Midway through matching the first of her soil samples to its color and writing down the code for determining which shade of brown it was precisely, Kiarn walked up behind her.

“Oh, you’re very serious about this, then.”

“Stop talking to me, please.”

“Fine, fine, I’ll not interfere with your work.” He sat down and crossed his legs, leaning back on his palms. “So his name is Tadg.”

“Tadg Curran, yes.” Merel held up a sample to the light, rubbing the grit between her fingers and marking down what she thought of it in the journal for samples, then describing the location.

“How do you know if it’s…gritty or silky or clay-like?”

“Feeling and experience.” Merel had decided this dark, silky alluvial silt was most probably rather mineral rich, and would take well to most subtle seals, since she assumed that’s why Ullic cared.

“Is that why you’re with Tadg?”

“No.” Merel frowned. “You ask a lot of personal questions.”

“I want to get to know the people around me.”

“But I don’t know much about you.”

“Because you don’t pay attention.”

“Because you never come out of your room except to grab more jars of fish, bread, and tea.”

“The stuff of life and living,” he agreed. “But why are you with Tadg?”

“I thought you’d pay attention and find out?” Merel dropped some of the pinches of the soil sample into a glass jar, and got to work comparing her next one. “Is this more green-base or red-base, do you think?”

“Green. And you told me to stop observing you.”

“Oh.” She gave him a look. “I did.”

“So why?”

“That’s complicated.”

“Nothing I couldn’t understand. Do you think you are alone in having a complex internal personal life?”

“Tadg loves me, very much.” Merel paused, testing the texture of this soil. Clay. “And I would not wish to see him unhappy.”

“You do not love him?”

“In my own way, I suppose that I do.” Merel began packing up the samples and the journal. “Come, we must test over in the floodplain, then in the bends of the creek.”

“In your own way.” Kiarn looked at her curiously. “If you could have anyone at all, it wouldn’t be him?”

“You must be joking,” said Merel. “No. Not him. Probably I would not choose anyone at all.”

“Why not?”

“I like my independence, or I do at least in theory. We’ve been betrothed since I was twenty, and agreed to be since I was sixteen, and we grew up together.”

“So you really never have been independent, then. Was he there when you became a wizard and lost your heart?”

Merel froze, her heart stopping cold against her clavicle, the piece of amber a reminder of that. “No. We had already been betrothed, but I deliberately did not invite him. He doesn’t even know what my heart is.”

“That’s for the better, then. This way, when you inevitably must leave him, for your own good, he cannot take your heart captive. That happened to one of my tutors when she was young. She had to inebriate him into unconsciousness to get it back.”

“That’s awful.”

“That’s life! Why do you think we don’t marry?”

“I understand the reason, of course.” Merel paused, glancing over at him. “Really, I’d like to know what you actually think is the reason.”

“Our hearts.” Kiarn decisively crossed his arm. “Why else? Who else could understand what it is to hold our own beating hearts in the palm of our hand and to exercise such mastery over them? We could not wed another because of the vulnerability, the trust. We shouldn’t. Everyone but us could take great advantage of this.”

“You are so cynical.” Merel stopped, a stiff wind blowing her scarf. Her short hair tousled against her face in coal black strands. “I always have believed that it was that our hearts should belong to the world, and our service. I know that mine always would, and I don’t worry about Tadg getting in my way.”

“What if Tadg wanted your heart?”

“I’d tell him no, of course.” Merel rolled her eyes flippantly, closing up her bag. “I’m not stupid.”

“What if he persisted? What if, Merel, he took it from you and hunted it out, what if he hid every prized possession you own until he found the warm, beating little thing? What if Tadg withheld your child from you or used mage-sight or long-seeing to find your heart no matter where you put it? Because you had taken him for your husband, and he thought your heart ought to be his?”

“Tadg knows what he is getting into with me. He knows my heart belongs foremost to— to my work, to what I care most for.”

“I like to think anyone who would love you, would know that. You are, of course, very principled. To sway your heart to love another more than you love that, would be a monumental feat.”

“Don’t make such claims.” Merel scoffed. “You hardly know me. A week!”

“I know you because you make it easy.” Kiarn smiled.

The rest of the afternoon, they spent mostly measuring soils. Kiarn did not pick it up so naturally as he seemed to believe he would, to his dismay. “It’s dirt!” he exclaimed in frustration. “Why should I need to tell any of it apart?”

“Because when working with magic—“

“The devil is in the details, I know,” groaned Kiarn. This was very juvenile of him, thought Merel. The best wizards knew well that detail, that the small differences between two sorts of sand or grass, were the difference between life and death at times. To complain about it now was also to complain about your choice in life alone. The notion that Kiarn had ripped his own heart out only to not feel up to telling soils apart, made Merel smile.

It was a beautiful autumn day, anyway, she thought, not willing to complain quite yet. Bluestone was a new place to her, the southern reaches of Moras far greener than the rocky north. She had grown up in the north and never left it, the dark sea stacks and stone and mountains as natural to her as breathing, and the green foothills of the south felt foreign. They rolled like waves, she thought, looking out over the ridge once, as emerald and beautiful as the colors changed, as the sea. The wind would stir and green would become gold as the grass moved, the orange of the trees brought to vivid life as all of them moved at once with a gust. She could not help but feel a pang at the beauty of it, thickets and groves and forests all lit up.

And that aside, as the looked out at the city from afar by day, Bluestone truly did look as if it had risen from the sea, as the stories said. She caught her breath, looking out at the shore. The cliffs of grey granite seemed to drop off of the edge of the world, like there was nothing past Bluestone.

“I think that’s all the soil samples we could take, Merel,” said Kiarn, and she turned around, realizing she had been daydreaming.

“Right, of course. Now we just need the acreage.” Merel sighed. “I hate this part.”

Of course, it didn’t help that the lot of the garrison, though sparsely treed and mostly grass, also had its fair share of elevation changes, and Merel was already very worn and tired. After she unpacked the implements that Ullic had thrown their way— furloughs and chains and protractors and compasses and a sextant and a theodolite— she sat out on the grass, and sighed.

“If you’d rather I do most of this part, you know I could figure out how to do it.”

“It’s not much trouble.”

“It’s trouble if you wear yourself out.” Kiarn sat down beside her. “I don’t want to have to carry you back or make you feel poorly, or worse, to possibly damage Ullic’s opinion of you.”

“I don’t care about that.”

“I care,” said Kiarn. And if truth was being told, Merel did care. She cared very much about being taken seriously, about not being seen as weak or vulnerable. There was an authenticity, though, when Kiarn said it. She believed him.

“Alright.” She sighed. “When you’re measuring, here’s what you do— take the theodolite, and mark the points you’d like— the edge of the garrison, right?”

“Well, yes.”

“Plant stakes then, at each of them, that you’ll be able to see. Then you find a central point between all the corners you’re measuring, mark it, set up the theodolite. Make sure it’s level. Then you look into the sights on it, and lock it into place and write down the measure. Make sure you’re very precise with the degrees, because later we’ll have to do the math for the elevation change too, but we already wrote that down.”

“This is a great deal of mathematics,” said Kiarn, and Merel, who was already scrawling out the precise location and point of the garrison field so that he could mark it correctly, nodded, and handed him the slip.

“It’s a great deal of mathematics, yes, but I’d rather do hand calculations for a few moments, than walk with a long chain, which is what I think most people without one of those do,” she said, gesturing to the theodolite. “It’s a very impressive thing, to measure distance so precisely using angles and sines. Do you understand how the triangulation of it works?”

“Well, yes, I’m just impressed that you know all of it so easily that you can do it off the cuff with a few pieces of paper!”

“I have a lot of practice,” she reaffirmed. “And I like calculations. Go!”

And Kiarn marched to the middle of the field, carrying the theodolite and its tripod, the huge tubular instrument with all of its measurements and mirrors and angles, and set it down, then walked about setting out little flags based on the map, by his estimate. From afar, Merel mused, he looked rather like a skinny autumn tree, with his bushy and long red hair and pale skin. He blended right into the woods. She was rather fond of him, she’d admit that. Something about the playful inauthenticity, combined with a real warmth beneath it, made her feel like even if he was annoying, it wasn’t as if he was being annoying out of cruelty. That was, to her, a small consolation.

“Make sure you twist the knob to adjust!” she yelled across the field.

“Your mum twists the knob to adjust!” yelled Kiarn back, and any feeling she had that they were in fact, comparable in maturity, dissolved. She rolled her eyes and began setting up the proportions with the elevation, so that when Kiarn came back, she could get it done easily and quickly.

Merel finished the setup right as Kiarn returned, calmly carrying with him the complete written measurements.

“Right, now what?” he said, handing her the paper, and Merel swiftly began setting each proportion up. Kiarn looked over her shoulder, clearly curious and halfway understanding what was going on, halfway completely lost, before something clicked, and she could feel the little change in his posture as he began doing the math alongside her mentally instead of simply observing.

“There,” said Merel, handing him the piece of paper. “It’s a slightly angled trapezoidal field parcel, with a thirty yard elevation range, two sides that are equal to precisely one hundred and forty eight yards, one side equal to ninety seven and one half at the banks of the creek, and the narrowest side, at the higher end of the elevation sloping downwards, at ninety four. This gives it an area of nearly three acres square. It contains three distinct soil group subtypes with a silty deposit at the creek, two types of sand in scattered portions of the higher elevation, and a strong, mineral rich clay at the flatter portions of the majority of the field. The vegetation consists of mixed grasslands and forests, with rowan, alder, and beech as the dominant species of tree and fescue and false brome as the dominant grass. There also appear to be a few human-planted apple trees. Likely most fauna will be those already documented and native. Deer, fox, mice, voles, perhaps an odd stray bear, but not likely so close to the city. Plenty of mix between seabirds and the meadow sort. Have you seen any bugs?”

“I would rather not think about such nasty things.”

“Nonsense. They’re necessary for the survey. Spiderwebs? Crickets?”

“A few dragonflies by the creek,” said Kiarn hesitantly. “And some spiderwebs.”

“Do you dislike spiders?”

“Ugh, do you like them?” Kiarn raised his brow. “They have far too many legs. Troublesome, scuttling, evil things. They are the work of darkness in our world.”

“I like most things that live,” said Merel simply, and left it at that, though she did like spiders a great deal. “They cannot help being born as they are, you know.”

“You are an odd woman,” said Kiarn, offering her a hand up and beginning to pack up their tools. “Very odd.

“Normal folk do not become wizards, Kiarn,” said Merel very plainly.

“That is, of course, too true.” He heaved the bag over his shoulder, and looked out over the field. “The sun will be down before we return.” He took off his mantle, and with little in the way of warning, draped it around Merel’s shoulders, his long nose crinkling at the corners as he frowned in concentration. Tucking it around her securely, he began walking, satisfied.

“I’m not that cold,” Merel called as she began walking, but he was a fair bit faster than her and had something of a lead. Kiarn turned and began walking backwards, facing her as they climbed down the hill.

“You probably will be before we’re back,” he said simply, shoving his hands into his pockets. A breeze stirred his hair, and she again winced a bit at the way the red seemed to glow in the early evening sun, and the way it warmed the rosiness of his cheeks. “I simply planned in advance.”

“I don’t want your cape!”

“Well, you’d never ask for it, no, but you would be cold. So at least try to prove me wrong, then?”

“I have no need for that,” said Merel very seriously, but she had to admit— she rather liked the warmth. And, it smelled of clean, old wool, a comforting scent that reminded her of home. She was rather hesitant now to remove it. “This doesn’t prove anything, either.”

“Whatever you say, Miss Pedler,” said Kiarn, turning around and walking at a pace akin to her own, but remaining a few feet ahead. “I had a nice day. Can’t wait to go to sleep.”