The Road She Drew

Senna drew the road the week after Luca disappeared.

She hadn't meant to. She'd been sitting at her drafting table in the back of the guild house, surrounded by legitimate work — the southern river survey, the coastal remapping, forty hours of assignments she needed to finish before her master's review — and instead she found herself drawing a road she had never surveyed and no one had ever asked for.

It started at the east gate of Ardenmoor, which was real enough. It ran east past the mill, past the three farms at the valley's edge, which were also real. Then it entered the Greywood, which was the point at which all sensible roads stopped. The Greywood had no roads because nothing in the Greywood cooperated with them — paths shifted, landmarks moved, the trees had a habit of standing differently depending on whether you were coming or going. Mapmakers did not map the Greywood. It was in the charter.

Senna drew a road straight through it.

She drew it the way she drew all her roads: with total confidence, each line placed without hesitation, the landmarks appearing under her pen with the uncanny accuracy that had made her master tell her, twice, that her gift was either exceptional talent or something he didn't have a professional vocabulary for. She drew the Greywood parting around the road. She drew the road emerging from the east edge of the wood and continuing to a valley she had no survey data for and had never seen.

At the end of the valley, she drew a village.

She worked for two hours. When she stopped, she had the best map she'd ever made, of a place she'd never been, for a road that didn't exist. She should have destroyed it. Uncertified maps were treated as hazardous in Ardenmoor — the guild had records of what happened when someone followed an uncertified road. The land, the cartographers' charter said, was not fixed. It could be written.

She put the map in her satchel and went to bed.

When she woke, there was a note from the surveyor's office: a new road had appeared overnight east of the mill, following the Greywood's edge, heading east. Guild certification was requested.

She didn't reply to the note.

Four days later, Luca was gone. His landlady said he'd gone east "to see what the new road was about." He'd left before dawn. He hadn't come back.

The guild searched for two weeks. They found the road through the Greywood exactly as Senna had drawn it. They found the valley. They found the village — empty, intact, untouched, as if built and immediately abandoned. They did not find Luca.

Senna was sitting in the guild house three weeks after his disappearance when someone knocked at the door.

A man stood on the step, thin and travel-worn, with Luca's satchel over his shoulder. His eyes didn't focus quite right — like he was looking slightly past her at something standing just behind her head.

"Your brother asked me to find you," he said. "He said you'd know how to bring him back. He said to tell you: the village is real, but the road home isn't drawn yet."