The Mapmaker's Orchard

The orchard was not on any official map, though everyone in the village knew where it was.

Tucked behind the old granary and the crumbling limestone walls of the Darrin estate, it sprawled for acres, more wild than tended. The trees bore no fruit anyone recognized. Their trunks leaned in odd directions, like dancers caught mid-turn, and their leaves hummed softly in the wind—though no one could agree on the tune.

The orchard had belonged, once, to the town’s mapmaker. That’s what the oldest villagers said, anyway, their voices lowering at the mention of her name: “Elspeth Kain.” She’d arrived decades ago, no one remembered from where, and built her cottage beside the trees. She was thin and dark-eyed, always measuring, sketching, wandering with that leather satchel of parchment and pens. It was said she made maps of things no one else could see.

Then, one day, she vanished. Left her satchel on the doorstep and was never seen again.

People stayed away from the orchard after that.

Except Mae.

Mae had grown up on the stories. She was nine when her grandmother first showed her the hidden gate through the ivy. She was twelve when she found her first parchment nailed to a tree: a hand-drawn map of a staircase that didn’t exist. She was fifteen when she realized the maps changed depending on who found them.

By seventeen, she knew how to read them.

Mae was twenty-four now, and the orchard was hers in everything but law. She kept it quiet, watched over it like a secret child. Others forgot it existed—unless they stumbled in by accident, which they sometimes did, though they never remembered how.

The orchard did not take kindly to being found on purpose.

One overcast morning, as Mae walked the perimeter, she found a boy standing at the third bend in the path. He had a yellow notebook in his hands and a camera hanging from his neck. His hair was a mess of curls. His face was familiar in the way dreams were familiar.

“You’re trespassing,” Mae said.

He startled. “Oh. Sorry. I thought this was… I don’t know. I followed a trail.”

“There is no trail.”

“I guess I made one.”

She frowned. The orchard didn’t usually allow that.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Rowan.”

Of course it was.

Rowan. The same name etched into the margins of several of Elspeth Kain’s surviving maps. The same name that had appeared in the orchard once before—ten years ago, on a particularly humid summer day, when Mae found a paper tucked beneath a root: Rowan, age thirteen: north gate, July.

She hadn’t known what to make of it then. She wasn’t sure she did now.

Rowan watched her like he was trying to draw her face in his mind. “Do you live here?”

“Sort of.”

“Do you know this place well?”

Mae tilted her head. “Better than most.”

“I think I’m supposed to find something here,” he said. “It’s going to sound strange, but I’ve been dreaming about this place for years.”

Not strange at all, she thought.

He continued. “And then I was in the village last night for work, and I woke up with mud on my shoes and leaves in my hair and this in my pocket.” He handed her a folded note. It was written on faded parchment. The ink shimmered faintly blue.

It read: Go back. You forgot something beneath the roots.

Mae felt her fingers go cold. “Did you write this?”

“No.”

“Do you remember coming here before?”

He hesitated. “I think so.”

That was the wrong answer. Most people never remembered. That’s how the orchard worked. It fed on memory. It grew by forgetting.

Rowan looked past her, into the sway of trees. “Do you believe places can be alive?”

“Yes,” she said. “I do.”

He nodded, like that was the only answer he’d accept.

“I think this place knew me. Before I knew myself.”

---

They walked deeper into the orchard. The trees whispered louder now. Mae felt the hairs on her arms rise. The air thickened with the scent of loam and old stone.

They passed a tree with bark that rippled like water. Beneath its roots, Mae glimpsed a glint of metal—an old compass. She made no move to touch it.

Rowan paused beside a knotted trunk. “This one,” he said. “I’ve seen this before. I carved my name here.”

“No one carves into these trees,” Mae said sharply. “They don’t allow it.”

But then she saw it. The initials. R.K. Faint and warped with time, but real.

“Was I really here?” Rowan whispered.

Mae didn’t answer.

He turned to her. “What is this place?”

Mae looked at the trees, the shadows pooling at their bases, the hidden paths that led in circles, the maps that sometimes showed up in people’s dreams. She considered what to tell him.

“This is where lost things go,” she said. “But only the ones that want to stay lost.”

Rowan looked down at the dirt. “I lost my brother when I was thirteen,” he said. “He was thirteen, too. His name was Kieran. One day we were playing in the woods, and the next, he was gone. No sign. No sound. No goodbye.”

Mae stared at him. The orchard shifted behind her.

“And then?” she asked.

“And then,” Rowan said, voice low, “I started dreaming of a place full of strange trees. He was always just ahead of me, laughing, turning corners I couldn’t find. Then the dreams stopped. Until last week.”

The orchard pulsed. A leaf floated down between them.

Mae stepped closer. “Do you still want to find him?”

Rowan nodded. “More than anything.”

Mae reached into her coat and pulled out a folded map. It had been blank when she took it from the hollow this morning. Now it was full: inked with loops and arrows, roots and stairs, a lake that had never existed. At the center: a door in the shape of an arching branch.

She handed it to Rowan.

“Follow this,” she said. “Don’t stop. Don’t take anything that’s offered. Don’t speak to anyone unless they speak your full name.”

He took the map, brow furrowed. “Why are you helping me?”

Mae smiled faintly. “Because once, I followed a map too.”

He looked at her one last time. “Will I come back?”

She didn’t answer.

---

Rowan disappeared among the trees.

Mae waited.

Hours passed. The sky darkened. The orchard stilled.

Then the air split.

The trees opened like curtains, and two figures emerged—Rowan, pale and shaken, and a boy with the same eyes, just younger. Kieran.

Mae inhaled sharply. The orchard had given something back.

Rowan turned to her, tears streaking his face. “Thank you.”

Mae nodded. “Go. Before it changes its mind.”

The brothers ran, vanishing toward the gate, toward the world.

Mae stood alone beneath the humming trees.

A new map fluttered down from a branch and landed at her feet.

It was blank.

She smiled.

The orchard had chosen again.