Compass rose on an arm

I was sixteen when she let me grind the pigment. She showed me how each of the sixteen points had to be ruled from the centre outwards, how the flower in the middle was a sea-pink pressed flat between two sheets of vellum, and how the fleur ends on the cardinal points were there so a man in fog would know which way was home even when the star itself had gone soft. Beneath every rose she set one letter, always an S. When I asked, she said it was for Sibéal, her sister, whose boat had gone out past the Stacks one March and never come back. She did not say it with sorrow. She said it the way you name a tide.

The winter I turned seventeen, the mail boat failed to come for six weeks and the fishermen began to talk of a rock that was not on any chart. Ysolde unrolled a sheet I had never seen, a rose with its flower drawn a little off true, and tapped the star where the centre should have been. We sailed out at first light with that sheet folded in my oilskin. The fog came down like a lid. I held the paper flat against the tiller, followed the fleur pointing south, and felt the swell turn beneath us, and then the harbour wall rose grey out of nothing. Ysolde was already on the quay, pinning the chart to the post, her thumb pressed against the flower until the ink was dry.