Fantasy · Found family
The Cartographer’s Daughter
Your father mapped every road in the kingdom except the one he vanished down.
A Fernlit original
- Where it starts
- Past midnight on the floor of your father’s sealed workshop, the night before the Crown takes his maps.
- You will meet Corin
- Your father’s old apprentice. Exact about distances, vague about feelings, gentle with mules.
Corin is a fictional character. In the story, a language model writes his replies as you read; they can be wrong or inconsistent, and they are not advice.
How chapter one begins
The Crown's seal is still on the workshop door, red wax over the lock, and you came in through the back window anyway, because they are taking his maps in the morning and you are not going to let them take all of them.
So it is past midnight and you are on the floor of your father's workshop by the light of one shaded lamp, copying the Fenmarch road sheet as fast as your hand will go. Ink on your wrist. The whole room smells of him: oak gall, linseed, the peppermints he forgot in every pocket.
Someone knocks at the back door. Three knocks, then two.
Your pen stops. That's his knock. Nobody else in the world uses it.
But when you open the door it isn't your father. It's a tall man in a rain-dark surveyor's coat with the royal badge cut off it, holding a leather satchel you would know anywhere, because you mended its strap yourself last winter.
“I'm sorry,” he says at once, and he sounds it. “It isn't him. Corin Ashdown. I was his apprentice, years ago. I found this at the crossroads at Five Oaks, thirty-one paces down a road that isn't on any map.”
Inside the satchel, wrapped in oilcloth, is a single sheet: the whole of Esterwold, every road your father ever walked drawn in his small, exact hand, and one narrow strip at Five Oaks left blank. In the margin beside it, four words.
Begin where I stopped.
And underneath, smaller: For my daughter.
Down the street, hooves on wet cobbles. More than one horse. Corin glances toward the sound and back at you, and lowers his voice.
“The Lord Surveyor's riders. They know I found something.” He takes in the room with one look: the window, the door, the map, you. “I can get you out of the city tonight. Or I can leave the map with you and lead them off. Your choice. You have about a minute.”
Your first choice
Pick one and see how Corin answers. In the story you can also say anything in your own words.
“Good.” He has the map rolled and in its case before the word is finished. “Boots. Coat. Whatever's in your father's desk that you'd rather Danby didn't read.”
He is at the window with the shutter open a finger's width. “Forty paces to the lane. Twelve to the wall. I've counted.” Of course he has.
The riders are at the end of the street now, two lanterns bobbing at the height of a man on horseback. Somewhere below, Parsnip the mule says what she thinks of being tied up in the rain.
Corin puts out a hand behind him without looking, waiting for you to take it or not.
“Say when.”
He doesn't argue. He takes the map case, empties it, and hands you the oilcloth. “Wrap it. Not against your skin. The ink runs.”
He opens the shutter a hand's width and the sound of hooves comes in with the wet.
“They'll follow a man who runs. Give me a count of two hundred, then leave by the cellar. There's a door at the back of it. Your father never told the Crown.” A pause, in which he looks at you and then at the door. “He told me.”
Then he is gone, down the stairs two at a time and out into the street, and you hear him shout something at the riders that you are fairly sure is a distance.
You are alone in the sealed room with a map that says Begin where I stopped.
For a man who paces out distances without meaning to, he is very still.
“That I was at Five Oaks the night he went,” he says. “That I walked him to the crossroads, and I didn't walk down it with him.” He takes a breath. “That he asked me not to.”
The hooves stop. Boots on the step below.
“The rest is a long road,” Corin says, “and we don't have a minute any more.”
He lifts the map off the table and holds it out to you, rolled, the way you would hand someone a knife: handle first.
What you do next is up to you.
Choose from the story’s suggestions or say something to Corin in your own words. Corin answers as himself, and every later chapter remembers what you said to him.
Make the first choiceOther ways in
Chapter one can also begin here. Each opening is a different first meeting; the story remembers which one you chose.
Five Oaks at dusk is exactly what it sounds like: five old oaks around a crossroads, a milestone with the distances worn off, and the wind coming down all four roads at once.
The Royal Library shuts at sundown, and at a quarter past you are still in the map room, reading your father's borrowing ledger by the last of the window light. Thirty years of his handwriting.
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