Jorram looked at the map briefly then turned to face what I thought was northwards and held the map up. I watched him closely, trying to figure out what he was doing. Of course I had seen maps; maps of the city, of the local area marked up with the boundaries of the various jurisdictions – this area was free to fish in, but this area only allowed open hunting in the early months of the year, and such – and maps of Westal. But I had no experience with actually using them to navigate.

Peering over his shoulder I saw that it was entirely different to the illustrated ones with thick flowing lines and large lettering that I was familiar with. This map had many lines, creating shapes like circles and spreading outwards in all directions. The land was littered with symbols and crosshatched with different patterns of ink to create a picture that was as mysterious to me as the arts of healing or efficient crop rotation. In short, I didn’t know what the hell we were looking at.

Jorram squinted at the sun and took a few strides forward before Mistress Farrow spoke up. Her tone was commanding and brooked no argument.

“Jorram!” He faltered. “Every opportunity to share knowledge, every change to teach your fellows should be seized. We may run alone, but we stand together.”

“Yes Mistress. Sorry.” The apology was muttered and to my ears not entirely sincere but he trudged back over. “Look at this. What do you see?”

“That’s the city, yes? This thick line here with the dots is the wall.” Mirabella traced a black mark at the bottom. I noticed her fingers were carefully cut and free of grime under the nails. “This gap here is the gate. Where we are. Ah, I see. You were facing northwards to align with the map, to match up what you can see in front of you with what is on the paper.”

“Exactly. This is easiest. Maps have this picture here so you can check the orientation. Most of ‘em just point north though.” It was like a circle with a four way cross. The elaborate “N” for North pointed straight up. “Face north, hold the map right way up and look. If you get better you can face any way and rotate the map as you go.”

“Right but what about all these lines?” I could see the road in front of us, another thick line spilling out northwards in a slightly haphazard manner. “I’m looking at a field and then those trees over there and couple of houses, but there’s all these lines.”

“Elevation profile. It shows the change in the height of the land, one line per five meters. No lines where we are because it is pretty flat. But this over here,” he pointed at a series of ovals set inside each other, growing increasingly smaller. “That could be either a pit or a hill, you have to figure it out from the shape of the land.”

“So it’s a hill.” It rose up far in the distance, its peak kissing the sky. Up and up and up, ringed onto the paper for anyone to look at.

“Yes.”

Jorram had a straightforward bluntness that I rather admired. He wasn’t exactly rude per se, though his delivery bordered on it at times. He conveyed information quickly and didn’t make me feel stupid for not knowing something. And when it came to map reading, what I didn’t know could fill several books.

“But these colours don’t make sense.” Mirabella scowled, her light eyebrows furrowing over long eyelashes. “I’ve been here with my father.” Her fingernails tapped an area that was lightly washed in colour. The map was primarily plain, the colour of the raw paper, but certain areas had been stained in varying shades of what looked and smelled suspiciously like tea, and others were green.

“This is Blackdawn forest but the scale is all wrong. The forest spans from this village to that and then all the way up this slope here.” Mirabella was clearly a fast learner, turning the small boxes and lines into what she knew. “But this green section is too small.”

“There’s different shades of green too; what do all the colours mean Jor?” His nickname slipped out without much thought. Jor smiled at me. His teeth were oddly pointed.

“Green is all woodland. Darker the green the harder it is to travel through. Paths are best. Main ones are thick lines. Broken up lines means faint trail, maybe a logging trail or an animal track. They aren’t best reliable ‘specially if the map is older.” He inspected the corner. “This one’s new. Must’ve cost a pretty penny.”

“We hire mapmakers,” Farrow said from where she hovered a few steps away, weighing our every word. “If we do not know the land we cannot plan, and if we cannot plan we would make poor messengers when a message is dearly needed.”

Dearly needed. I thought of what my uncle said, about the Wings in wartime and blood and death and dearly needed orders. Would that be me one day? Me, a bloody hand clutched around bloody words, bashing around cross-country? Me, stumbling down a dark trail knotted with tree roots, clambering over rocks barely going faster than a shuffle, a missive that could save lives sweaty in my fist? It made me shudder. Did I want that to be me? No. But a part of me wanted to want it to be me. It’d be easiest after all. I wanted an apprenticeship and now I had one, so I’d better suck it up.

“My da keeps a map of his land. Notes on crop yields, soil quality and the like – that is my job to update. Was my job; I ‘spose my younger brother will do it now.” Jorram’s head twitched eastwards. “Anyways. The white is clear forest. Means you can trample all over it, no problem. White is good. Dark green is to be avoided. Light is alright.”

“So yellow is what?” I thought about it for a second. “Fields?” The flat area in front of us was a light tea yellow. Literally in front of us were fields; it made sense.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“Sure. But it’s more general. Means open land. Dots mean its open but rough, like tussock strewn moorland, or gorse.” He scratched his head. “That’s ‘bout it really.”

“A fair explanation, Jorram. Thank you.” Mistress Farrow said.

It was unclear what her role here was; was she teaching or testing us? This was something in between, like a guided lesson, as she took on a lecturing tone not dissimilar to my schoolteachers. Only she lacked a sheaf of papers and a stick to rap the knuckles of a daydreaming student.

“The first element of undertaking a journey is to plan.” She took the map off of Jorram and spread it out on a rock. “This here,” there was a stylised sketch of a wing, situated in what I now recognised as a valley clustered on three sides by steep forested slopes. That or a really oddly shaped hill. “This is our destination. As you have correctly identified we are here, near the city gate. What you need is a plan.”

So plan we did. Mirabella and Jorram did the bulk of the work, debating the merits of distance over elevation (flat any day, Mirabella argued!), paths over cross-country hiking (always, Jorram said), and the likelihood of wild boars (uncertain). I had little to contribute and it struck me again, with a hint of despair, how out of my depth I was. Mirabella clearly wasn’t a country girl like Jorram, she was too neat and clean, her words too proper, but she was able to hold a conversation on the matters of map reading and planning. Sensing Farrow’s eyes on me, I scrambled for something to say.

“How’d you know how far it is? We’ve got maybe two hours of daylight left and once that starts to go, it’ll go fast.”

That was something I knew a fair amount about from a few nights too many stumbling home from the tavern. Even in the city with torchlight flickering from major corners, once the light failed it was a race to get home fast, before I couldn’t make my feet out and my fingers couldn’t find the lock in the door without the scrabbling noise waking my mother.

“This is the scale. That line means one mile so if we use our fingers we can make a rough guess,” Mirabella pinched her fingers a set distance and walked them over the map along the route we had selected. “Approximately twenty five miles. With an estimated average pace of four miles an hour,” she looked me once over, from my head to my toes, “no, three miles an hour, that makes eight hours. Presuming we don’t go wrong. We’ll need somewhere to stay tonight.”

“Why’d you say it like that?” I said defensively.

“Like what?”

“You looked at me and then slowed our pace down. You don’t need to talk down to me, just ‘cause I’m new to this.” I crossed my arms. “I’ve got legs and they work just fine.”

“Anya,” Mirabella said soothingly, palms held out. My eyebrows shot up even further. “It’s not personal—“

“It’s your footwear.” Jorram said with his now expected customary bluntness. “You don’t have the right kind. Not enough ankle support. Soles too thin. You’ll feel every rock and it’ll make your feet hurt. You’ll be slow, ‘specially after a few hours.” Mirabella nodded in agreement, hands still up.

I breathed out, the wind whistling harshly through my crooked front teeth. Mirabella looked genuinely sorry to have aggravated me. This wasn’t personal. We were just three nervous people standing out in the cold, not really sure what was going on, bickering with each other in turn because we were all slightly afraid. Even Jorram. I could see it the way he kept twitching, as though keeping himself from looking towards home.

“Sorry.” I looked Mirabella squarely in the eye. “You’re right. Pace is dictated by the slowest person and all that.” I swallowed the last of my simmering anger away. “So with two hours of walking, we can make the village of Little Swallow; maybe we can make use of our new status as apprentice runners? We are supposed to be aided by law, ain’t we?”

United in agreement, we started to walk down the road. We didn’t talk much. Jorram went first, holding the map, muttering to himself; Mirabella followed him and I was behind her, looking around me with curiosity at the landscape: the rise and fall of the grass in mounds, the fenced off fields crammed with drowsy sheep, and the crops that shimmered like coins. Wardwatch and the surrounding areas were wealthy enough, fed by the trading ships that meandered up and down the coast and the goods that we made to fill their holds. I could see that wealth in the tired but satisfied bodies of the other people around us.

As the minutes trickled on by I began to feel the weight of the long day upon my shoulders. My eyes dropped to focus on Mirabella’s back, the sway of her shoulders almost hypnotic as I moved each foot forward. By contrast, behind me Farrow seemed entirely unfazed, moving just as easily as she had done when we started.

I followed Jorram’s lead without complaint. He paused occasionally to confer with Mirabella, and I listened in but offered no input as he stated that, yes, it had been three fields we had passed now and that must have been about a mile so this was the correct right hand turn. No, she argued, the path should be in sight of one of the local villages and she couldn’t see anything. Jorram retorted that he lived here his entire life and he knew this was the right turn and what did a city girl like her know anyhow? I sat on a rock and sipped my water as I waited for them to make up their minds.

The light was fading fast when we encountered a slow moving river. Jorram peered in the gloom from the dry shore.

“What’s the problem? It’s shallow enough to cross,” I splashed out into the water to prove my point, getting wet only to my ankles.

Jorram let out an aborted “don’t!” But I was already halfway across, puzzled by his reaction. He sighed wearily. “You’re going to get blisters. Wet feet and hiking is a bad combination, causes rubbing. Never mind you’re mostly across now.”

I cursed and splashed irritably the rest of the way, regretting my impulsivity. Slipping my shoes off, I wrung my woollen socks out, trying to get out the worst of the water. The ground was cool under my feet and I dug my toes into the dirt, trying to remember why I had ever wanted to come all the way out here and if I still wanted to go the twenty odd miles we had left, just to get to the start of my apprenticeship. Too late now, I thought, I’d never find my way back to the city even if I could hack the shame of it.

Graceful and dry footed, Mirabella joined me in the shore, having hopped across a series of rocks that peeked out over the water. Jorram elected a more methodical approach of balancing with a pair of long sticks as he stepped carefully out over the water.

“Sorry, should’ve warned you,” Mirabella said.

“Not your fault.” I said glumly.

My sock drying efforts may have helped, but they hadn’t saved me. By the time we had arrived at Little Swallow my feet were aching and the backs of my heels were sore and rough with swiftly shedding skin. Mistress Farrow stepped in and arranged for us to sleep in the barn out that presumably served as the local inn. I was too tired to do much else than nibble on my bread and cheese before collapsing into sleep.

Silence shrouded the four of us and I wondered briefly is this is what it was like to be a runner – exhausted and prone to avoiding conversation, even when surrounded by others.