The Springsweet Read Online Free PDF Page B

jumped into a winter sea. It was very like the peace I'd felt when my skirts dragged me into the fountain—I wasn't frightened at all; it was an embrace.
    When I opened my eyes, a faint glimmer snaked across the plains. Silvery, ghostly streams marked the land, as if the water that moved beneath the earth had revealed itself to me.
    My deep breath sustained me through the shock. Presented with a wonder, with a marvel, I disbelieved it at first. But the light did not fade at my doubt—no, it seemed to call me. It sang, not with music but with sensation, a siren that lured me into motion.
    Unsteady, I stumbled toward the brightest, nearest spot. When I came to stand on top of it, a bright intoxication filled me. It was magic—real magic, and though I'd seen my cousin Amelia give a hundred fortunes, though I had seen so many of them come to pass—some part of me had yet resisted belief. There was still a rational thread in me that said no magic could be true.
    But in that moment, it broke.
    Turning slowly over the silver of my vision, I knelt down to flatten my palm against the ground. My heart beat in time with the rhythm beneath me. The earth was alive, running with pure, clear water—I had no doubt of it whatsoever.
    I struggled to find my voice, and when I did, it came out as a spare whisper. "Right here. Dig your well here."
    Speaking broke the moment. All the glimmering rivers drained into the dark. I made a soft sound of disappointment. How strange it was to be newly habituated to a marvel, so much that I missed it as soon as it was gone. I saw only night and felt a bit foolish.
    But when I raised my head, Emerson Birch stood over me. His smirk had faded. Offering me his hand, he said, "First thing tomorrow."
    "See you do," I blustered, standing without his help.
    Realizing the cool of the night, I bundled myself in my arms again, starting inside. Papa used to joke that we came from a long line of charlatans and dowsers, and that's why taking up the law was so natural to him. Now it seemed I carried on the family legacy, entirely by accident.
    Emerson and I shared dinner in quiet. He didn't try to make conversation, and I, in my newly magicked state, couldn't find words that mattered enough to voice.
    Truly, I'd spent a summer extolling Amelia's miraculous sunset visions—I had pushed her and praised her—and now, it seemed, I emulated her. It was an impossible thing suddenly possible, and my heart thrummed in odd rhythms.
    How peculiar that I should oppose her element, that she would be fire and now I imagined myself water. I could only take it to mean that the madness of my grief lingered, just in another shape.
    "Take my bed," Emerson said.
    His voice interrupted my thoughts but not my daze. I should have argued. I should have been the one to wrap myself in a quilt by the stove and sleep on the floor.
    But I wasn't, and I was punished for it with a long night of distraction. The linens smelled of him, and I felt the pulse of water outside. When I sank down to dreams, they were troubled and odd.
    This was not the first day in the West I had expected, and I had a most unsettling sense that none of the others would be either.
    ***
    West Glory jutted up from the prairie like a single ship in a sea of grass. As Emerson steered the buckboard closer to the one street that ran through it, I found myself disappointed.
    Frontier stories were among my favorites; when I was small, Papa would read Buffalo Bill's dispatches from the Territories at bedtime, instead of fairy tales or parables.
    So in all my planning to come to the rugged West, I'd expected to see long-coated gunslingers swaggering along. Certainly, there should have been ladies of questionable repute wearing nothing but petticoats and corsets as they called to passersby. Dirty miners, cowboys running cattle through the street, and Indians in buckskins watching it all suspiciously from a distance—I truly believed I should see them all there.
    I had built the