A Dustwalker team came through Maxentius in the late summer of my tenth year.
Not for the village. For the Riftzone.
The Riftzone Tier X seal had generated enough anomalous readings by this point that the Conclave had issued a monitoring advisory for the surrounding area, which meant that any guild operating in the region was technically obligated to conduct periodic visual assessments and report back. Dustwalker, being the guild closest to the relevant coordinates, had received the contract.
There were three of them. A woman in her forties who led the team, with the rank insignia of a C on her card and the movement of someone who had been doing this kind of work for a long time. A younger man, perhaps twenty-five, rank D, who carried too much equipment for the size of the job and had the eager posture of someone still in the proving phase. And a quiet third member, also rank D, who said very little and watched everything.
They stayed in the village for two nights, which was standard for an assessment trip. Maxentius had no formal inn, but Pell the headman had a large enough house that travelers were accommodated there by long custom.
I observed them the way I observed everything new in the village: carefully and without appearing to.
The woman, whose name I gathered was Bram Oles's colleague and who I later learned was named Calla, was competent in the understated way of experienced field workers. She asked the village headman exactly the right questions about any changes in the eastern area over the past several years. She got useful answers. She did not press past the point of usefulness.
The younger man, Wick by name, was genuinely enthusiastic about everything in a way that would have been exhausting if it had not been equally genuine. He asked Rynn about her training when he saw her practicing in the yard, which produced a twenty-minute conversation that I monitored from the house with the vague interest of someone watching a thing unfold according to a predictable pattern. Rynn was engaged. Wick was pleased to have an audience.
The quiet third member was named Tonn. He was large, moved carefully, and cooked something on his portable equipment that smelled better than anything a field team had any right to produce from travel rations.
They went to the Riftzone on the first day and returned by evening with the expressions of people who had found more than they had expected and less than would constitute an emergency.
'The seal is holding,' Calla said to Pell, in the summary conversation that I was near enough to overhear. 'But it's not passive anymore. Something inside has been active. We're recommending a priority upgrade on the monitoring schedule and a formal assessment request to the Conclave.'
Pell received this with the measured concern of a headman who had learned to worry about the right things and not the wrong ones.
'Is the village in danger?' he asked.
'Not immediately,' Calla said. 'The seal architecture is designed for far worse than current readings. But I won't tell you this is nothing, because it isn't.'
This was honest. I noted it.
Rynn appeared at dinner both evenings, which required no adjustment of her actual schedule since the Duren family ate when everyone was home. She and Wick continued their conversation across the shared meal with the ease of people who had discovered a common interest and were running through its full extent.
After they left on the third morning, Rynn sat at the breakfast table with the expression she got when she was assembling a conclusion.
'They were good,' she said.
'The team?'
'Calla especially. She knew exactly what she was looking for and she found it and she reported it accurately without exaggerating in either direction.' Rynn paused. 'That's actually hard to do. Most people either panic or minimize.'
I agreed with this assessment. Accurate reporting was genuinely difficult for most people because it required separating what you had observed from what you felt about it.
'Dustwalker does that kind of work,' I said.
Rynn looked at me.
'Borderland monitoring,' I said. 'It's unglamorous and it's consistent and it requires exactly the kind of judgment you just described.'
She was quiet for a moment.
'I'm applying in spring,' she said.
Not for the first time. But this time with different weight behind it.
'I know,' I said.
I drank my morning water and thought about a guild of people who did unglamorous necessary work with accurate reporting and no exaggeration in either direction.
There were worse things to become.