I was crossing the village square, minding my own business, thinking very important thoughts about whether pigs preferred rain or sunshine (the answer, according to my friend Gerald the pig, is “neither, we prefer mud, Ollie, honestly”), when my left foot decided it had somewhere more interesting to be than underneath the rest of me. Down I went — arms spinning, blue tunic flapping — straight into the village fountain with a splash that soaked three chickens, one confused librarian, and a very startled flower pot.
“I meant to do that,” I announced to no one in particular, sitting in the fountain with water streaming down my messy brown hair.
That’s when I heard the screaming.
Not scary screaming. More like the kind of screaming that happens when someone discovers all the cookies are gone. Confused, outraged screaming. I pulled myself out of the fountain and squelched my way toward the noise, leaving a trail of drips across the cobblestone.
Every single villager in Sproutville was standing outside their doors looking completely baffled. Old Farmer Hobb was turning in slow circles, squinting at the horizon. The blacksmith was holding her compass upside down and shaking it like that might help. And Mayor Crumblewick — who wore a hat so tall it sometimes got stuck in doorways — was waving a completely blank piece of paper in the air.
“The maps!” he cried. “Every map in the village — GONE!”
I looked down at my own pocket. Empty. Biscuit appeared at my elbow approximately one second later, which is her personal record for arriving exactly when things get interesting. She was wearing her chunky yellow mushroom sweater and already had her giant backpack half unzipped, rummaging around inside it with the focused expression of someone who keeps seventeen backup plans in there alongside the snacks.
“I heard the commotion,” she said, not even looking up. “Also I could smell something was wrong. Burnt metal, sort of — like redstone but angrier.” She sniffed the air firmly. “Strawberries. But mean strawberries.”
That was Biscuit’s way of saying: redstone-powered machinery had been through here recently. And I had a horrible feeling I knew exactly whose machinery it was.
Sure enough, near the edge of the village square, we found the evidence. Tiny scorch marks on the cobblestone, each one shaped like a small spinning wheel. Scorch Scouts. Baron Blaze’s horrible little robot minions had zipped through Sproutville in the night, swiped every single map from every single drawer and shelf and pocket in the whole village, and left nothing behind but smoke stains and chaos.
Without maps, nobody in Sproutville could go anywhere. The road to the mill looked like four different roads. The path to the neighboring farm had somehow gained an extra bend that definitely wasn’t there yesterday. Three villagers had already gotten lost trying to walk to the well, which was twelve steps away.
Biscuit had gone very still beside me. I recognized that look — she was overthinking so hard I could practically hear the gears whirring. “Okay,” she said slowly. “We could wait for someone to draw new maps. Or we could send a messenger bird to the next village, but we’d need directions to find the messenger bird, which requires a map. Or we could climb the tallest oak tree and look for landmarks, but the tallest oak tree is outside the village and we’d need a map to—”
“Biscuit,” I said.
“—or possibly we construct a primitive astrolabe from sticks and—”
“Biscuit.“
She blinked. “What?”
“I have an idea.”
She looked at me with the expression she always uses when I say that — somewhere between hopeful and deeply worried. “Does it involve you falling over something?”
“Probably,” I said honestly.
Here’s the thing about being someone who falls over constantly — you start to notice the ground in ways other people don’t. And sitting in that fountain, I’d felt something odd beneath my feet. A current. Not fountain water. Something moving under the stone, like the world was breathing.
I went back to the fountain. I stepped in again — on purpose this time, which felt very strange and mature of me. I shuffled my boots along the mossy bottom. There. A loose stone, and beneath it, the faintest shimmer of blue-green light.
It took Biscuit approximately four seconds to identify it by smell. “Luminite moss,” she breathed, eyes wide. “It only grows on hidden paths. Ollie, this is a trail marker. Someone built a secret path under this fountain.”
“Where does it go?” I asked.
She leaned down, sniffed deeply, and stood up looking like she’d just found the best thing in her backpack. “Oak bark, meadow grass, and something that smells like a rainbow, if rainbows smelled like wet wool.” She grabbed my arm. “Rainbow Meadows, Ollie. It leads straight to Rainbow Meadows.”
I had heard of Rainbow Meadows the way you hear of somewhere wonderful and far away — from stories, from the map that used to hang in the village hall, from old Farmer Hobb muttering about the Wool Festival being the finest thing he’d ever attended before his knees gave out. It was a full day’s walk, and nobody had gone in years because the road signs had gotten muddled long before Baron Blaze ever started his nonsense.
But this path didn’t need a road sign. It just needed someone clumsy enough to fall into a fountain and feel the ground properly.
Mayor Crumblewick looked at the fountain. He looked at me — soaking wet, grinning, hair sticking up worse than ever. He looked at the blank paper in his hand, then at the scorch marks on the cobblestone.
“Well,” he said, in the voice of someone choosing to be brave, “I suppose if the maps are gone, we follow the boy who finds things by falling on them.”
Several villagers nodded. That was either a great vote of confidence or a sign that things were truly desperate. Possibly both.
Biscuit had already pulled out a fresh notebook and was writing rapidly. “I have seven plans for the journey,” she announced. “Plan One involves adequate snack rationing. Plan Four involves a contingency for rogue sheep. I’m including Plan Four because I have a feeling.”
I picked up my small pack, checked that my lucky acorn was stitched firmly on my pocket, and looked out past the fountain toward the glimmering hidden trail stretching into the green distance.
Baron Blaze had stolen every map in Sproutville to keep us confused and stuck and small.
He’d forgotten one thing: some people find the way forward by accident, and they go anyway.
“Right,” I said, stepping out of the fountain for the second time that morning with a magnificent squelch. “Let’s go save a festival.”
