It had taken her some time to grasp the concept of a map. Certes she had heard of such a thing before, had vague memories of even seeing one or two in passing, knew roughly what they were for, but otherwise had dismissed them as something only tultharian, with their deep love of abstraction, could or indeed would create. Why not just go out and find where things were? Was even that too difficult for them? What did it take to drag these people out from under a roof?
Perhaps, had she followed the notion of abstraction long enough, she might have discerned some insight to the mind of Glenn Burnie, but that, too, stood outside her ability to conceive. Or perhaps the game was too quick in her to care much for who set it.
A great deal of her judgemental grumbling stemmed purely from the fact that, as it turned out, not only could she not read a map, she could not conceptualize one. She knew North by instinct, but didn't understand how North could still be North when you could turn the paper widdershins and make it West. If she faced West, but the paper pointed North, which of them was correct? Her, obviously, but then how did the map still apply? And how did a whole league's walking compress to a fingerwidth on a page? Lugh'us Daanan, maybe that was why they never went anywhere, if this was all they had to rely upon: the moment you turned a corner, you wouldn't even know where the rest of the world was anymore.
She wasted the better part of a morning perched on a tree branch, legs crossed at the knee and feet dangling in the very posture of a tultharian woman propped upon a park bench and scowling at a scandalous broadsheet, as she traced a path again and again with her finger. The more she went over the thing, the more suspicious she became about it. She half-convinced herself that this Glanvarnie fellow had set out a spy for no other purpose than to report upon whoever happened turn up at the right spot, and that her better plan would be to wait a week until the spy either starved out, begged off, or something else happened on it first. She didn't know that she had a week, though.
The Dagger, as it turned out, became the key that unlocked the whole thing--the Dagger, rendered as a tiny red box on the page. She knew how big that was, where it was, and exactly where her own den lay in relation to it. She concentrated on that short distance as if it were written in runes. Dagger there, den there...and if she were imagining a path, Hok's cabin there...shortcut around the marshy bit there...until she found she had been not merely squinting but actually reading the thing for several minutes before it dawned upon her that she had cracked the code. Her heart squeezed in absolutely shameless delight. Take that, Glanvarnie!
At once she slithered down from the branch, dropping the ten feet to the forest carpet below. Her eyes were bright and eager, her face awash with the radiant, unabashed excitement of a child on the hunt for a glittering painted egg. Now she was ready to hunt. In the chancy morning light, the forest seemed to be a labyrinth overlaid with a thousand secret green and brown paths.