Mara Bell kept maps the way other people kept secrets: folded, labelled and tucked into wooden drawers that smelled faintly of cedar and rain. One windy afternoon, while tracing a coastline for a seafood merchant, she noticed a peppercorn had escaped from her lunch and was resting beside the compass rose.
Every time she nudged it away, the peppercorn rolled back north. It did not hurry, and it did not wobble. It simply knew. Mara placed it on a blank sheet and watched it travel over the paper as if crossing an invisible country. Behind it, she drew a line in ink.
By nightfall the line had become a map to a cove she had never visited. The next morning she followed it and found not gold, not treasure, but a cluster of wild herbs growing where the sea threw mist against the rocks. Mara laughed, cracked the peppercorn over her lunch, and decided that some maps are made for flavour, not fortune.