Compass rose on the side ribs

Her grandson Piers came home from the coast with a sailor's bag and no money. He wanted the castle's cellars, where the old tale said a lord had hidden his tithe of silver. He asked Tamsin for the compass. She gave it to him on one condition: that he walk the eight points of the rose, north to south and east to west, before he set foot on the hill.

He walked them through bracken and sheep wire for three days. At each point he found a standing stone, and on each stone someone had cut an arrowhead pointing onward, so that the path bent round the hill like a hand turning a key. At the southern stone the arrows stopped. Beneath it lay a flat slab with a shallow cup worn into it, full of rainwater, and in the water a single coin. It was not silver, as the tale promised, but brass, stamped with a word too rubbed to read.

He carried it home and held it up to the lamp. Tamsin looked once and said it was the token the parish gave to men who had finished the boundary walk, and that the lord's silver had gone into mending the bridge a hundred years back. Piers asked why nobody had told him that part. She put the compass back on its nail and turned it so the brass face caught the window light. The needle trembled, settled, and for the first time anyone could remember, it pointed up the hill at the broken tower.