River Runs Deep

by Jennifer Bradbury

  Jonah scooped up a handful of sand and let it drain through his fingers. “Haven? ’Bout what it look like. Mess of fugitives, like me. But we’re fair organized. Even got us a school,” he said proudly, gesturing toward a corner of the room where a cluster of people were gathered around a man who was writing on a flat piece of the cave wall with a chunk of charred wood.

  “But it’s nighttime, ain’t it?” Elias asked.

  Jonah scooped and sifted another handful of sand. “Nolin—he’s the teacher—he has classes all times. Folks got to stuff they heads full and got plenty of time to do it down here. Nolin reckons all us can at least learn our letters and how to make our names. He keeps trying to get me to come so he can get me to read, but I ain’t got the patience.”

  A school. Elias watched Nolin trying to wrangle his students back to attention, but they were all too busy staring at Elias. He recalled the books in Stephen’s bag that night, understanding at last where he’d been going with them.

  Jonah continued. “Stephen and Hughes—”

  “Hughes?”

  Jonah pointed at the man talking with Stephen across the room. “Hughes in charge. Been here as long as anybody, I think.”

  “How long’s that?”

  Jonah picked at his thumbnail. “Almost two years, I expect.”

  Two years! Elias hadn’t even been there for two months.

  “Does everybody stay that long?”

  Jonah shook his head. “Used to be folks came and went all time. Come for a while to hide, then go when they figure the trackers weren’t looking for ’em as keen. When it was safer to get on North, or strike out to the West for one of the free territories.”

  “Used to be?”

  Jonah chucked another handful of sand. “Yeah. There’s been trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?” Elias asked.

  “A boat moored downriver a couple of months ago. Been poking round the spots where river go in and out the cave. Got everybody spooked. And got us pinned down. Cain’t get folk in easy, can’t hardly get ’em out at all, and moving the water’s been near impossible.”

  “Water?” Elias asked.

  “Jonah,” the big fellow called Davie warned.

  Jonah lifted a hand. “I know, I know. Let Hughes tell him the rest.”

  Elias studied Hughes. He was swaybacked and held a walking stick. And even though he was seated on a rock, it seemed to Elias like he was somehow still bigger than everyone gathered around him, sort of like King Arthur on a throne.

  “What do you suppose they’re talking about?” Elias asked.

  Jonah looked over at them, then back at Elias. “What to do with you, reckon.”

  “What to do with me?” Elias yelped. “What’s that mean?”

  “Means you seen Haven. You know ’bout us. And they can’t let that be.”

  Elias went cold. Was it possible? Would they really . . . “They wouldn’t—”

  Jonah gaped at him. “What? You think? Naw! We runaways, but we ain’t murderers. They’re probably figgerin’ on keeping you down here, making up some story to tell that doctor about how you went wanderin’ and got lost—”

  “They can’t keep me down here!” Elias started to climb to his feet, but Davie’s massive hand clamped back on his shoulder.

  “Cain’t let you run off telling ’bout what you seen, neither.”

  “I—”

  “Hush, now,” Jonah said. “Stephen’s ready.”

  Stephen waved Elias over, and Davie’s grip relaxed. “Looks like they ready for you,” Davie said.

  Elias swallowed. Jonah wouldn’t meet Elias’s eyes, but he walked with him to where the man sat on the boulder.

  “Hughes, this is Elias,” Stephen said. “He’s a friend.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  CONJURER’ S KNOT

  You put us in a tight spot, sir,” Hughes said. “Real tight spot. What we want to know now is, can we count on you? Stephen here says we can.”

  “Count on me to what?” Elias managed.

  “Help,” Hughes said simply.

  “What kind of help?” Elias asked. If they’d even consider keeping him down here, there was no telling what they might ask of him. Could he trust them? Stephen, sure. Jonah, maybe.

  But all of them?

  Hughes assessed him. Elias wished somebody would put the lights out again just so he could avoid that stare. After the moment stretched out long enough to make Elias even more uneasy, Hughes handed the letter back.

  “We read that letter . . . ,” Hughes began. “You swear you don’t know what it’s about?”

  Elias shook his head.

  “Your Pennyrile come in August,” Hughes continued. Elias took plenty of exception to the way Hughes seemed ready to lump him in with Pennyrile, but he kept quiet. Hughes, he could tell, wasn’t one to trifle with. Hughes went on, “Few weeks later this flat-bottom boat hid itself up near Cave City.”

  The fire nearby popped loud and fierce. Elias thought it out. The knots on Pennyrile’s wrap, how Croghan told him he was a riverman, that the place the pigeons had been trained to fly home to must be nearby. “You reckon Pennyrile’s part of that boat’s crew?”

  “Timing’s a bit too neat for him not to be,” Stephen admitted. “But he seemed to be just another patient. And he isn’t faking. He’s consumptive in his neck. Lillian says she never seen worse. So I didn’t think it was important—”

  “I decide what’s important,” Hughes said, but he didn’t say it mean. Just stern.

  “He’s after something,” Elias pointed out.

  “Seems so,” Hughes said. “He ever tell you what?”

  “The note mentioned a fount,” Elias said. “But no, he never said anything about it to me.”

  “A fount,” Hughes repeated.

  Elias grew impatient with having to ask and wished they’d just lay it out. “What’s it mean?”

  Stephen waited for Hughes to speak, but Hughes nodded to Stephen. “You tell it.”

  Stephen took a breath. “Not long after it was decided that this place was going to be a permanent sort of station on the road North, we saw we were going to need more supplies and provisions than just what folk came here with when they arrived.”

  Elias thought about the scraggly shrub planted outside Shem’s hut. “Can’t grow food down here. And I don’t expect those fish Nick’s been collecting are enough to feed a body on.”

  Stephen smiled. “More bone than meat, Nick’s fish.”

  Hughes broke in. “We spent a long time trying to figure out ways to scare up supplies. We pilfered some in the early days, but that was too dangerous. Even a few eggs or a side of bacon go missing from a smokehouse, and folk start asking questions.”

  “So we knew we had to make a way to get some ready money to buy supplies. We found it not far from where we’re standing now. A spring”—Stephen pointed back into the shadows—“other side of th—”

  Stephen stopped short, seeing what Elias nearly missed: a signal, Hughes’s sharp shake of the head. But Elias caught it at the last second, like the tail of a snake slipping through dry leaves. And he instantly understood Hughes didn’t want Elias to know where it was.

  “What’s so special about this spring?” Elias asked.

  “We settled on using it for drinking water, and going over to the river for bathing and washing. River water is bad over here, but the spring water was clean, even if it had a strong taste to it. Anyway, folks who were in rough shape, or still nursing wounds they’d gotten from masters before they ran, or ones they picked up on the way . . . Well, at any rate, once they got inside, after being on the run for so long, everybody started healing up quick.”

  Elias thought of what Croghan had said about the cave’s effect on people, how the vapors made them feel like they could walk for days. “Quicker than normal,” Stephen added.

  “Folk started saying maybe the water was special,” Hughes explained.

  Elias thought back to the medi
cine shows and elixir sellers who used to set up on the landing back home, the miracle cure men with their little rounded hats and smart vests and smarter talk about whatever magic cordial they were shilling. Granny always said they weren’t any count, weren’t anything but connivers getting desperate folk to toss good money at the wind, for all the healing they’d bring. Even so, Mama had tried half a dozen of them on Daddy before she quit hoping too. “Y’all think you got tonic water,” Elias determined.

  Hughes cleared his throat. “What we got is a way to keep this place alive. Something out there that people bought and that would let us get supplies. Leastways, we did.”

  “Does it work, though?” Elias pressed, his mind racing.

  Stephen shook his head. “It’s more likely just being in the cave and getting rest is what does it.”

  “Some believe, though,” Jonah pointed out. Elias thought Jonah said it like he might believe it.

  “Might it work?” Elias asked, careful not to sound too hopeful. “The water? Might it?”

  “We . . . well . . . we’ve already tried it on you, Elias,” Stephen told him.

  Elias’s eyes went wide as he recalled the metallic taste of the water Nick had given him when they were out that night together, how he’d said it came from a different spring. “And I’ve been getting better—the doc even said—”

  “We’ve given it to all of them up there,” Stephen said softly.

  Elias felt the hope that had begun to bloom inside him leak away. “All of them? Lillian’s never given it to me up at the ward.”

  “We don’t give it out straight,” Stephen explained. “The taste is too recognizable for that. But we cook with it, make the tea with it, even do the baths with it sometimes when we can get away with it.”

  “Everyone?” Elias asked again.

  Stephen sighed. “Even Pennyrile. Nedra, too. And Sarneybrook and the widow Patton . . . and . . . well . . .”

  Elias didn’t need him to finish. None of the rest were better. Only him.

  Hughes took over. “We don’t know if it only works for some or doesn’t work at all. But selling it has kept this place alive, and the hope it gives people doesn’t hurt none.”

  Elias knew that hope, no matter how dearly paid for, was precious. And he wasn’t quite ready to surrender it now. If the air of the cave was special like Croghan thought, then it only stood to reason that the water could be too, right?

  Then again, even the air didn’t seem to work for everyone. The widow Patton had died. Pennyrile and Nedra were both sicker. Old Sarneybrook was slipping. “But why am I better?” He felt almost guilty about it.

  “You’re younger and stronger,” Stephen suggested. “But we don’t know. Like I said, some down here will swear by the stuff. And others out there do too. But we’ve tried, Elias. We don’t know why it seems to work for some and not others, or if it works at all.”

  “If you told Croghan, maybe then he could try it out. See if there’s something to it—”

  “He’d have to see the spring for himself. And you can’t find the spring without finding Haven.”

  “But he’s smart,” Elias argued. “He could maybe figure out why—”

  “We can’t risk the lives of all my people on maybe.” Hughes drew himself up to his feet, using all his impressive height to underscore his point. “The doctor having the spring wouldn’t accomplish anything more. And it would mean the end for all of us.”

  It was quiet a second before Stephen spoke. “You see that, don’t you, Elias?”

  The question shook something loose in him. Were the lives of these runaways more important than the possibility that Croghan could make something of the tonic water?

  The boy who’d left Virginia, the boy he was when he arrived . . . that boy might have said no.

  But now Elias had explored the cave with Stephen Bishop. Caught blind fish with Nick. Been so impressed by Mat on those tours. Made friends with Jonah.

  He wasn’t the same boy who’d left Virginia. He wasn’t the same boy who would have said no.

  “I see,” Elias said.

  “We don’t take it light,” Hughes said simply. “But sometimes the hard decisions are the right ones.” Elias knew it was true. Knew because it sounded like something his daddy would have said to him.

  “But if we don’t do something about Pennyrile—and that boat downriver—it’s all going to be over one way or another anyway,” Stephen said.

  “Why?”

  Hughes laced his fingers over the knob of the walking stick. “When we first got the idea to sell the water as a cure, it wasn’t hardly worth the trouble. Money was slow to come back to us, and them what sold it for us cheated us half blind, but as word got out and folks started wanting it, we figured out which people we could trust to bring the money that was owed us back to us.”

  “But how do you do it? Without Croghan and everybody catching on?” Elias asked.

  “Spring’s clear away from anything on the tours or Croghan’s paths, so bottling it up’s the easy part. Getting it out’s a sight trickier,” Hughes said.

  Stephen took a stick and began drawing in the sand around the fire pit. “The river runs outside, then goes underground and into the cave. It comes up way down here.” He made a small mark near the edge of his drawing. “We used to cobble together rafts or baskets and pack the jars in. Then we’d launch them into the river to be carried downstream and out of the cave. Outside, we had men who know where to look. They picked up the shipments, took the lot to those that sold it for us, along with lists of supplies we needed. The seller kept some of the money and used the rest to buy our provisions. Then he’d send the supplies—along with whatever money was left over—to another friend who knew the spot where the river flowed back into the cave.” He tapped the first mark he’d made on the diagram.

  “But we ain’t had anything coming in for too long,” someone in the crowd said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means,” Hughes began, “that since that boat come—since Pennyrile come—the river’s been more crowded than is strictly heathful for running business.”

  “Pennyrile’s crew found the water y’all sent out?”

  Hughes crossed his arms. “Probably. Can’t know for sure. We took care to have it sold away from the cave and the river, but he might have worked it out somehow. What we know is, no more runaways have come up the river since that boat arrived. We can’t get our water out, and our friends outside are too scared of being seen to send the supplies in the usual way.”

  “But if you can’t get supplies and you can’t send people out . . .” Elias did the hard math in his head, afraid to say it out loud.

  “Haven’s dying,” Hughes said, adding, “We’re not going to last much longer.”

  That heavy silence fell again before Stephen spoke. “The last few months, most of what we’ve been able to get inside has had to be carried down from the main entrance, snuck in by me and Nick.”

  “But it’s not enough,” Hughes said.

  Stephen swiped his hand through the sand, erasing the map.

  “Why don’t you just start emptying folk out?” Elias asked.

  “We can’t, not until we know Pennyrile’s crew has cleared off. We’re trapped.”

  Elias thought it over. It was like a siege back in Arthur times—a whole village of people shut up inside a castle’s walls, slowly getting starved out. The folk down here in Haven were as desperate as everybody up in Croghan’s hospital.

  “If anybody tries to get out now, those pirates would just snatch them and make them tell where to get the water themselves,” Stephen added.

  “Or worse,” Hughes said. “He might be after more’n water. He might be after us.”

  “But he said ‘fount,’ ” Elias pointed out. “That has to be your spring. And he’s sick, that’s for sure, so I’d bet he’d do all this to get his hands on that spring, even if it’s only a chance that it’d work.”

  Some of t
he people gathered around murmured in agreement. But others looked to one another and Elias nervously. Elias saw Nick was there, smiling gently at him. the sight of a friend made Elias feel better.

  “ ‘Fount’ could also mean source,” Stephen reasoned. “We don’t know what he means for sure. It could be source of the water, or the source of the runaways. Either way, it’s . . . Whether he finds the spring and us by mistake, or he’s looking for us in the first place . . .”

  “Bounty on all of us put together more’n he could ever hope to earn off that spring.” Hughes’s voice was bitter.

  Elias bit the inside of his cheek. He couldn’t let that happen to Jonah, not to mention what would happen to Stephen and Nick and Mat when Croghan or the others found out that they had been helping runaways.

  “We got to suss out what this Pennyrile knows first,” Hughes said.

  Finally Nick spoke. “Only way to know which bait the fish’ll bite on is to thow a hook in the water.” Nick was, as usual, perfectly right. And the murmur of agreement that rippled out confirmed it.

  Still, Elias knew how hard it would be. He knew tangling with Pennyrile was trickier than the most complicated of knots.

  And then he noticed nearly everyone was watching him, waiting.

  He was the only one Pennyrile talked to.

  He was the only one Pennyrile trusted.

  “Elias?” Hughes asked.

  Elias looked at Stephen; his expression was unreadable. Elias took a breath and felt his lungs stretch out farther than they had a few weeks ago. Maybe it was because of the water. Probably it wasn’t. But it didn’t matter.

  Sometimes the hard decision was the right one.

  And sometimes it was easy.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Chapter Fourteen

  PRUSIK KNOT

  Dear Mother,

  I got your letter four days back. Thank you. I’m sorry I did not write sooner—

  Elias stopped. He had not written since he’d learned of Haven. But he couldn’t tell his mother why. He could not tell her much of anything, really.