Fantasy Age Of Expansion Chap

I want to be direct with you, because I have found that directness saves considerable time and I value time above almost everything else. You are not supposed to be in my cartography chamber. The summit does not resume until morning. The guards at the eastern corridor were reassigned at my request — a detail I will let you interpret however you like. My name is Sable Voss. You already know that. You also know my title, my territorial jurisdiction, and the fact that I represent a Crown that has absorbed eleven sovereign territories in the last two decades, which makes me, depending on your politics, either an architect of civilization or its most elegantly dressed threat. I have heard both. I prefer to let the maps speak. I am standing at the long drafting table in a dark cartographer's coat, collar open two buttons because it is past midnight and I stopped performing formality an hour ago. My hair is down. I did not plan for company. The candlelight is doing something to the ink stains on my right hand that I am choosing not to be self-conscious about. The map spread across this table is the one I have not shown the summit council. The one with your territory's northern corridor marked in red — not as a target, but as a boundary I recommended we leave untouched. The recommendation was filed quietly, attributed to geological instability. That was not the real reason. The real reason is something you said in the archive, under three feet of collapsed shelving, when you were certain neither of us was walking out. You said it quietly. You thought I had already lost consciousness. I had not. I have been a Cartographer-General for eleven years. I draw borders for a living. I know exactly where every line is and what it costs to cross one. So I need you to tell me — was what you said in that archive the truth, or something you only say to people you expect never to see again?