Map Maker

The jigsaw piece this time wasn't shaped like a place at all. It was shaped like a torn corner of paper, edges rough and uneven, with a tiny scrap of ink on it that looked, if you squinted, like the corner of a map.

"That's new," said Elfine, turning it over carefully in the lamplight. "It's not even really a place. It's a piece of a picture of a place."

"Does it matter?" said Felix, who had already decided it didn't.

It didn't. Marion pushed it into the gap before anyone could discuss it properly, and the puzzle glowed gold, warmer than usual somehow, and the four of them tumbled through together.

• • •

They landed on something soft, faintly squishy, and unmistakably smelling of ham and mustard.

It took a moment to understand what they were looking at. The whole island beneath them was a sandwich — proper soft bread hills rolling away in both directions, a narrow, glassy lake of mustard cutting through the middle, one enormous curling lettuce leaf serving as a village green, complete with tiny benches. A large bite had been taken clean out of one end of the island, leaving a neat, curved cliff edge, which nobody thought to question, because sandwiches were clearly meant to look exactly like that here.

A small, frantic creature came scrambling over the nearest bread hill towards them, trailing loose papers behind her like the tail of a comet. She had ink smudged across one cheek, a pencil tucked behind each ear and a third clamped between her teeth, and she dropped at least four sheets of paper before she'd even said hello.

"Oh — thank goodness — you're not from around here, are you? No, of course you're not, I'd know you if you were. Fresh eyes. That's exactly what I need." She scooped her papers back up in entirely the wrong order and thrust out a hand. "I'm Nib. I make maps."

"What's wrong with your maps?" asked Alex, watching her hands shake slightly as she rolled out an enormous scroll across the lettuce-leaf green.

There it was — the whole of the Isles of Yum, drawn in fine, careful, beautiful lines, dozens of islands labelled in neat handwriting. Except for two large patches near the middle, blank and pale, as though the ink had simply lost its nerve and crept away.

"They weren't always blank," Nib said, and her voice wobbled the way the lake did when the wind touched it. "Spaghetti Bolognese Island. Roast Dinner Isle. I drew them myself, years ago — well, my mother drew the first lines, and I finished them, and they were right, I checked them a hundred times — and now look. Gone. Like they never existed at all."

"Your mother mapped the Isles too?" asked Marion, gently.

Nib nodded, not quite looking at anyone. "She was the map-maker before me. Best there ever was. I'm meant to be finishing her work, not — not losing bits of it."

• • •

"Maps don't usually un-draw themselves for no reason," said Elfine. "Something's happened in both those places. That's our best guess, anyway."

"Would you go and see?" Nib asked, all in a rush. "I can't leave — I'm right in the middle of the coastline, if I stop now I'll lose my place entirely, and I never find it again once I lose it — but if someone else went—"

"We'll go," said Felix, already climbing into the little boat tied up at the mustard-lake shore, which was very like Felix.

• • •

They sailed towards Spaghetti Bolognese Island long before they could see it, following the smell alone — rich tomato, warm garlic, a faint whisper of basil on the wind. When it finally rose out of the sea, it was exactly as glorious as it smelled: whole hillsides of long golden noodles, draped like garlands between towers of grated parmesan, with narrow lanes winding between them where, on an ordinary day, spaghetti carts would rattle back and forth delivering fresh pasta all across the island. Today, the lanes stood completely empty.

• • •

A noodle-shaped resident hurried over the moment they climbed ashore, wringing his hands so hard they nearly knotted. "Are you here about the fountain? Please say you're here about the fountain."

"What's wrong with it?" asked Alex.

"Come and see. Come and see, please, before we run completely out."

He led them at a trot through the silent lanes to the island's very heart, where an enormous fountain stood — the Meatball Fountain, according to a proud little sign, the thing that turned and turned all day, every day, spinning out fresh spaghetti from its base for the whole island. Except it wasn't turning. It sat perfectly, worryingly still, and gathered around its base was a small, anxious crowd of residents holding empty bowls.

"Two days," said the noodle-shaped resident miserably. "No fresh spaghetti in two whole days. We're down to the very last of what we'd stored."

"What's stopping it?" asked Marion.

He pointed, and there it was — one single, enormous meatball, wedged sideways into the great turning-wheel at the fountain's base, jammed so tightly that three residents pushing together hadn't managed to shift it an inch.

"We've tried everything," said the resident. "Push, pull, shout at it. Nothing."

• • •

Alex crouched down and studied the wheel for a long moment before saying anything. "You've all been pushing from that side," Alex said slowly, "which pushes it further into the gap, not out of it. It needs to come out the way it went in."

"How can you tell?" asked the resident, startled.

"Because that side's got room behind it, and this side hasn't," said Alex, pointing. "If you push where there's no room to go, it just wedges tighter."

Marion knelt down beside the wheel, running a careful hand along the meatball's curve. "If we push here," she said, marking a spot low on its side with her finger, "at this angle — it should roll out along the gap instead of jamming across it."

"I'll push," said Felix, who had been waiting for exactly this moment, and set his shoulder against the spot Marion had marked.

It didn't move at first. Felix pushed harder, feet braced against the cobbles, face going pink with effort, and just when it seemed like it might not budge at all, the meatball gave a sudden, enormous, tomatoey squelch and popped free all at once, sending Felix stumbling forward with the sudden lack of resistance.

The fountain shuddered, groaned, and began to turn.

Fresh spaghetti spooled out from its base in long golden ribbons, and the watching crowd erupted — cheering, waving bowls, someone somewhere ringing an actual bell.

"You've saved us," said the resident, seizing Felix's hand and shaking it so hard his whole arm wobbled. "However can we thank you?"

"Lunch would be nice," said Felix, with feeling, and got exactly that.

• • •

Back on the boat, full of the best spaghetti any of them had ever eaten, the jigsaw piece in Elfine's pocket gave a small, warm flicker.

"That's the feeling it gets," Elfine said, watching it settle, "when something in the Isles has been properly put right."

"One left, then," said Marion.

They sailed on towards Roast Dinner Isle, and the smell changed entirely somewhere along the way — roasted, savoury, thick with the warmth of gravy — until the island itself came into view, golden Yorkshire pudding hills rising in gentle curves, enormous roast potato boulders scattered across meadows of green beans, and winding right through the middle of it all, a proper river, wide and glossy and brown.

Except the river had slowed to the barest trickle, and a small crowd of roast dinner residents stood along its banks, staring anxiously at the nearly-dry riverbed.

"You're not from the ministry, are you?" asked one, hopefully, catching sight of them. She was round and golden-brown, with a little sprig of rosemary tucked behind one ear like a flower. "We've been asking for help for hours."

"We're just visiting," said Elfine. "What's happened to the river?"

• • •

"The Gravy Boat," said the rosemary-resident, pointing upstream. "That's where the whole river comes from — always has, since before I was born. It's stuck fast, and without it moving, we're down to barely a trickle, and second helpings are meant to start within the hour."

Upstream, exactly as she'd said, an enormous boat shaped precisely like a gravy boat sat wedged on a wide sandbank, tilted at an awkward angle, its spout dribbling only the thinnest thread of gravy into the riverbed below.

"We could push it," said Felix, already rolling up his sleeves.

Elfine studied the sandbank instead of the boat. "It's stuffing, not rock," she said slowly. "Soft. It's not stuck forever — the tide comes in properly at second helpings time, doesn't it?"

The rosemary-resident nodded.

"Then it'll float free on its own," Elfine said, "once the water's deep enough. We just need it lighter, so it doesn't need as much tide to lift it clear. What's it carrying?"

"Roast potatoes," said the resident. "Rather a lot of them, I'm afraid."

• • •

They formed a chain at once — Felix and Alex hauling the heaviest boulders from the boat's deck, Marion and Elfine passing smaller ones hand to hand along the line, resident after resident joining until a good dozen roast potatoes sat piled on the riverbank and the boat had noticeably lifted on the sandbank.

It was heavy, awkward, slippery work, gravy splashing up around their ankles with every boulder shifted, and they were nearly done — one last enormous potato left balanced on the very edge of the deck — when the tide arrived early.

The whole boat lurched.

Felix, reaching for that last potato, lost his footing on the gravy-slicked deck entirely, and went sliding — not towards the riverbank, but the wrong way, towards the open river itself, arms windmilling.

"FELIX!"

Alex moved first, dropping the boulder he was carrying and lunging across the tilting deck, catching two fistfuls of Felix's jumper just as Felix's feet left solid wood altogether. For one long, awful second, Felix hung half over the edge, the thick brown river rushing past just beneath him, close enough that the warm gravy smell filled his nose completely.

"I've got him — Marion, Elfine, HELP—"

They scrambled across at once, Marion grabbing Alex around the middle to anchor him, Elfine seizing whatever handhold on Felix's jumper she could reach, and together, all three of them hauled backwards, heels dug in against the tilting deck, until Felix came sliding back over the edge in one ungainly heap, gravy-soaked and gasping.

"That," said Felix, once he'd got his breath back, staring at the river that had very nearly had him in it, "was extremely close."

"You're alright," said Alex, still holding on rather tightly. "You're alright."

• • •

They didn't have long to recover. With one last great creaking groan, the Gravy Boat lifted entirely free of the stuffing sandbank and drifted smoothly out into deeper water, gravy pouring forth in a rich, glossy flood, the river swelling back to its proper width within moments.

"Second helpings!" someone shouted, and cheering broke out all along both banks.

The rosemary-resident hurried over, took one look at Felix — soaked through, gravy dripping from his hair — and burst out laughing before she could stop herself. "Oh, you poor thing. Come and get dried off, at least, before you catch your death."

They stayed just long enough for Felix to dry out by a Yorkshire-pudding-hill fire and for everyone to be given a proper plate of second helpings, which felt, after the fright, like exactly the right way to end the visit.

• • •

By the time they sailed back to Nib's sandwich island, the jigsaw piece was glowing steadily warm in Elfine's pocket, and Nib was exactly where they'd left her, hunched over her scroll — except now both blank patches had filled back in, fine ink lines spreading slowly and carefully across the page, redrawing Spaghetti Bolognese Island and Roast Dinner Isle exactly as they must once have looked.

Nib traced the new coastlines with one trembling finger, and for a moment she didn't say anything at all.

"I really thought I'd ruined something," she admitted finally. "Something she started. I've thought that every single day since she left me the map."

"You didn't ruin anything," said Marion. "The islands just needed help. That's not the same as you doing something wrong."

Nib looked at her for a long moment, and something in her shoulders loosened, just slightly, for what looked like the first time in a while.

• • •

That was when Alex noticed it.

In the very far corner of the scroll, past every island anyone had ever mentioned, sat one more patch — not blank this time, but marked with a strange, curling symbol unlike any label anywhere else on the whole map.

"What's that one?" Alex asked.

Nib leaned in close, and her face changed entirely — the relief of a moment ago replaced by something quieter and more uncertain.

"I don't know," she said slowly. "I've never seen it before. But—" She hesitated, then reached into her satchel and pulled out a second, much older, much more careworn map, its edges soft with handling. "My mother's own map has the exact same mark, right in the same corner. She never finished that part either. She used to say it was the one place even she couldn't chart."

Nobody said anything for a moment.

"Next time," said Elfine, quite firmly, "we're finding out what that is."

Nib looked down at her mother's old map, then at the fresh ink still drying on her own, and — slowly, for the first time since they'd met her — smiled properly.

"Yes," she said. "I rather think we are."

• • •

The jigsaw piece pulled them gently home just as it always did, the sandwich island and the smell of mustard fading away behind them, replaced by the familiar warmth of their own kitchen.

P.S. — It took two changes of clothes and a very long bath before anyone could get the smell of gravy fully out of Felix's hair, a fact he considered, on the whole, an excellent trade for the adventure.

P.P.S. — "Some mysteries are worth taking your time with," Mummy said, once she'd heard the whole story, tucking them in. "Especially the ones that matter to someone else, not just to you." Alex thought about Nib's mother's old, unfinished map for a long while after the light went out, and wondered what it might feel like to finish something someone you loved had started.