The Commission

The duke was dying, and he wanted a road. Elin Sarr knew the first part before she crossed his threshold. You could smell it in the corridors of Hallow House — that sweetish rot under the beeswax and the woodsmoke, the smell of a body losing an argument with itself. The servants moved the way servants move around the dying, quick and quiet, already practicing their grief. The second part she did not learn until she was standing at the foot of his bed with her case of pens still buckled. "A road," the duke said. His voice had been famous once. Now it was a thing he had to gather before he spent it. "From the western gate of Hallowmere to the city of Anvarre." Elin waited. When he did not go on, she said, carefully, "My lord, I have charted the whole of the western reach. There is no city called Anvarre." "I know." His eyes found hers, and they were not a dying man's eyes. They were bright and terrible and entirely awake. "That is why I sent for you and not for some surveyor. They tell me your maps are true." She did not like how he said it. People said it two ways. Most meant accurate — that her coastlines did not lie, that her leagues were honest leagues. This duke meant the other thing. The thing she did not advertise and could not always control. "They are accurate," she said. "Don't be modest in my house. I am paying too much for modesty." He lifted one hand off the counterpane, and it cost him. "I have read the report from Sedgewick. The bridge you drew at Tarn Ford. There was no bridge at Tarn Ford. The masons had not laid a stone. And then you sold your map at the spring fair, and by midsummer there was a bridge, and the masons swore they had been building it for a year, and the ledgers agreed with them, and the river agreed with them. You drew it, and the world remembered it had always been there." Elin's mouth had gone dry. She had spent eleven years being careful. Drawing only what existed. Walking every league before she inked it. Burning the drafts where her hand had wandered. "That bridge killed a boy," she said. "Two springs after. The ice took out a span and he went through. If there had been no bridge there would have been no boy on the river that morning." "Yes." The duke seemed pleased she understood. "Everything true has a cost. I am not asking you to pretend otherwise. I am asking you to name your fee." "There is no city called Anvarre," she said again, because it was the only solid ground she had left. "There will be." He smiled, and the rot-smell seemed to thicken in the room. "I have wanted a thing my whole life and never had it, and I have run out of life in which to build it the slow way. So I will buy it the fast way. You will draw me a road to Anvarre, and you will draw enough of Anvarre that the world remembers it. A wall. A gate. A market square with a fountain. And I will be carried down that road before I die, and I will sit by that fountain, and I will have been to the city that was always mine." "And the cost?" Elin said. "You said it yourself. Everything true has a cost. Who pays for a city?" The duke looked at her for a long moment. Outside, a bell was ringing the hour, thin and far. "That," he said, "is a question for cartographers. Not for dying men. Three hundred crowns, mistress Sarr. Three hundred now and three hundred when I sit by my fountain. I am told that is more money than your craft will see in a lifetime of honest leagues." It was. That was the worst of it. It was. She should have walked out. She had walked out of smaller rooms for smaller reasons. But she was thirty-six years old and her knees ached in the wet season and her father's debt still sat in a ledger in Hallowmere with her name written under his, and three hundred crowns was a door out of a life she had stopped being able to see the end of. "I will need to see the western gate," Elin said. "And I will draw nothing until I have walked the ground the road begins on. I do not ink what I have not stood on." "Then stand on it tomorrow." The duke closed his eyes. The audience, she understood, was over. "And mistress Sarr — draw it beautiful. If I am buying a city, I want a beautiful one." That night she did not sleep. She sat in the guest room with her case open and her best pen unwrapped, and she did not draw anything at all. She only looked at the empty paper, white as a frozen river, and thought about the boy who went through the ice, and how he had never once, in his short life, asked for a bridge.