Delila had taught one wanderer at a time for sixty years, and now five of them stood at her crumbling shrine, waiting to be taught at once. She leaned on her staff and watched them shuffle through the broken stone archway. Her cracked compass spun, as it always did, pointing nowhere. She had promised these seekers a school. She had no idea if her method worked for a crowd. The seekers were a sorry bunch. A baker who had lost his way home. A girl chasing a riddle. Three others, all fidgeting. Each one wanted a clear answer. Delila had never given a clear answer in her life. "Teaching one is easy," she muttered. "You point them wrong, and the wrong road teaches them something right." But five mouths asking at once? Five wrong roads crossing? She did not know the sum. She raised her staff. "Follow the path past the leaning fence," she told them. "It knows the way." The baker frowned. "Which way does it point?" "It doesn't point. It talks." They walked to the weathered wooden fence beside the road. Its crooked boards had knots like eyes. When the girl touched a post, the fence groaned and spoke. "Left for the lost," it creaked. "Right for the found. But you lot can't all go the same way." The seekers argued. The baker wanted left. The girl wanted right. The three others split three ways. Delila's stomach dropped. This was the failure she feared. One wanderer could take one road. Five tore her method apart. Then the fence laughed, a dry wooden rattle. "Can't choose? Then you'll have to ask each other." The seekers went quiet. The baker turned to the girl. "Where were you going, before you got lost?" "Home," she said. "But I forgot the way." "So did I," the baker said. They stared at each other. Slowly, the five began trading what they each knew. The girl's riddle matched the baker's missing turn. One seeker's wrong road was another's right one. They were not five seekers. They were one set of answers, scattered. Delila watched, and her breath caught. Her method did work for a group. Better, even. A lone wanderer learned from a wrong road. A group learned from each other's wrong roads. The misdirection multiplied. By dusk, all five had found their way. They came back to the shrine together, laughing, pointing at the talking fence. The baker pressed a coin into her hand. "When do we start the school?" he asked. Delila gripped her spinning staff. She had her proof now. But the baker's words landed hard. A school needed more than proof. It needed walls, a roof, a name that seekers could find. She looked at her broken shrine, then up at the strange teacup-shaped tavern floating in the evening sky. A school needed a home. Hers was a pile of cracked stone, and she did not own a single wall.

The baker's coin still sat warm in Delila's palm the next morning. She looked at her shrine in daylight. Cracked stone. No roof. No door. A seeker could pass it and never guess a school lived here. By noon the baker returned with two friends, hungry to learn. They stood in the open road, with no walls to hold them. A cold wind pushed through, and the three shivered and glanced back the way they came. Delila saw it plain. Without shelter, they would scatter before she said a word. "Wait," she told them. She gripped her staff. The cracked compass spun fast, then stopped. It pointed down the road, firm, for the first time she could remember. Delila frowned. Her compass never pointed anywhere. "It seems we take a wrong road," she said. "Follow." She led them where the compass aimed. The baker grumbled. "We came to learn, not walk." "You'll learn by walking," she said. The road bent and climbed. Then it opened onto a clearing, and the seekers stopped dead. A building stood there. Sturdy wooden walls, honey-brown and clean. Bright windows framed in red, green, and blue. A small porch sheltered two wide doors. Above the door hung a plain sign: School. It looked as if it had waited years for someone to walk up the wrong road and find it. "Whose is this?" the baker whispered. Delila stepped onto the porch. The boards held firm under her staff. No lock barred the doors. Inside, dust lay thick on empty benches, but the roof was sound and the walls kept out the wind. She laughed, dry and surprised. Her method had misdirected her straight to the thing she needed. "Mine, now," she said. "And yours, while you learn in it." The three seekers filed in out of the cold. They wiped benches with their sleeves. The baker tested a window, and it swung open smooth. For the first time, no wind could scatter them. They sat, and they stayed, and they looked at Delila for the lesson. She planted her staff on the dusty floor. She had walls now. She had a roof and a door and a sign seekers could read. The compass had done its strange work. But standing in the quiet room, Delila felt the next trouble settle on her. An empty school was easy to fill with three. Word would spread. The baker would tell others, and others would tell more. Soon dozens would climb the wrong road to this door. She looked at the few benches, the single room. Three seekers fit. Thirty would not. She had solved the problem of walls only to face a harder one. Now that she had a home, she had to make it big enough for everyone her method would send.

Word spread fast, as Delila knew it would. Within a week, seekers crowded the schoolhouse porch each morning. The single room held thirty on packed benches. But more came. By the second week, forty stood outside in the sun, then fifty. Delila watched through the window as latecomers waited, grew bored, and drifted back down the road. She could not teach a crowd she could not fit inside. She rapped her staff on the floor, out of answers. "You've built a jar too small for the bees," said a voice above her. Delila looked up. A striped cat lay stretched along a roof beam, tail curled, grinning wide. She had grown up among cats in the forest, but none had ever grinned like this one. "And what would a cat know of teaching?" she asked. "Nothing," the cat said, pleased. "But I know that you keep the door shut. Why hold a school in one room when the whole wrong road is your classroom?" His grin stretched wider. "You teach people to walk astray. So let them walk." Delila frowned. The cat's grin faded, then his body, until only the smile hung in the air. Then that was gone too. She stood in the quiet, turning his words over. She had trapped herself. She fought to pull every seeker into one room when her whole method sent people outward. She went to the porch. Fifty faces turned to her, and more trudged off in the distance. "Stop," she called. "Don't come inside. None of you." The seekers muttered. The baker, near the front, threw up his hands. "We walked all this way for a bench." "You walked all this way for the wrong road," Delila said. "The lesson was never in the room." She lifted her staff. The cracked compass spun, then stopped, pointing nowhere and everywhere. "Break into fives. Each five picks a road. Walk it wrong. When one of you hits a dead end, the others learn the way from it. Return by dusk and tell me what you found." The crowd split into small bands. They argued, laughed, and scattered down a dozen roads. The porch emptied. The room behind her sat empty too, and for once that did not trouble her. Delila sank onto the step and watched them go, each group a classroom with legs. By dusk they returned, muddy and loud, every seeker with a story of a wrong turn that taught the next. No one had wandered off. No one had been turned away. The schoolhouse had never been the school. The roads were. But as the last group filed in to warm themselves, Delila counted heads and felt the next trouble. A hundred seekers now looked to her, scattered across roads she could not watch. She had freed them from the walls. Now she had no way to know who was lost for real, and who was lost on purpose.