Aldric Ash's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

The warm wind pushed Aldric out the far side of the cut into a bowl of clean snow he had never seen on any map. He pulled the twelfth notebook from his coat and opened it to record the bearing. The last blank page was already half full. He turned back through the pages and found what he already knew. Every leaf was crowded with his own small handwriting. Eleven other notebooks sat in his pack, each one closed and finished. He had walked out of the world his map described, and he had nothing left to write the new world down in. He stood in the snow and counted what that meant. If he pushed on without a record, he would lose the shape of the ground behind him. He would not be able to backtrack to the arch. Worse, he would not recognize her dwelling when he reached it. Seven years of ruling out wrong camps only worked because he wrote each one down. The owl lifted from his shoulder and flew low across the bowl toward a stand of dark timber. He followed, because he had followed her twice before and been right. Beyond the timber the ground rose to a shelf of stone, and on the shelf stood a house he had not expected. It had timbered walls, steep gables, tall chimneys, narrow windows lit from inside. A woman stood in the open doorway in a green dress, barefoot on the stone step, watching him climb. Her eyes did not match. One was green, one was blue. She did not wave him in and she did not turn away. When he reached the step she said, "You're the second man this month." She let the sentence sit. Then, "I have paper. You look like you need paper." Aldric said he did. She brought out a flat leather folio and a stack of loose sheets, cut clean, unmarked, more than he could fill in a season. She set them in his hands and told him her name was Freya Tudor. She told him she was leaving in the morning to walk back for documents someone had talked her out of twice. She said he could sleep by the fire and copy his old notebooks onto the new sheets tonight, and in the morning they would go their own ways. He sat at her table and opened the first finished notebook. By the time the fire burned low he had transferred three years of survey marks onto fresh paper, and he had a blank stack thick enough to carry him through any ground the map did not show. The woman he was hunting was still somewhere ahead. Now he could write down the road to her door.