The-Coast-That-Isnt-On-Any-Map
Mara had drawn every coastline her kingdom owned, and a few it didn't, and she had never once trusted a coast she couldn't walk twice. So she resented this one on principle. It appeared, the fishermen swore, for a single night each autumn — a strip of black shingle and a lighthouse that stood on no chart, no survey, no memory but theirs. Maps were a promise that a place would still be there tomorrow. This place made no such promise, and she had come anyway, with her oilskin satchel and her good brass pen, to call its bluff.
The tide that night went out farther than tides should. Where there had been only water at dusk, a beach unrolled itself in the dark like a held breath let go, and at the end of it the tower burned with a light that was not quite the colour of fire. Mara walked the new shore counting her paces, because counting was how she loved things, and the salt smell was wrong — sweeter, with something underneath it like cut apples and cold stone. By the time she reached the door at the tower's foot she had ninety-one paces of a coast that, by every law she believed in, did not exist.
The man who opened the door was lighting a second wick and did not turn around. "You're early," he said. "Most of them wait until they're lost."
"I'm never lost," Mara said. "I make the things that keep other people from being lost."
That made him look at her. He was younger than the