected.

“The terraces and their channels. We saw repeated work across several slopes. The orchard adds to that. I would be more cautious about the lake structure, even though it is the largest thing we found.”

That answer seemed to alter how he looked at the drawings. The socket sheet, which had attracted his attention when Mirelen first uncovered it, stayed where it was. He drew the wider view nearer.

“And no dwellings,” he said.

“None that we recognised in the ground we covered.” Mirelen touched the end of their route. “We did not follow every branch or search the whole valley. Houses could have been elsewhere. They could have been built from materials that left less to see.”

He nodded and turned to Aelira.

“You put the inlet report beside it.”

“It is the only living community we know of there. They may know what this place was.”

He looked down at the earlier description of low buildings beneath the trees. For a moment Aelira expected a question about decline: people who had once shaped a valley now living behind a fish barrier on the coast. She realised she had already supplied half that story herself, despite knowing nothing about the rest of the settlement or the people beyond it.

Her father asked instead whether there was any connection between the route they had walked and the inlet.

“We have not traced one,” Mirelen said. “I would not know how to compare the building work either. I saw roofs from offshore. Ian described timber and plant material. That is all.”

“So we have two places.”

“Two places we have not connected.”

Mirelen began rolling the smaller drawings. The King asked to retain the clean copy and let her take the field sheets, then thanked her for coming herself.

At the door, Mirelen paused.

“I would like to go back and follow the route farther. I am not promising it leads to a town.”

“I have not ordered you to find one.”

“I know, Your Majesty. I wanted that said before the next report.”

She bowed and left. The King watched the door close, then looked at the clean drawing again. Aelira stayed in her chair.

---

“She thinks we are going to make an expedition out of her walk,” her father said.

“She has spent a great deal of time explaining what she has not found.”

“I heard her.”

Aelira looked at him. He was still studying the terrace groups, but the answer had enough edge to stop her from defending Mirelen against a criticism he had not made.

She waited. Beyond the room, somebody spoke quietly to an attendant and was directed elsewhere. The King lifted one corner of the map where it had caught beneath the inlet account, freeing it with more care than the paper required.

“I asked the chart-keeper about long voyages,” he said. “After you first brought me the island.”

Aelira straightened slightly.

“She does not know why. I asked about what ships and navigators could actually do. Carrying provisions for a long voyage is possible. Reaching a particular place across unknown sea is another matter. She found nothing that gives us a route.”

He told her no more of the old accounts than that they were uncertain. No approach had been made to the High Elves, and no captain had been asked to prepare a vessel. Aelira's first discomfort eased. He had continued thinking after she left him, as she had wanted him to, and had resisted turning his questions into activity at a harbour.

“Then nothing here creates a reason to hurry,” she said.

“Nothing about our ships. I cannot answer for anyone else's.” He laid the coastal account flat. “But I have no evidence of somebody racing us to this inlet, and I will not invent one.”

Aelira rested her forearms on the table. Her advice to the explorers had been easy to give: leave the inlet alone while she spoke to her father. She had wanted time in which no one appeared above unfamiliar roofs with all the advantages on one side. Now she had the conversation she had asked for, and the inland report made delay feel less like an answer.

“The people there could tell us something none of these surveys can,” she said. “Even a name for the valley. Whether they use it, remember it, avoid it.”

Her father looked up from the paper.

“And what would you offer them?”

“An honest introduction. An account of where the explorers have been, if they want it. No claim on their land.” She stopped before the answer grew into an imagined conversation. “I don't know what would interest them.”

The admission irritated her. She knew how to approach a neighbouring household, how to judge what lay beneath an invitation and what an unanswered letter might mean. Here she was trying to make a welcome from people who had supplied none of the familiar cues. Even describing the three travellers accurately would bring its own difficulties.

Her father left her time to think before speaking again.

“I am interested in this history too. I would like to know who built those walls. I don't think our wanting the answer gives your Wardens a duty to obtain it.”

“I was not proposing a duty.”

“Then let them know you would welcome the answer, not that you expect them to bring it back.”

Aelira looked away towards the door Mirelen had used. The Warden had told them what she wanted to do next, plainly and without asking to become their representative. Follow the route. Look at more ground. Come home with whatever it actually contained.

“I won't ask them to approach the inlet on our behalf,” she said. “The valley is something they might eventually ask about if a relationship develops. It need not be the reason they introduce themselves.”

Her father accepted that with a small movement of his head.

“And it need not be solved before they can introduce themselves either,” he said. “I do not require them to establish the ancestry of a fishing community before speaking to it.”

That drew a tired smile from her. The alternatives had begun to feel like endless inspection or a prematurely important visit. Neither was an appealing way to meet anyone. She could tell the explorers what concerned her, but the ruined valley would not provide an answer to every difficulty merely because it contained enough stone to impress a king.

“The decision still needs all three of them,” she said.

“Yes. You may tell them my interest in the ruins does not add a fourth person to their party.”

He began returning the earlier sheets to their wrap. The inland account would stay with the island material. He asked for no expedition, no additional witness and no further work before accepting what Mirelen had already brought.

Aelira helped him align the long sheet without creasing it through the lake. His hand paused at the edge of the orchard marks.

“Do you want to see it?” he asked.

She considered giving him the answer appropriate to a First Princess with other work waiting outside. It would have been easy to describe the risks of an additional visitor, the trouble of arranging the day, the things for which she would need Ian's agreement.

“Yes,” she said instead. “Very much.”

Her father glanced at her.

“So do I.”

For a moment neither moved. Then he let go of the sheet, and she finished folding it.

“Neither of us has been invited,” Aelira said.

“I had noticed.”