There was a time when every child in Somewhere learned to find north before they learned to find themselves.
No one called this wisdom. It was only a lesson, like tying knots, reading street signs, counting change, and keeping still when an elder spoke. A child might forget the names of distant rivers, confuse one mountain pass with another, or fail to remember which road led quickest from the market to the harbor. But every child was expected to know how a compass settled.
The lesson usually came early.
Long before children understood government, trade, or the old arguments carved into the stones of the Assembly, they were taken up Compass Hill to the Hall.
On ordinary mornings, no one thought much about the Hall.
A fisherman leaving before dawn checked the compass nailed beside his cabin door, then carried baskets toward the harbor. A surveyor laying out a new road set her instrument on its tripod and waited before calling to her assistants. A mail rider unfolded a map at a stable gate, traced a route with one finger, and tied the map beneath his coat before mounting. At the bakery near the lower market, Eleanor Ash counted sacks of flour unloaded from a wagon that had arrived by ship the night before.
None of them spoke of north.
They used it.
The boy who would remember the Hall had not yet learned that difference.