The Hollow Road

The Ashfen had no proper road through it. There was a path — if you were generous with the word — that had been beaten into the peat by cattle and the occasional desperate merchant. Marek followed it the way a man follows a rumour: with more hope than certainty, checking behind him more than he should.

He had been walking since before dawn. The sky above the marshland was the colour of old tin, and the reeds on either side of the path whispered in a wind he couldn't feel. Somewhere out in the bog, a bird called once and went quiet. He didn't know what kind of bird. He had spent most of his life in cities and had never bothered to learn.

The name he was carrying was written on a piece of oilskin folded into the inside of his boot. He had memorised it on the second day after leaving Duskwall, but he kept the paper anyway. It felt like proof of something, though he couldn't have said what.

Eryn Voss. Chartmaker. Last known location: the salt flats south of the Orveth mouth.

He had been paid to find her. He had not been told why. The man who paid him — a councillor whose name he hadn't been given and hadn't asked for — had pressed a coin purse into his hands with the quiet efficiency of someone who did this often, and said: bring her to Duskwall, and bring her willing.

Marek had asked what willing meant, in this context.

The councillor had looked at him for a moment with an expression that was not quite amusement.

It means don't drag her, the man had said. She needs to be able to work when she arrives.

By midmorning the path had narrowed to the width of a single footstep, and the ground on either side had gone from soft to genuinely uncertain. He tested each step before trusting it. Twice the peat gave way beneath his boot and he had to pull his foot out of water the colour of strong tea, cursing quietly.

He didn't know what the Ashfen had been, once. Old land, he supposed. Someone had tried to drain parts of it — he could see the remnants of ditches, the rotted stumps of timber that had once been sluice gates — but the water had returned, as water always did, and taken back what it was owed.

There was a word for places like this. He couldn't remember it. Something from the old language — the one people spoke before the council standardised everything and called the standardisation progress. His grandmother had used it. A word for land that belonged to neither the living nor the dead, that sat outside the ordinary arrangements of the world.

He walked, and the reeds whispered, and the bird did not call again.

He found the first marker around midday: a post driven into the peat, its top carved with a simple symbol he didn't recognise — three lines converging on a point, like a crude attempt at a map coordinate. Below it, burned into the wood, a number: 7.

He consulted his mental inventory of things the councillor had told him. There had been no mention of markers. There had been no mention of numbers.

He walked on. Found marker six. Then five. He was going the right way, then, by someone's accounting. He was grateful for the company, even if it was only wood and numbers.

Marker three was leaning at a severe angle, nearly swallowed by the bog. Marker two had fallen entirely, lying half-submerged like a casualty. He almost missed it.

He did not find marker one. What he found instead, just as the path widened again onto solid ground, was a low stone building with smoke coming from its chimney and a woman standing in the doorway watching him approach with the expression of someone who had been expecting him for rather longer than she would have liked.

She was shorter than he'd imagined. She held a charcoal stick in one hand and had ink on her forearms up to the elbow. She did not look like someone who needed to be found. She looked like someone who had decided, quite deliberately, to stay lost.

"You're late," she said.

Marek stopped. Looked behind him at the bog. "I've never been here before."

"I know." She stepped back from the doorway. "Come in, then. I've been waiting to put the tea on."

He followed her inside. The walls were covered in maps — not the finished, official kind, but working maps, drafts, corrections and over-corrections, lines that went somewhere and then stopped, lines that started from nothing and built toward something he couldn't yet see. He stood in the middle of the room and turned slowly, and felt, for the first time in a long while, that he might have stumbled into the right place after all.

"You're Eryn Voss," he said.

"Yes." She set a kettle over the fire. "And you're someone who was sent to find me, which means someone at the council knows where I am, which means my time here is limited." She didn't look at him when she said it. "How many days do I have?"

He thought about the coin purse. About the word willing.

"As many as you need," he said.

She looked at him then, properly, for the first time. Whatever she saw seemed to satisfy some private calculation.

"Three days," she said. "I need three more days. Sit down."

He sat. Outside, in the Ashfen, the bird called once more. This time, he thought, it sounded almost like a word. ✦