The blizzard shut the pass above Halfmoon Ridge before Aldric Ash could reach it, and now every hour he waited was an hour her tracks turned to smooth white. He sat in the last inn on the ridge road with his map spread across the table, one glove off, one finger pinning the frozen river bend. Three survey marks. A name written in another man's hand at the top edge of the paper. Seven years he had followed that name across the frozen wastes. Four pairs of boots. Eleven notebooks stacked in his pack, each one full of wrong camps and forks he had ruled out. The man who drew this map had meant to marry her. Aldric had trusted him once. He meant to reach her first. The owl on the back of his chair turned its head toward the door as the wind shoved snow under the sill. The innkeeper told him no one crossed the pass in weather like this, and told him again when Aldric paid for rope, hard bread, and a second lantern. Aldric stepped out into the wind. The owl lifted from his shoulder and cut sideways across the road, away from the pass, toward a black seam of pine below the ridge. He had followed her twice before and been right twice. He turned off the marked route and went down after her. An hour into the trees he found the shape of a stone arch buried to its keystone in drift, and beyond it a narrow cut in the rock the map did not show. Wind moved through the cut in a straight, warm line. He marked the opening in his twelfth notebook, tightened the strap on his pack, and stepped inside, leaving the sealed pass and the map's blank white space behind him.

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.

The fire had burned down to coals when Aldric closed the fourth notebook and lifted his head. His host had gone up the stairs an hour ago. He listened. The house was quiet. He had until dawn, and then she would walk out the door and be gone with whatever she was. The map on the table showed a frozen river bend and three survey marks and a wide blank field where this house sat. It told him nothing about the rooms above him. If the woman he had hunted for seven years lived under this roof, or had ever lived under it, he would find no proof by sitting at the kitchen table. He stood and took a candle from the mantel. The great hall opened into a corridor lined with narrow doors. He tried each one. A pantry. A boot room. A study with a locked drawer he could not force without noise. He climbed the stairs on the outside edges where the wood did not creak. The owl watched him from the banister and did not move. On the second landing he found a small room with a writing desk and a leather folio like the one she had given him downstairs. He set the candle on the desk and opened the folio. Inside were deeds. Three of them, in a hand that was not hers, signed by a woman named Tudor eighty years ago. Under the deeds lay a bundle of letters tied with green thread. He read the top letter. It was addressed to Freya. It named a Tuesday, three witnesses, two funerals, and a name he knew. The name of the man who had drawn his map. The man had written to her twice. In the second letter the man asked her to wait for him and promised he would come. The letter was dated four years ago. Aldric sat down on the edge of the desk and read it again. The woman he had chased across seven years of ice was not ahead of him. She had been behind the door the whole time. "You could have asked." Freya stood in the doorway in the green dress, barefoot, a lamp in her hand. She looked at the open folio and then at him. "He told you I was farther on. He told me you were dead." She let it sit. "I am still leaving at first light. You can come with me for the papers, or you can go back the way you came." She set the lamp on the desk and walked out. Aldric folded the letter and put it in his coat. He had found her. He had found her by breaking into her rooms, and she knew it, and the man on the map was alive.