Roses and compass on a thigh

The chart room at Harrowgate has been shut since the frost, so I am writing this on the back of the coastal survey while Master Ilse snores over her brandy. You will remember the compass she gave you before you sailed, the brass one whose needle sulks toward the north-west whenever it rains. I have it now. She says the needle was never the trouble. The trouble was the men who trusted it without checking the stars.

Three roses came up under the tallow lamp the night you left, pressed flat between the pages of the Varenmoor atlas where you used to hide your pipe. I meant to tell you they were not the usual red. They were the grey of the sea at dusk, the shadow of a bloom rather than the bloom itself, and Ilse said that was how the old printers made them, by working the ink until it sank into the paper like weather.

Here is the news, then. The queen's surveyors came on Thursday and asked for the lost-coast soundings. I told them the soundings were lost, which is true, and that the only people who could find them were the ones who had gone looking. They laughed. I did not. The map you drew of the drowned harbour is still pinned above my bed, and every morning I trace the coast with my thumb as if the sea has not yet made up its mind.

Come home when the roads thaw, or send word by the carrier at Stillwater. Bring the compass if you still have it. If you never get lost, Tobiah, you will never know what the far shore looks like. I would rather you were lost and writing than found and silent.

Yours across the water, Maren