The drainage channel took four days, not half a day.
This was because the ground was softer than it looked in two sections, which required repacking before the channel walls would hold, and because Tomas showed up on the second morning and had strong opinions about the angle of the run that turned out to be wrong but took an hour to demonstrate conclusively, and because it rained on the third day in a way that was either very bad timing or extremely useful field data depending on how you looked at it.
Tarev looked at it as useful field data.
The channel worked. The standing water in the square drained. By the fourth evening the path was dry in a way it apparently hadn't been in living memory, and three people told Veth about it in the market the next morning, which was how news traveled in Graysmouth — not to the person who had done the thing, but to the person standing nearest to them.
Maren said nothing when Tarev passed her stall.
She did move one of the cloth-covered items to a more visible position on the table, which he decided to interpret as acknowledgment.
He had been putting off the library.
Not avoiding it — putting it off, which was different. The library was the kind of problem that required a proper block of time and a commitment to the mess it would make, and in the first two weeks he had been spending his time on the manor's immediate needs and learning Graysmouth's rhythms and building up enough goodwill with Veth that she would answer occasional questions without the particular expression that meant you are eight years old and you are exhausting me.
But the map in his coat pocket had been sitting there.
He took it out every few days and looked at it. The pre-war survey with the settlement in the marsh's center and the symbol he didn't recognise. The date in the corner, written in a hand so old the ink had faded to a suggestion of itself.
He wanted context for it. And context was in the library.
He set aside a full morning, borrowed a pair of thick gloves from the toolshed, and went in.
The first hour was just clearing.
The collapsed shelves he moved aside plank by plank, working from the doorway inward. Most of what had been on them was unrecoverable — pages fused by moisture into grey blocks that fell apart when he touched them, spines that had bloomed mould into the hollow spaces of their own text. He stacked the salvageable pieces near the door and swept the rest into a pile he'd deal with later.
It was unglamorous work. He had done a lot of unglamorous work, in one life or another.
By midmorning the room was clear enough to move in properly, and he started on the far wall where the shelves had held better. These were mostly intact: estate records going back four generations, a few books on subjects ranging from agricultural management to the history of the Settled Kingdoms' northeastern trade routes — dry reading, but the kind of dry that told you useful things between the lines. A wooden box on the bottom shelf contained rolled documents that had survived by virtue of being sealed, the wax still mostly whole.
He opened each one carefully at the table, weighing the edges with whatever came to hand.
Most of it was as expected: land surveys, legal records, household accounts. The Morthis family had been meticulous record-keepers even as everything else fell apart, which he found somehow both admirable and sad. The accounts stopped abruptly about three years ago.
He noted this without writing it down. He was building a list in his head of things connected to three years ago. It was getting longer.
Then he unrolled the third document from the bottom of the box and found himself looking at a survey that was not like the others.
It wasn't the same map he had found before. That one was a terrain survey — the marsh's geography, the settlement mark at its center. This was something different: a structural diagram of a site, showing what appeared to be the layout of a building or complex, drawn with a precision that was several orders of magnitude above the practical estate records surrounding it.
Whoever had made this had been thorough in the way that suggested they were afraid of forgetting.
The diagram showed chambers. Corridors. Something at the center that was either a room or a concept he didn't have the vocabulary for, marked with the same symbol that appeared on the settlement map — the one he didn't recognise from any cartography notation he knew.
He spread both documents on the table side by side.
The symbol matched exactly. Not approximately. Not in the same style or the same family. Character for character, line for line, the same mark.
The terrain survey showed where the settlement had been.
The structural diagram showed what was inside it.
He pressed his palm flat against the diagram, not for any particular reason, and the Ruinwright responded.
It was different from the way it worked on buildings — not the clean architectural readout he got when he touched a wall or walked across a floor. This was quieter. More like hearing something very far away and not being sure if you were actually hearing it or had simply thought of it at the right moment. A warmth that started at his palm and settled somewhere behind his sternum, and a sensation he did not yet have the right word for: the feeling of a thing that knew it was being read by something that could read it.
He lifted his hand.
He looked at the diagram for a long time without touching it again.
Then he went and found the old inscription guide on the history shelf — a dry academic text on the written traditions of the northeastern Settled Kingdoms, not remotely interesting to most readers and therefore still intact — and started looking for the symbol.
He didn't find it. Not exactly. But in the chapter on pre-Hollow War documentation, there was a footnote about a category of inscription that predated every known writing system in the region, found occasionally on artifacts recovered from the deep marsh and the Thornwall foothills, classified as provenance unknown, origin predating current scholarly framework. The footnote's author had the tone of someone who found this conclusion professionally unsatisfying.
He understood the feeling.
He copied the footnote into his notebook, copied both symbols side by side with as much precision as he could manage, and added three new questions to the list at the back.
He was so absorbed that he didn't hear his father in the doorway.
He noticed him the way you notice a change in a room's air quality — a shift in the light from the corridor, a difference in the sound of the house. He looked up.
Aldric was standing at the threshold, not quite in the room, one hand on the door frame. He was looking at the documents spread across the table: the terrain survey, the structural diagram, the inscription guide open to its footnote, and Tarev's notebook with its pages of careful notation.
His face was doing the closed-room thing. But there were windows in it today that Tarev hadn't seen before.
"I didn't think anyone else could get that box open," Aldric said. His voice was level. Not upset, not pleased. Just noting.
"The wax was mostly intact," Tarev said. "The seals weren't difficult."
Aldric's gaze moved to the structural diagram. Stayed there for a moment.
"Did you look at all of them?"
"Everything in the box. Most of the loose documents."
"And the diagram."
"Yes."
His father was quiet. The hand on the door frame had tightened slightly — Tarev noticed it the same way he noticed the wall joints, the way a load was distributed. "Your mother found that in the third year," Aldric said. "She spent two weeks trying to cross-reference the symbols."
Tarev waited.
"She found the same footnote you found." A pause. "She used different words about it."
"What words?"
The corner of Aldric's mouth moved. Not a smile, but a memory of one. "She said whoever wrote the footnote had the right answer and the wrong conclusion. That provenance unknown wasn't the same as origin predating current scholarly framework. That something having an unknown origin wasn't the same as something being old. She thought it might be the other way around."
Tarev looked at the symbol on the diagram.
He thought about the terrain survey. The settlement marked as living. The structural diagram showing what was beneath it.
"Not old," he said slowly. "Present."
Aldric looked at him for a moment with an expression that Tarev couldn't fully classify, somewhere between grief and something that was not quite hope but was in its neighbourhood.
"Don't go into the marsh alone," he said. "Not yet."
Then he moved away from the door, and his footsteps went down the corridor toward the kitchen, and the jug moved somewhere, and the afternoon went on.
Tarev sat with the documents for another hour.
He wasn't thinking about the marsh. He was thinking about his father's phrasing.
Not yet.
Not don't go into the marsh alone. Not it's dangerous, stay away. Not the reflexive prohibition of a parent who didn't want to explain anything.
Not yet.
Which meant there was a yet. Which meant Aldric knew something about when it would be appropriate, and that something had a shape and a set of conditions that could in principle be met.
He added this to the notebook. Not in the questions section. In a new section at the front that he titled, after a moment's consideration, Things Father Knows.
It had one entry so far.
He suspected it would have more.
That evening he went out to the village path and checked the drainage channel by the last of the light. The ground on either side was still settling into its new configuration, the way disturbed earth does for the first week. By the next rain it would be compacted properly. By winter it would look like it had always been there.
That was the thing about good infrastructure. When it worked well enough, people stopped noticing it. They just stopped having the problem.
He stood there for a while in the cooling air, looking at the dry path, and thought about a settlement in the center of a marsh that no current map acknowledged, built above a structure that felt, when you put your hand on its diagram, like something that was still paying attention.
He thought about provenance unknown. About his mother's correction: not old, present.
He thought about the marsh's silence and what it might mean for a place to be quiet in the way this one was quiet — not empty, but waiting.
He went inside before the fog got too thick to see by, filed everything in the right columns in his notebook, and slept soundly, because he was eight years old and he had moved a significant amount of earth that week, and his body had opinions about that regardless of what his mind was doing.
The documents stayed spread on the library table.
Nobody moved them.