A Crown Made of Closed Roads

How it begins

At her coronation, Elian promised that no citizen would go hungry under her rule. The western road vanished before the applause had finished.

Tavi Sen felt it disappear through the soles of his shoes. Royal mapmakers learned to distinguish subsidence from negligence, and negligence from an instruction passed down through stone. This was the third kind.

Across the cathedral, the new queen smiled with the terrible concentration of someone holding a hot dish.

“Continue,” whispered the chancellor.

Tavi stepped out of his assigned place among the lesser servants. “Your Majesty should sit down.”

“She has only just stood up.”

“She has also isolated the grain province.”

The organist held a note until it became an accusation. Elian looked at Tavi, then at the gold branches resting on her hair. Between two points of the crown, a tiny black gap had opened.

Her father had worn it for forty years. His official portraits showed no gaps at all.

“Is this a joke?” she asked.

“No, Majesty. Those usually leave a route home.”

Tavi spread his map across the altar. The bishop began a protest, saw the moving ink, and found another duty. Where the western road had crossed the hills, the parchment now showed a stand of ancient forest. A small red mark blinked inside it.

“A coach,” Tavi said. “Possibly the millers' delegation.”

Elian touched the crown. “I intended to feed everyone.”

“Intentions are not in its jurisdiction.”

The chancellor reached for the map. Elian put her hand over his.

Outside, the crowd waited for the familiar promise that her reign would bring peace. She had practiced it since she was fourteen. She could hear the exact cadence, the pause that invited cheering.

“How many roads?” she asked.

Tavi opened his oldest map beneath the new one. Its ink had faded to brown, but there were roads everywhere.

“Before your father's coronation,” he said, “we had considerably more.”