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Rowan was born in a town at the northern edge of every map of the known world. Growing up, she had no way of considering the world beyond the markers that bounded her everyday existence: the farmhouses, the fields, the dusty path to the village and back, the funeral groves extending out to the desert at the edge of the horizon. The world seemed very small and she knew every corner in it.
***
As soon as Zenna says her leg is healed enough for the attempt, Rowan knocks at Arvin’s door, sword strapped on, holding a bow and some arrows. “You promised to teach me to shoot,” she says without preamble when he opens the door. Bel stands silently just behind her, eyebrows slightly raised at Arvin over Rowan’s shoulder.
Arvin eyes her cane, which she still uses most days.
“We’ll start slow,” Rowan counters.
Arvin eyes Bel, who shrugs. “You can teach me too.”
They do start slow, Rowan taking frequent breaks to rest her leg as Arvin explains the weapon and demonstrates techniques. Within a few weeks, both Rowan and Bel are proficient archers, albeit with very different approaches. Bel makes the weapon work with the build of her own body, aiming instinctively and sending arrows slicing toward the target with ruthless efficiency. Rowan is more patient. With each shot, she sights the target and roughly calculates range and angle, wind direction and speed. Her shooting is not as elegant as Bel’s, but it’s almost always as accurate.
As soon as Arvin pronounces them both advanced enough to practice on their own, Bel asks the question that Rowan’s been waiting for. “Where do you aim to kill a demon?”
***
Rowan was fourteen before she ever saw a map. The steerswoman Keridwen spread a map of the Inner Lands across a table and pointed out her town, right at the top edge, just below a blank expanse labeled as the Red Desert. For the first time, Rowan understood that the world was very, very big, and she was very small. It filled her with a sense of rightness, of perspective yanking into place.
***
Rowan leaves Arvin to teach Bel about the best way to kill a demon. He knows as well as anybody. Bel had pointedly directed the question to Arvin and not to Rowan, which Rowan supposes was meant as a nod to her likely opinions on the subject.
Rowan can never forget the first time she ever saw Bel afraid. Her legs shook as they crouched for hours in the stillness, ears straining to detect the buzzing of a single demon. She knows what Bel will do with the information: she will teach the Outskirters to kill demons. She will spread that information the way she’s already spreading the truth about the wizards, another weapon against another potential enemy. The Outskirters don’t have trees for bows or feathers for arrows, but they are warriors, and they will find a way.
Her legs naturally take her down her usual walk to the harbor, her eyes automatically seeking out the further point on the horizon. Growing up, she always sought out the edge of the desert, the boundary that no one had been beyond; at the Archives, it was the western mountains that no one had yet crossed; in the Outskirts, the endless redgrass, against the too-bright blue sky. From Alemeth, at least she can see the sea, the waves rolling in across the scrubby shore.
War is a thing that Rowan has always associated with wizards, red and blue fighting each other endlessly over territory and power. She’s dealt with her share of bandits and raiders in the Inner Lands and she participated in battles in the Outskirts, against goblins and against other tribes. But she’s never had to contemplate an organized fight of another people against her own, fighting over resources, over the very land that they will live on. She intends to stop Slado before that happens, by any means necessary. But she must allow for a second possibility: that she will fail.
Bel eventually finds her at the harbor. She comes up behind Rowan and waits with a bow still in her hand: a familiar, watchful presence.
Rowan struggles to conceive of a way to convey the depth of the feeling that she knows it’s vital for Bel to understand, the sense of the world altering at the recognition that a monster is not a monster at all but simply a being beyond your understanding.
“Tell them everything,” Rowan says.
Bel catches the meaning, her mind as quick as Rowan’s. “Every tribe that I teach about this weapon, I will also teach about the story of the demon people,” she says solemnly. Rowan knows that she will. She does not know if it will be enough.
They stand for another moment. “And you ought to teach the steerswomen as well.” Bel gently drops the bow at her feet and walks away.
***
By the time she was thirty, Rowan had been beyond the edge of all the maps. She’d been across the wide sweep of the Outskirts, teeming with life that looked like nothing familiar, warriors and dangerous creatures and thousands of daily battles against the land itself. She’d been beyond the place where ships vanish, to the land of monsters who turned out not to be monsters after all, but faceless, voiceless people. She filled in the maps behind her as she went, labeling the face of the world for the next comer, and for all who wanted to know.
***
Rowan returns to the books that night, as she does every night, searching the pages for evidence of magical events. She tucks the bow into a closet by the door. She places her sword and cane together against her chair and spreads a new map in front of her. She’s been drawing unusual weather patterns that Outskirters and the Inner Landers seemed to experience at the same time, before the fall of the Guidestar. The room is quiet and comfortable. The stillness and warmth of the fire lull Rowan into a doze and into a nightmare. Jann, in full Outskirter war band dress, and Arvin, in his simple Alemeth home quality silk, point arrows at a demon who doesn’t seem to hear them. Rowan reaches out to stop them but Bel is faster, interposing herself between the demon and the archers. Her shout rouses the demon, who raises two of its arms to spray. Somewhere out of sight, Janus laughs.
Rowan jerks awake. She does not believe in prophetic dreams. She knows from her training the dreams are often a reflection of some inner conflict of the dreamer, and she doesn’t need dreams to tell her what her own are. Still, it leaves her with an unsettled feeling that she doesn’t like.
She smooths her hand across the newest map of the world, still smelling of fresh ink. There is more information marked on it than there ever has been before, much of it drawn from her own travels. As ever, she mentally places herself on the map and feels herself to be one small person in a world that grows ever larger as it is mapped and made known. But as her fingers trace the borders of the Inner Lands, boxed in by impassable mountains, warrior tribes, demons and uninhabitable terrain, she notices a new paradox: her own knowledge makes the world feel much smaller.
Previously, the lands beyond the steerswomen’s maps had been blank spaces that seemed interesting but, if not irrelevant, vast and very far away. The mapping has made those places not just graspable, but threatening. Rowan now knows them to be very close indeed, and pressing inward, with none of it beyond the watchful eye of the wizards. She turns the thought over in her mind, regarding it as interesting but not particularly pertinent. Even unmapped and unconsidered, the threats were always there. Knowledge of them did not create them. Knowledge, however, may counter them.
Rowan returns to the task at hand, sketching and labeling the erratic severe weather a steerswoman on the Long North Road had reported during what Rowan's calculations told her would have been a Rendezvous year for the Outskirters. Her pen scratches across the page, determinedly adding another piece of information to the map of the world.