Dawn came to Wyrmfield like an apology: thin, pale, and bitter with mud. Marek's hands knew the shape of that apology better than his face; they were always cracked along the knuckles from pulling roots and the long rope of winter. He had the same sunrise-stiffness that came to everyone who turned the earth for a living, but his chest felt hollow in a way the cold wind could not explain. There was a scrap of paper in his palm.
The map was no more than a scrap, really — the corner of something older than the merchant's ledger, a fragmented coastline and a single mark in faded ink like a heart stitched in blue. Whoever had once drawn it had been precise in other places, careless here. Marek had thought then he could name the place by smell: salt, horse dung, smoke. He had been wrong. The mark felt like an argument.
He'd not meant to take it. That was the honest truth. He had been helping an old man carry blocks of burned grain down the lane and the kid from the merchant house — the one with the shiny teeth and the smooth hands — had been foolish enough to set the ledger on a stump and walk away for bread. Marek had wanted only to hand it back and be done with the men who set fire to other men's roofs for a laugh. The map slid when his fingers brushed the page. His palms closed on it without law or prayer.
"Thief?" Old Jorr's voice was worse than a slap. The man's teeth refused to hide the accusation.
Marek looked up. The road outside Wyrmfield was smoke and people with singed cloaks. Someone was crying—thin keening like a gull. A house less than a field away smoldered still. A merchant tallyman stood with two men, all of them eyes and money and no shame.
"I was—" Marek began. The words came out small.
"Thief," repeated Jorr. Not the question this time.
The tallyman's smile was the kind a man uses when he expects to collect a debt he did not earn. Marek could have put the scrap down, laughed and walked. He could have kept his hands clean for another season. It was the easy thing. The harder thing was the one that made his feet move.
He swore his father would have done the same — taken what he could to prevent hunger, handed it back if the cost was his neck. So he folded the scrap and put it in his shirt.
"Then keep it," Jorr said, softer now as the fire took a new hold. "Reckon that lot have taken enough."
On the quays the boats lay like scattered ribs. Marek had never gone past the low wooden pier that matched the tide's whispering. He had not seen the sea as more than a rumor, a horizon-line that belonged to sailors in stories told with brandy and bad teeth. The scrap sat hot against his chest. He walked. The town seemed to be moving away from itself — the children held closer to mothers, the men carried axes like statements.
At the dock the world opened. The sea smelled of fish and old rope and a kind of dangerous promise. Ships thrust and groaned at their moorings, flags like ragged tongues. Men in coats with buttons bright enough to be insulting barked orders. A small brig lay waiting; its paint had seen too many storms and still tried to be respectable.
A man was shouting. Marek drifted like a thrown stone toward the sound.
"…one recruit's worth a week of grain!" a captain was saying. He had a voice of iron shavings. Men lined up to be counted. Marek watched more than listened, noting the scar on the captain's brow, the neatness of his boot leather, the way his fingers tapped a rhythm only he felt.
A lad next in line beside Marek looked up and grinned, showing a scar where a tooth once had been. "You first time?" the lad asked.
Marek, for all his awkwardness, understood the economy of a grin. "First time shore looks like this, aye."
"It'll spit you out if you ask it to," the lad said. "Name's Rallo."
Marek had not meant to answer. He said, "Marek."
Rallo's grin widened. "Well, Marek, they'll take anyone with hands and a spine. You might even get sea legs, if the tide's kind."
When his number came, Marek stepped forward. The captain peered, saw the smallness of the hands and the stubborn square of the jaw. He asked the usual questions: can you climb, can you pull, can you keep quiet under lash? Marek replied as men must: the truth slipped into a shape that sounded like promise.
"You'll learn," the captain said finally. "We leave with the tide."
Marek thought, for a single ridiculous moment, of the map. He felt the scrap beneath his shirt as if it were a second heart. He did not know why that scrap mattered beyond the fact that it felt like a thing worth breaking a man's rule for. He could see no more of the coastline than before, but belief is a stubborn cartographer.
They called him to put his name on a ledger. When he wrote it his hand shook. Old Jorr watched from the quay, wiping his eyes with the back of his wrist. The merchant tallyman was nowhere to be seen; the burned home behind him cast a thin shadow that did not move even in the wind.
That night on deck, Marek lay with the low planks of the brig beneath him like a second earth. The rope smelled of tar, and the sea was a black that fit the shape of hunger. The crew laughed and argued within earshot, and Marek rolled the scrap out from his shirt when he thought no one watched.
The map's little heart mark made no promise. It was a mark on paper, ink made soft by rain and time. Marek traced it with a fingertip. A gull called somewhere like someone remembering a name. He did not know the difference between home and far-off not-home yet; he only felt the hollow at his ribs fill in small with the sound of other men's voices and the slow move of the ship cutting the water.
"First night?" someone asked.
Rallo's silhouette shifted across him. "First night," Marek said, because the word first tastes of everything. He held the map like an answer and like a question.
Above them the sky was indifferent. The sea below was full of things that remembered before men drew boundaries. Marek folded the scrap and pressed it to his mouth in a gesture he would later not remember. He said a small oath to himself, a promise that had nothing to do with law and everything to do with the clean country wind that had been taught to him as a child.
"Find it," he told the sea. "And don't let it go."
The tide took the words with no answer, only the ancient slow nod of coming water. The ship leaned into that nod and the world moved under Marek's feet for the first time in his life. He slept with the map under his shirt, and for the first time there was a taste of the future — a hard, bitter salt — at the back of his throat.
When the brig shoved away from the quay the next morning, Wyrmfield was a small smudge on the horizon. The smoke stayed behind like an afterthought. Marek gripped the rail until his knuckles went white. The map thudded against his heart like a promise and like a beginning.
He could not know then that the scrap was the edge of more than a place on a map. He could not know how many people would die for its secrets, how many friends would become family, how many times he would wake to the sound of a cannon or the small laugh of someone he loved. He could not know the taste of aura, the lesson of ritual, or the price of reservoirs grown in long, lonely nights.
He knew only that the sea had a language he had not learned and that learning it would cost him everything he had and everything he would be. That was enough to make the first step.
He tightened his fingers and the map folded onto itself: the heart mark, the faded inkline, the tiny smears of someone else's cigarette ash. It was small. It fit his fist.
"Then let's steal tomorrow," he said to the gulls, to the sea, to the dark the brig cut through. The line was half bravado and half prayer. The gulls answered with a sound like a laugh. The ship answered with the patient, old creak of ropes.
The world moved forward with them.