The Boundary House

The house she'd drawn was built by the time she found it.

Senna walked the east road on the third morning after drawing the addition to her map, telling herself she was going to inspect the waypoint she'd imagined. She knew, by now, that "imagined" and "created" were not distinct categories for her. She'd accepted this the same way she accepted rain — practically, without drama, because there was no use doing otherwise.

The house stood at the Greywood's edge exactly where she'd placed it on the map: a low stone building, one door, two windows, a chimney that showed no smoke but smelled of it. Someone had planted rosemary beside the step. She had not drawn rosemary.

She tried the door. It opened.

Inside: a drafting table, a stool, a cot, a lamp. On the table, paper and three good pens. Everything clean, everything ready. The window faced east, toward the Margin's gray light filtering between the trees.

She sat down at the table.

"You've been expecting me," she said, to the room, to the house, to whatever attended places she drew.

The lamp lit without her touching it.

She didn't find that alarming. That was probably what alarmed her most — the steady shrinkage of what she found alarming. She was becoming calibrated to the wrong things. Normal cartographers found alarming the prospect of an inaccurate survey. She found alarming the idea of drawing something she didn't mean and having to live with the consequences.

She opened the topmost sheet of paper and picked up a pen.

She wanted to map the Margin properly — not the entry road, but the place itself. Its layout, its rules, its geography. If she was going to be the keeper, she needed a complete survey, not the rough-sight observations she'd made on two hurried visits.

She wrote Survey: the Margin at the top of the page.

The pen moved through the heading easily. Then she reached the first landmark and paused. The ink waited. The Margin waited.

She felt, very distinctly, the sense of something reading her intention.

Behind her, on the road she hadn't heard anyone approach, someone said: "I wouldn't do that yet."

She turned.

A woman stood in the doorway, older than Senna by twenty years at least, wearing road clothes and a surveyor's belt. She had the patient, slightly tired look of someone who had been walking a very long time.

"I know what you're doing," the woman said. "I tried it too, the first time I remembered."

She stepped inside without waiting to be invited.

"My name is Vera," she said. "Voss, technically, but that's — well. You'll understand in a moment."