Chapter 357: The Tended Ground
Kai did not sleep much. He lay inside the marker-square, the dark plain over him and the gathering ground under him. He turned Edra's argument over the way Soren turned a stone — looking for the side that had not been shown to him.
It was a good argument. That was the trouble with it. The rule protected a zone, and a zone had an entity that could say no, and Zone Ten had neither. She had not bent the rule. She had found where it ended and sat down one step past it, on ground that was still legally nothing.
Words would not move her. He had no words she had not already answered in her own head.
But she had made one mistake. She had called the ground unclaimed. She had stood inside his four markers and called them stakes in empty dirt.
He knew the ground better than that. By first light, he knew what his answer was.
It was not a thing he would say.
It was a thing he would do, where she could see it being done.
