Wren Osprey drew maps the way other people kept grudges: carefully, and with the intention of settling them later.
The ford at Halloway was her thirtieth map and her first lie. There was water there — the survey said so, the villagers said so — but the crossing she drew was a little further upstream than the place where the old bridge had fallen in. It made a prettier line. It made the route shorter. A courier would take it in autumn and drown.
The clerk came to collect three days later. She was grey as a ledger page from boots to collar, and she set two coins on the table, and then a third.
"The river has a debt against your name," the clerk said. "Every map that lies takes a year of someone's memory. You owe the ford nine years. I am not here to argue about the interest."
Wren looked at the coins. "Whose memory?"
The clerk smiled the way ink smiles when it bleeds through paper. "Yours, mapmaker. Unless you have a better name to give me." She tucked the three coins into her coat, walked home along the water, and did not look at the ford once, which was a kind of answer in itself. The coins sat on the table between them, three small suns with the river's face stamped on the reverse. Wren did not touch them. Outside, the road she had drawn so prettily ran down to the water, and the water had been waiting for someone to believe in it. She had been a good cartographer for eleven years. She wondered, with the first cold drop of fear, how many of those years had already been spent.