Berri wiped his hands carefully on a handkerchief—his cleanest item besides the map—and set his hands, palms down and separated, to frame an area of the map whose boundaries were elaborately filled in and whose central region was blank.

“I lost my best friend there,” he said in a low voice. He picked up the mug, saw it was empty, and set it down again. He hadn’t touched his food.

“Ah.” She had uncovered something she hadn’t expected, something raw and wounded. Its echo resonated in her own heart.

He mumbled on without prompting. “That scar on your neck—not to be rude—but it reminds me of him.”

“Why is that?” she asked carefully.

He seemed not to hear the question. “He was fascinated by the Desolation. Kept going in, even though everyone knew it was dangerous. It’s a terrible place, you know. Wild and disordered. Landmarks don’t stay in one place. I only went in twice, but he went back again and again. Then the last time, he never returned. I had sworn never to go back in, but I had to follow the trail he left. We leave signs other surveyors can read.”

A thing Elen hadn’t known!

“The trail he left dead-ended at a blank cliff face. I found this there, the last piece of him in the whole wide world.”

He pulled out a brass disk strung on a leather cord that he wore around his neck. Strangely, the disk held a scent that made her think of fields of dream-flower drowsing under the summer sun. It was incised like a stylized lightning bolt. The line was jagged, not wavy like her scar, but there were about the same number of angles. It wasn’t that big of a leap for a drunken, grieving man to see the two as alike.

“The lightning bolt is our mark. We used it for messages when we were boys, planning mischief.” He leaned closer, breath sodden with the smell of beer. “He’s still alive, I’m sure of it. He left the disk to mark his path. He went into the cliff and wasn’t sure if he’d be able to get out again. Everyone says I’m deluded. No one wants to talk about him anymore. They say it’s ill fortune to do so. He’s the last surveyor known to have been lost in the Desolation. I’m the last one who went in and came out alive.”

“What is his name?” she asked.

Berri’s pained smile held a grief still so fresh it hurt to see it in his face. “Rotho. What a goof. Always tripping over his own feet. I love that man.”