The Ember Vow

Her father had drawn every road in the kingdom of Varn. Every mountain pass and river crossing, every goat track and pilgrim’s path, every lane in every village from the salt marshes to the northern ice. His maps hung in the king’s war room and the merchants’ guild and the smallest schoolhouse in the smallest hamlet, and they were never, ever wrong.

Except, Edda discovered on the morning of his funeral, for one.

She found it in the bottom drawer of his desk, wrapped in oilcloth: a map of the Greywood, the forest on the eastern border where nobody went and nothing grew in straight lines. Every other map of the Greywood showed it as a blank green space. This one showed a road.

It began at the edge of the forest, near the ruined chapel at Hollin, and wound east in her father’s neat, sure hand. It crossed two rivers that did not appear on any other map. It passed a lake shaped like a closed eye. And then, halfway across the parchment, it simply stopped, as though the pen had been lifted and never set down again.

In the margin, very small, he had written: Not yet. Not for her.

Edda sat on the floor of the map room with the oilcloth in her lap for a long time. Outside, the funeral bells were ringing. Inside, surrounded by the whole known world, she understood for the first time that her father had been keeping a secret, and that the secret was about her.