The Road That Wasn't

The dream had got half a league. Elin found it in the cold light after dawn, walking west from Sib's gate with her case on her back and her draft rolled in her hand. The cart track ran out in the grass exactly where it had always run out. She knew that grass; she had stood in it three times. And then, where yesterday there had been only sheep-cropped moor, there was a road. It was not a finished road. It was the suggestion of one — a band of paler ground where the heather had thinned, two faint ruts as though carts had passed, though no cart had ever come this way. It curved west around the contour of the hill. The same curve her hand had drawn. She crouched and put her fingers to one of the ruts and the soil was packed hard, as if by years of wheels. By midsummer there was a bridge, she thought, and the masons swore they had been building it for a year. The land was agreeing with her ink. Quietly, the way a river had agreed about the bridge. It was finding reasons to have always had a road here. She could turn around. The thought was very clear and very calm. She could walk back through Sib's gate and return the duke's three hundred crowns and go home to Hallowmere and her father's debt, and the half-league of road would sit out here in the moor unfinished, and perhaps in time the heather would forget it. A dream half-dreamed could still be woken from. But she did not turn around. She told herself it was because she had to see — that a craftsman who would not look at her own work was a coward. The truth, which she did not say even to herself until much later, was simpler and worse. The road was beautiful. Her line through the empty land was the truest thing she had drawn in eleven years, and standing there in the cold she felt the old forbidden joy of it, the joy she had buried after Tarn Ford: the joy of being right, of the world bending to say yes, you saw me, this is what I always was. So she walked the road instead of away from it. To see how far the dream had got. That was all. The road got firmer as she went. By noon the ruts were honest ruts and the pale band had become a packed earthen way wide enough for a wagon, and there were milestones — squat weathered stones, lichened, ancient-looking, though she would have sworn on her father's grave they had not been there an hour before. She knelt by one and rubbed the moss from its face. ANVARRE, the stone said. XL. Forty leagues to a city that did not exist. The stone was cold and certain under her hand and it had clearly stood there a hundred years. That was when Elin understood, fully and with a lurch in her stomach, what she had done and what she was still doing. She had not drawn a road to Anvarre. She had drawn a road, and the road, being a road, had decided where it went. A road is an invitation, Sib had said. You're saying come. And the land, dreaming, had answered with milestones and a destination, because a road with no end is not a road and the dream wanted to be a true thing. She was not making Anvarre. The road was making Anvarre. And she was walking down its throat. Behind her, faint on the wind, she heard wheels. Elin turned. The road ran back east, straight and packed and old, all the way to a smudge that was Sib's gate. And on it, perhaps a league back, catching the light, was a wagon. A real wagon, with a real team, coming west. Travellers. On a road three days old. Coming, because she had said come. She stood very still in the middle of her beautiful, terrible road, forty leagues from a city she had invented, and for the first time since the duke had named his fee she let herself be afraid — properly afraid, the way you are afraid of a thing you have done and cannot now undo. Then she shouldered her case, because there was nothing else to do, and walked on toward Anvarre to find out who would pay for it.