Chapter Four #2
“It’s Ezra. My name is Ezra. Would you like me to show you the hot spring?”
“You don’t even know my name!”
“I know who you are. It’s apprentice … Conductor …” His hand extended as if asking for a favor.
I finished his sentence with an air of exasperation. “Josephine Haven.”
He echoed my name, hand still extended. “Would you like me to show you the hot spring?”
I sprang to my feet without his help and hurriedly untied the knot at my knees to release my skirt to my ankles. My hands shot to my hips, my body responding with anger before I could reason my way through a response. “Why?”
“Because you ought to know all the good places if you’re living here.”
Be careful, Ainsley had said.
But I wanted to know all the good places.
“I’ve heard of you,” I said, the rational parts of my brain reaching for a reason not to take his hand. “Henry said you hate the railway, that it’s bringing poison here. If that’s true, doesn’t that make me poison?”
Ezra’s brown eyes clouded over. “Henry’s a little boy. I tell him stories so he stays close to home and out of trouble. Surely you’re old enough to recognize a fairy tale.”
I felt absolutely foolish. As Ezra watched me, waiting for a response, it seemed absurd to believe anything I’d been told by a child.
Henry had said Ainsley didn’t want him spending time with Ezra.
But any reasonable guardian wouldn’t want her child playing on rafts and docks beside the powerful river.
“You’re sorting things out,” Ezra said, his crooked smile returning. “I can see it on your face. Calculating risk versus reward?”
“Are you saying there’s risk involved?” Absurdly, my heart gave a small eager leap at the notion.
“You could trip and break your ankle. You could miss a summons from your Senior. People could talk about you walking in the woods unescorted with an eligible young man. You could tumble into the river and drown.”
He spoke playfully, his smile never faltering, but none of the risks he cited were unreasonable.
“And the reward?” I asked.
“A good swimming hole and good company.”
I should have said no.
And maybe it was because Julian had been so unwelcoming. Or maybe it was because I didn’t have Gertrude to keep me in line. But I found myself nodding. “All right. Let’s see this spectacular landmark.”
Despite telling myself all I was going to do was see the hot spring, then turn around and march back to the Mission, my curiosity soon got the better of me. “Are you a ferryman?”
Ezra walked ahead of me on the trail along the high riverbank.
He laughed, a sound I was already growing used to thanks to its obnoxious frequency.
In less than half an hour, he’d laughed at a bird startling me, at another bird startling him, and at my insistence that I’d done plenty of walking and hard work at the House of Industry and didn’t need to slow down.
This time, however, his laughter held something hollow. “No,” he answered. “I’m not.”
“Then what do you do?”
“Then what use am I?”
I wanted to throw a pine cone at the back of his head, even as I recognized something in the ache of those words. That quiet, painful desire to matter. “I’m simply asking about your vocation. Surely you don’t spend your days rafting aimlessly on this river.”
“Do you know what the river is called?”
“I do not,” I answered, rolling my eyes.
“It’s called the Dry Bone.”
“It doesn’t look particularly dry.”
“People say it was called that after the first settlers here found a skeleton wedged between stones in the dry season. The rapids had whisked every bit of flesh off the bones. All that remained was white as pearl.”
“When you show me the hot spring, be sure to show me where to avoid getting my skeleton jammed.”
He laughed, the sound easy once more. His boots swung from his shoulder, and he walked along the bed of glossy pine needles with barefoot sureness. I followed in my boots, feeling anything but graceful.
The trail unfurled like a secret, canopied with trees of every kind. Leaves and needles and moss shivered on the breeze, the light whisper echoed by the constant hush-hush of the river running alongside us.
I’d never known anything this beautiful. Walking made me recognize how different it sounded here. Sterling City was never quiet. It wasn’t quiet here either, but the sounds that filled the air were gentle and organic. Birdsong and creaking tree limbs.
Sweat beaded at my temple and ran down my back under my dress.
I loved the way it felt, the way my body had become warm following his easy pace along the trail that rolled with the bluffs.
At times, the river was so far below us that my heart gave a leap when I looked down at the sharp roots and rocks.
He hadn’t mentioned breaking my neck as one of the potential risks, but I was careful with every step I placed.
At the House of Industry, my days had been scheduled from before dawn to when I finally sank into my little bed, too exhausted to care how hard it was or how noisy the other girls were when they cried out in their sleep.
I’d never once gone for a walk for the sake of walking.
With every step, an invisible band around my chest loosened—even as my heart beat faster with the knowledge that Julian would never approve of me exploring Frostbrook alone.
Or, rather, worse than alone: with a strange boy.
“I’m an apprentice healer,” Ezra offered, breaking the easy silence between us. “But the only healer here is the midwife, so I’m learning a bit of that here and there.”
“A boy learning midwifery?” I blurted. It was my turn to laugh.
He whirled around, his cheeks flushed and bright.
I nearly walked right into him and grabbed on to a sapling to keep my balance before I toppled both of us over.
He opened his mouth as if to shout at me, then clamped it shut.
I could hear his breath, and the intimacy of our closeness sent an unruly shiver down my back.
“I’m sorry,” I said softly, properly ashamed. “It’s only that I’ve never heard of a boy bringing babes into the world.”
“There’s more to it than that. It’s about nurturing a new life, balancing what that life needs and what the mother needs.
” He spoke with sudden fervor, like he’d already forgotten I’d crossed him.
He stared at the small stretch of chestnut-brown needles between our feet.
“It’s about knowing which herbs are safe and which aren’t, and then how to care for infants and small children.
They’re hardy in their own ways, but not the way adults are.
A fever can take a child’s life in the night, when it might have only brought you or me down for a day. ”
“I believe you.” I forced myself not to touch his shoulder to reassure him that I did believe him, that it was impossible not to believe that this meant everything to him. “People need to know the things you know. I’m glad you know them.”
He lifted his gaze. “I want to make people better. Death comes early for too many.”
The breeze seemed to grow cold for a moment. Goose bumps rose along my forearms. “I know. It came for my parents,” I offered, an admission that felt like a peace treaty. I rarely spoke of them, though at the House of Industry, no one had needed to explain that their parents were long dead.
Ezra looked away as if he had something to say but decided against it. With all he’d said so far, it was difficult to imagine him withholding a single thought that crossed his mind.
Still, I didn’t press. Not when the air had become thin and cool. “Should we continue?”
He nodded and set off, his pace slower now, more measured. I found myself watching the patch of suntanned skin at the back of his neck where sweat pulled the shaggy ends of his hair into loose curls.
“When I was a young child, I wanted to be a shepherd,” I said. “I thought that napping with lambs and bumblebees sounded lovely.”
“How does being a Conductor compare?”
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been a shepherd. And I’ve never even met a lamb. Maybe they bite.”
When he let out a soft, breathy sound of amusement, I found myself wanting to make him do it again. “They don’t bite hard,” he said. “But you ought not grow too fond. They’re delicious.”
I echoed his laugh, testing out the sound. It eased the knot of strange tension in my chest. I’d only just met this boy, but I didn’t want him to be sad or cross with me. I knew better than to give him that power over me, but it didn’t stop the feeling from surfacing and attempting to rule my mind.
He asked nothing from me but to follow him to a good place, so what harm could it do? It wasn’t like a single walk would make us friends, would make me attached to him.
Right?
“We’re almost there,” he said.
I stumbled briefly, guilt snagging my gait as we broke free from the canopy of trees to a clearing that sloped down to a gentle riverbank.
Small boulders had clearly been moved by people to form a sort of pool with shallow places to lounge and deeper places to soak.
My thoughts scattered. All I could consider was the beauty of this place.
The way it smelled and sounded. The scrape of pebbles beneath my boots and the way my breathing changed when my body heated with exertion.
Ezra picked his way down the sloping path, stripping his shirt off as he walked and tossing his boots and the blue cloth into a patch of fluffy grass.
“As long as the river is high enough, it mixes with the hot water and tempers it. When the river is low, avoid the hot spring. It’s scalded a few who didn’t know better. ”
I swallowed against a dry throat, tearing my eyes away from the angles of his back. “I don’t have bathing clothes.”
“I didn’t invite you to bathe; I invited you to see where the hot spring is.” Ezra looked back over his freckled shoulder at me. “Now that you know how to get here, you can come alone and preserve your modesty.”
“Of course.” I was appalled to feel a brief twinge of disappointment. “Yes, of course.”
Ezra entered the water in his trousers, letting out an indelicate moan as he sank to his armpits and rested his head back on a dry rock.
I found a little spot on the opposite side of the pool and unlaced my boots.
He had his eyes closed and his face to the late-afternoon sun, so I paid him no mind as I rolled my skirt to my thighs and sank my legs to the knee in the water.
It was hot, but not painfully so. Precisely the kind of bone-deep heat that soothed muscles. “I can heat water, but it takes a lot of concentration,” I told him. “I like this better.”
My words sounded clumsy. I clamped my mouth shut to keep from telling him that this would do as a place to soak away the tension of working with delicate machines. That I’d prefer it to the small bath in the lonely Mission.
Despite my resolve to remain silent, a question rose, bubbling out of my chest. “Did you know the Senior Conductor who passed away?”
The water around him splashed gently as he sat up, his gaze almost disoriented for a long moment before it settled on my legs, then—quickly—on a patch of dry rock to my side.
“I saw her around town. Everyone saw her. She kept to herself when she wasn’t making her rounds and overseeing the work on the radiance lines and the Mission. No one really … knew her.”
“Do you know Julian?” I asked, hoping he’d have some choice words about him. Surely a boy like Ezra would dislike someone as stuck-up and fastidious as Julian Gray.
Ezra fiddled with a dry leaf floating in circles on the surface of the water. “Who?” he finally asked.
“The new Senior Conductor.”
“Right. I always forget he has a proper name. Most of us don’t know anyone from the House of Industry.”
“But you know me.”
He looked up, his thick eyebrows pulled into a solemn sort of frown. “Yes, I do.”
I splashed him. “Wrong! You don’t know anything about me.”
His eyes widened and his mouth gaped, and then he let out a hoarse laugh and splashed me back. The warm water ran down my arms and my chest and wet my hair. “That sounds like a challenge.”
I scooted away from the edge and sunned my feet and legs to dry them. “Surely a challenge that you’d be up to.”
“Is that an offer to teach me?”
I drew my knees to my chest and hugged them. Were we talking about my radiance or my inner workings? I was a delicate machine, meant to be unknowable—especially if I cared to follow the rules I’d been raised to abide by.
But Ezra wanting to know me was more intoxicating than the promise of a prestigious assignment. It made me feel solid. Maybe he’d see something I didn’t. Maybe I’d know myself better, somehow, if he pried me apart.
Warning bells sounded between each beat of my heart. This was a real risk. Bigger than falling and breaking my neck or being seen alone in the woods with a boy. “I’m certain you’ve heard enough about the House of Industry to know that we’re not meant to be … close. To anyone.”
“I don’t care,” Ezra said, watching my face. I looked away from him. “You’re right. I like to learn. I want to learn about you.”
Swallowing hard, I adjusted my skirt, casting it over my damp legs fuzzed with reddish-blond hair. I felt exposed and pleased by his interest in a way I didn’t want to understand. “Why?”
“Because I don’t think anyone has ever learned about you.” I could feel his gaze, though I refused to meet it.
This was simply an afternoon of foolishness. An ill-advised walk stolen from my duty to remain beholden only to radiance. Lovers were forbidden. Even friends were forbidden.
“Your ears are turning pink,” Ezra murmured. “You ought to wear a hat on a sunny day like this.”
I rubbed my earlobes, willing the blush away.
The sun hadn’t pinkened my skin, but my unruly mind certainly had.
There was no reason to think about lovers.
My imagination was running away with me, caught up in the folly of something I wasn’t allowed to have.
This meant nothing. I was dizzy from the steaming hot spring and the long walk.
I needed water and shade and to escape Ezra’s watchful, curious gaze. That was all.
“I know my way back,” I said shortly, grabbing my boots and daring myself to carry them and walk barefoot as Ezra had. Like someone who belonged here in Frostbrook.
Every step hurt.