The Map Mapping Back

He woke to find a line drawn across his own forearm in his own ink, and it matched, exactly, a river he had not yet charted. He had not done it. He had slept with his hands folded, the way his teacher had taught him, so the ink would not smear. The line on his arm was precise. Confident. Better, frankly, than his own work. Joran understood then that the relationship had two directions. He drew the land, and the land — or the map, or whatever lived in the seam between them — had begun to draw him. He should have gone back to the guild. He knew that. He also knew that no cartographer in six hundred years had been offered this, and that knowledge, that terrible curiosity, was the same thing that had made him a master too young. He uncapped the ink.