Wren paid the first year with the name of a street she had lived on. She watched it go the way you watch a word you have been saying all your life stop meaning anything.
The clerk came back. The clerk always came back; that was the whole trouble with debts. Wren had drawn eleven more maps by then, all of them honest, all of them surveyed twice, and still the ledger wanted more.
"I will draw you a true map," Wren said. "The truest I have. Halloway as it is, with the water where it lives and the bridge where it fell. That must be worth something."
"It is worth six years," said the clerk. "The last three are for the lie, not the water."
Wren had known this. She had known it since the third coin. There is a kind of debt that cannot be paid with anything you can make; it wants the things you cannot buy back. So they sat at the table, the mapmaker and the clerk, and Wren began to give names of people instead of places: the ferryman who had taught her the river; the sister who had married across it; the old woman at Halloway who remembered every road before it was a road.
The clerk wrote each one down without hurrying. "You understand what a true map costs when it is a map of your own past."
"I understand that a maker who lies about water should not be paid in weather," Wren said. "Keep drawing." The candle guttered and the clerk wrote on, and Wren listened to the names leave her: a ferryman's laugh, a wedding in the rain, the old woman's road before it was a road. Each one went quietly, which was worse. When the ferryman's name went, she waited to feel something lose its anchor, and felt only the room get colder. The clerk did not look up.