The Traveler

The man's name was Orrin. He had been a wool merchant before he walked the east road, which was the kind of detail that made Senna feel the specific sadness of ordinary lives interrupted. He sat in the guild house kitchen and drank the tea she gave him with both hands, the cup rattling slightly against the table when he set it down.

He was not, she determined, in any physical danger. He was warm, coherent, walking without difficulty. He ate the bread she offered. But he kept pausing mid-sentence to look at something that wasn't there, and twice he reached out to touch the air beside him as if steadying himself against a wall she couldn't see.

"What's in the village?" she asked.

He thought about this for a long moment. "Everything you've lost," he said finally. "Or — not the things exactly. The feeling of them. It's a very quiet place. I wasn't afraid there." He paused. "I think that's the danger of it."

"How long were you there?"

He looked at the window. "I'm not certain. I thought it was two days. The guild says I've been missing for three weeks."

Senna wrote that down.

She asked him to describe the village in detail, and he did — stone houses, a central well, an orchard to the south, the smell of wood smoke that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. He said the people there were not quite people: they had the shapes and voices of people, but their conversations were always unfinished, always waiting for something the speaker couldn't name.

And Luca. He'd found Luca sitting on the steps of one of the houses, calm and unhurried, the way he always was. Luca had given him the satchel and said his sister would know what to do, with the certainty he always had in her even when it wasn't warranted.

"Did he say why he wouldn't come back?" Senna asked.

"He said he couldn't find the road out. That there isn't one." Orrin looked at her steadily. "He said you drew the road in. So only you could draw the road out."

Then he reached into his coat and produced a folded piece of paper. "He gave me this too. Said it might help you understand."

She unfolded it. A rough map — not guild-standard, drawn quickly on whatever Luca had found — of the village and its surrounding landscape. The handwriting on the landmarks was not Luca's.

It was hers.

Not a copy of her map. Her map had no landmark labels — she never labeled first drafts. These labels were in her handwriting, but she had never written them.

She stared at it for a long time.

"The road is waiting," Orrin said quietly. "I can still feel it pulling. I think it wants you to come."