Compass star and vine design with mandala

Imrana kept a stall at the caravan yard at Senna Wells, selling brass compasses to anyone foolish enough to cross the salt. Her needles never pointed north. They pointed toward whatever a traveller had lost most recently, which made her a poor saleswoman and a good listener. One dusk a boy came in with grit in his eyebrows and asked for a compass that would take him home. She told him every compass points home if you stop lying to it, and he laughed, but he paid her in dates and walked out anyway.

She had given him a small star of brass with a cut-glass flower set in its heart, the only piece she would not sell. Men at the gate said the boy was walking into a fool's road. They always say that, the way men do about roads they have never walked. Three nights later, the water camel's bell rang at the gate, and there he was, thinner, dragging nothing but the compass by its cord.

He said the needle had swung past the old track and past the dunes, and stopped only at a crumbled well where ivy grew over the stones. Green, in all that bleached nothing. He had sat by that ivy until the cold came, and when he woke the needle still pointed there, not to any road. Imrana took the compass from him and turned it in her palm. The flower at its centre caught the firelight. So when you walk out tomorrow, watch for the green things where nothing else will grow. Somebody stopped there once, and that is all the map you need.