The Salt Road

Chapter Originals

The Salt Road runs south out of Vennow between two ridges and it is four days to the sea, and in a hundred and eleven years forty-one people have gone down it and one has come back. Tamsin Reed makes maps, which in Vennow means she draws field boundaries for men in disputes and has done since she was nineteen, and she is twenty-six and the best surveyor in four counties and nobody has ever paid her for anything that mattered. In the spring the Guild offers her eleven hundred marks to chart the Salt Road, which is the amount you offer somebody when you have already worked out that they are not coming back. And they send a guardian with her, because they always send a guardian, and his name is Ivar and he is the one who came back — once, nineteen years ago, at twelve years old, alone, having gone down it with his mother and four other people. He has been walking it ever since. He is sworn to it and he cannot stop and he has taken thirty-one surveyors down that road in nineteen years and buried none of them, because there is nothing to bury. What neither of them knows on the first morning is that the Salt Road is not a place at all, and that it has never once been the same road twice, and that the reason nobody comes back is not that they die.