River Runs Deep by Jennifer Bradbury

Author:Jennifer Bradbury
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers

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

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