Anja

Anja the heron is patient, and patient folk think ahead. When she reads a shore, she looks past the very next turn to the ones after it, and she asks a question the eager young islanders always forget: if I settle here, where do I grow next?

"It's the easiest thing in the world to miss," she told Senna, standing at a snug little corner hemmed in by rocks and water. "Look at this spot. Lovely goods, decent pips — and hemmed in on every side. Rocks here, the sea there, another islander's cottage just past. You could settle it, and it would feed you... for exactly one cottage. Then you'd be stuck. Nowhere to build your next one, nowhere to run a road, boxed in with no way out." She shook her head slowly. "A corner that can't grow is a corner with no future, however pretty it looks today."

Senna glanced at a plainer spot up the slope, open fields spreading away from it. "And that one?"

"That one has room," said Anja warmly. "Open neighbours all around it. Settle there, and next turn you can build again, and the turn after, spreading out across the shore. It might not dazzle you now. But it can become something. The whole season is ahead of you, Senna — you want a first corner you can grow from, not one you'll be trapped in."

She'd seen the mistake break many a promising start. Islanders dazzled by a rich but cornered spot settled there, thrilled — and then spent the season penned in, watching neighbours who'd chosen humbler, open ground spread out and prosper. "Room to grow doesn't feel urgent," Anja said, "so people trade it away for a shinier corner. But it's the thing that lets your first choice keep paying off, turn after turn. Never box yourself in."

That is Anja's quiet wisdom, the last of the five things a good surveyor weighs: not only what a corner is now, but what it can become. A spot with open neighbours is a spot with a future. And Anja — who tends the Commons and the Lighthouse and always thinks of the long haul — would take room to grow over a fine dead-end corner any day.