The Ozark trilogy Read Online Free PDF Page B

would you? A person could fly over that and never be heard of again—it must be ... three days across? Five? Six?”
    “It’s got to be done at one end or the other,” scoffed his sister “Better to do it when the worst is over and she can take her time. She’ll be plain worn out, by then.”
    “What makes you think so, Silverweb?” the boy taunted, for all he had to stand on his tiptoes to look her in the eye. “She’s Responsible of Brightwater, Silverweb, she’s not a tourist! ”
    Silverweb’s chin went up and the blue eyes almost closed.
    She took one step forward and the boy fell back two. Second of nine she was; it couldn’t be easy. And the other eight all male ... it was enough to constitute a substantial burden.
    Silverweb. I added it up in my head—she was a seven . Withdrawal from the world ... that went with not marrying ... secrets and mystery … that fit the hooded eyes and the intricate figure of her braids. From what I could see, this one was properly named, and living up to it.
    As of course she would be. There were no incompetent Grannys on Marktwain to cause trouble with an Improper Naming, as had been known to happen elsewhere from time to time.
    I let them squabble, Silverweb winning easily, and relaxed as best I could given the way I was dressed, enjoying the sight of them all if not the sound. I had my route chosen now—as Silverweb had had the wit to lay it out, and it was not designed solely in terms of distances and points of the compass. I would do quickly the friendly territory of Oklahomah; and in that way I’d have a bit extra where it was less than friendly.
     
    The party was pleasant, more a dance than a party, and a credit to Anne. She’d invited people enough to fill the Castle’s smaller ballroom, and had managed to muster a respectable crowd, considering the short notice and a thunderstorm that had already been scheduled and could not of been postponed without distorting the weather for the next three weeks. Anne and I stood in a comer back of the bandstand where the Caller was hollering out the dances, both of us in slight danger from a flying fiddle bow but willing to risk it for the sake of the semi-privacy. I despised parties as much as Anne did, probably more. And I couldn’t dance even the simplest dances, much less the complex things they were weaving on the tiles that night in honor of my visit.
    “Star in the shallows, flash and swim,
    Lady to her gentleman and parry to him!”
    “Wherever do they learn to do all that?” I marveled.
    “Circle has a border to it, touch it and run.
    Muffins in the oven till their middles are done!”
    “You should of been taught,” said Anne. “They had no right to leave you ignorant just because you might of enjoyed yourself.”
    “There wasn’t time,” I said, which was the plain truth. Plus, I was awkward, always had been.
    “Braid a double rosebud, smother it in snow,
    Swing your partner, and dosey-do!”
     
    “Step on a Pickle in the dark of night,
    Grab your cross lady, and allemande right!”
    “It’s not fair,” she insisted. “I hear your brother’s the best dancer in three counties, and turning all the girls to cream and butter. And I’ll wager they saw to it that your sister learned every dance that was worth knowing.”
    I snorted. “Nobody ever ‘saw to it’ that Troublesome did anything, Anne of Brightwater. What she wanted to do, she did. What she cared to know about, she learned. Anything else was just so much kiss-your-elbow.”
    “Sashay down the center; rim around the wall,
    Single-bind, double-bind, and promenade all!”
    I couldn’t even understand these calls ... dosey-do and promenade-the-hall went by often enough to let me know it was dancing, but the intricacies of it were beyond me. I couldn’t decide whether I minded that, either, though on general principles I was not supposed to fall behind on anything that mattered to any sizable proportion of Ozarkers, “sizable” being