Over the far western passes lies Weirmere — a prosperous town of weirs and sluices, proud of its clean works and its good water. When the lake began to fail, Weirmere did the sensible thing: it sent over the pass for the famous cure, paid for the rite, nailed the proof to a landing-post, and called the matter closed.

Fenn Beck mends what he's told to mend. He's the soundest hand in Weirmere, the one fetched when the water's wrong, trusted utterly for his labour and never once asked his opinion. So when Fenn feels — in the flow, in the stone, in the colour the wet rock comes up of a morning — that the lake is still quietly dying, he does what he's done all his life. He says nothing. What would I know.

Then Bryda Sael walks in uninvited: the celebrated hand who once woke a dead lake, certain she can simply perform the cure properly this time. She and Fenn agree on the diagnosis and split clean down the middle on the remedy — because a cure carried in over the pass, however true, is still a cure the town doesn't own. The water won't answer a borrowed hand. It's waiting for one of its own to stop apologising and speak.

To save the lake, Fenn will have to risk the one thing his station ever earned him, on a reading no one else can see. And Bryda will have to do the hardest thing a famous healer can: keep her hands still.

A warm, wry, lake-deep tale about humble work, hard-won standing, and the danger of a town that has talked itself into a comfortable belief. Perfect for readers of Travis Baldree's Legends & Lattes and Heather Fawcett's Emily Wilde who like their fantasy gentle, grounded, and quietly clever.

The Orrowmere novels each stand alone — but together they tell one slow, satisfying story about the places we belong to and the work of keeping them alive.

Read the first chapter

Chapter 1: The Board on the Post

The races ran loudest before first-light, when there was nobody on the landing to talk over them, and that was the hour Fenn Beck liked them best — the water coming down off the weir in its ordered channels, sliding under the sluice-gates and going on about the town’s business with the busyness of water that has been told where to go and has, on the whole, agreed to it. He stood at the head of the long race with a stiff brush and a half-bucket of grit and listened to the whole of it the way another man might read the day off the sky — without supposing he was doing anything at all, or once thinking the reading was a thing not every man could do.

The stone wanted scrubbing. The stone always wanted scrubbing; wherever the water lay against it day and night it furred over, a soft pale crust coming up faintly rough under the hand, the way scale builds in a kettle that is never let to go cold. The works-folk called it fouling and took it off, because Weirmere kept clean races and was proud of them, and because fouling left to itself would close a sluice before the season turned. Fenn had scrubbed this same stone since he was a boy at it under old Dela Rusk, and his hands had gone the colour of the scale in the doing — cracked across the knuckle and pale as the stuff they cleaned, so that in the grey before the light a stranger might not have told where the works left off and the works-hand began.

He set the brush to it, and the crust came away in flakes and went off down the race, and the stone underneath showed the colour it had worn all that season: a dull ochre-grey, the flat unbothered colour of a thing that has given up and not troubled anyone with the news. Fenn ran his thumb across the cleaned stone before he had decided to. He always did that; his thumb went to wet stone the way other men’s eyes go to a fire, ahead of any thought, and he could no more have said what he was feeling for than a man can say what he listens for in a room before he knows there is someone in it. He knew only that the colour was wrong, and had been wrong a good while; that it had not always been this flat and dead, though he could not have named the season it changed or said what it had been instead; and that there was no profit in saying so, since the proper answer to a sluice-keeper with opinions about the colour of his own fouling was a kind word and a change of subject.

So he scrubbed, and said nothing, and the water ran on grey and clean and biddable under his hands.

The light came up over the eastern hills grey at first and then a thin and reluctant gold, and the quiet went out of the morning all at once and in good temper. A bargeman down off the passes was already shouting about the price of something that did not warrant it; a lock-hand shouted back, on principle; a windlass began its slow complaining turn, and the first loaded barge came nosing in along the wharf with a man at the pole reading the depth off the colour of the water as he came — which everyone on the landing could do, after a fashion, and which nobody had ever thought to call anything grander than knowing your trade.

It was a good town to be busy in. Weirmere sat where four trade-ways came down to the one water, and it had made the most of that: weirs and sluices and races raised over more generations than the oldest stone could account for, until the lake did very nearly what the town wished, very nearly when the town wished it, and the carters cursed the inclines and never the water. The people here were good with water and knew it — it was the first thing they told a stranger and the last they would have given up. On a loud bright morning in the full of the trading season, with the channels brimming and the whole apparatus of the place turning over smooth as a greased windlass, you’d have had to be a sour and ungrateful sort of man to stand in all that plenty and feel anything was wrong with it.

Fenn felt it anyway. He felt it low down and off to one side and without a word to put to it, the way you feel a draught in a shut room a good while before you find the gap it comes in by — a small and patient wrongness that did not care in the least that he could not name it or prove it or do one useful thing about it. He had long since given up trying to name it. A man could go a long way in Weirmere on a thing he could not name, provided he kept it behind his teeth; and that was the one kind of sense Fenn had always had in rather better supply than most.

He took up his bucket and went down the line of the races toward the open water, easing one gate a hair as he passed and leaving the rest, and came out at last by the post.

The post stood where the main race gave out into the lake, set where the town had chosen it on purpose, so that a stranger arriving by barge would see it first of anything and a trader pulling away would carry it last in his eye. It was a good stout post, planed square and bedded in sound mortar, and nailed to the face of it, about the height of a man’s chest, was the board.

The board was not much to look at, which was a thing nobody in Weirmere cared to dwell on. It had come over the western passes a few seasons back under the arm of a travelling hand who knew the famous rite — knew it well enough to perform it, which was the whole of what the town thought to ask of him — and he had set his board at the waterline through a long cold night that half of Weirmere sat up to watch, and in the thin grey of the morning he had lifted it streaming from the lake and held it up for all to see, and there in the bare grain was a colour. A wash of pale blue had risen into the board the way a stain creeps up the side of a cup left standing in it. The lake had answered, the travelling hand told them; the lake had said its yes. He nailed the board to the post while the town cheered itself hoarse, took his payment, and went back over the passes before the season was out — and the board stayed, and the blue stayed in it, and that, so far as Weirmere was concerned, was the end of a long fear and the beginning of better times.

There was a knot of bargemen at the post now, as there were most mornings, standing and looking at the board the way men look at a thing that belongs to all of them and cost them nothing.

“There it is,” one of them was saying, to a younger one new to the run. “That’s your cure. Painted on, like — only the lake done that, mind, not the fellow. He only held the board to it.”

“The lake did it,” the young one said, dutiful.

“The lake did it. We were dying here, before — you’d never credit it now.” The older one said it comfortably, the way men say a thing that has long ago stopped frightening them. “Water gone sullen, trade falling off the wharf year on year. Then the master sent over the passes for the cure, they did the rite the proper way, and there’s your proof of it nailed up where you’re stood. Answered, clear as the morning. Best money this town ever laid out, and you’ll hear no man on this landing say different.”

Fenn set his bucket down and looked at the board too, because a man standing as near it as he was would have looked the stranger for not looking. It was a pretty enough colour, and he gave it that, every time, in the privacy of his own head. A soft even blue, lying along the top of the wood the way a morning haze lies along the top of the water, and with about as much to do with the wood beneath it. He had no quarrel with the colour. His quarrel — if a thing a man has never said aloud can be dignified with the word — was that he had spent a life with his hands on stone the water touched, and he knew what a colour looked like when the water had truly put it there. It came up out of the thing from underneath, the way a bruise comes up out of a knock, slow and dark and from the inside, and a man could no more have washed it off than washed the green out of a living leaf. The blue on the board did not do that. It sat on the top of the wood and waited to be admired. The two were not one colour wearing two faces; they were two different things a hopeful eye had agreed, between itself and itself, to call by the one name. And there was not a soul in Weirmere he could have set that difference out to without being told, kindly and at length, to get back down to his sluices.

“Fine morning for it,” he said to the bargemen instead, because it was, and took his bucket back up.

“Fine morning, Fenn,” the older one said, pleased to be known by name, and that was the whole of it.

He was a good way back up the race line when Halla Crewe came down it toward him, brisk as a let sluice, with a brace of lock-hands trailing her and a tally-board under her arm. She was not a tall woman, but she went about the landing as though the matter of her height had been settled in her favour years ago, and the landing made way for her without appearing to notice it did — which is what thirty years of being right about the water buys a person, and about the cheapest thing it buys. She had kept Weirmere’s water moving through dry seasons and swollen ones, through a bad year of fever and a worse year of thin trade, and the town trusted her the way it trusted the weir itself: as a thing that had simply always held.

“Beck,” she said. “The third sluice on the cross-race is sticking. Gravel in the seat, I’d lay. Will you see to it before the loaded barges come up the chamber?”

“I had it open a hair this morning,” Fenn said. “It’ll be the seat, like you say. I’ll lift the gate and clear it out.”

“Good man.” She did not break her stride to say it; she broke her stride for very little she could help. But she slowed at the post, the way she always slowed at the post, and laid a hand flat to the board as she went by, the way a woman in a hurry will lay a passing hand to the head of a child she is fond of. “Holding fair,” she said, half to the lock-hands and half to no one. “Will you look at the trade on this landing. You’d not credit what this place was, before it.”

“No, master,” said one of the lock-hands, who had not been born before it, and so could not have credited a word of it from anything but being told, and told, and told again.

Fenn watched her hand where it lay on the board. He had a thing he might have said, and it had taken up lodging behind his teeth this long while: that the board said one thing and the stone in his races said the flat opposite, and that he had his hands on the stone every day of his life and on the board not once, and that a body wanting to know whether the lake was well might do worse than ask the man whose whole work was the water, sooner than the man who held a painted board up out of it for one night and went home over the mountains. But Halla had her hand on the cure she had sent for, and paid out for, and sat up the better part of a freezing night to see made, and her face above it was easier than Fenn had seen it in a long stretch of years — eased the way a face eases when a fear it has carried so long it had stopped feeling the weight of it is finally, and blessedly, set down. And Fenn was a sluice-keeper. The lake was the painters’ business, or the curers’, or the business of anyone at all in the world but the man with the brush and the bucket. So the thing stayed where it had learned to live, and the morning went on without it.

“I’ll see to the sluice,” he said.

“I know you will. There’s nobody surer at it.” She meant it, and it was true, and it was the warmest word she had for him or was ever likely to have, and the two of them knew between them to the inch the size of it. The surest hand at a sluice in Weirmere. It was a good thing to be, and not a small one, and the only thing the town had ever thought to offer him to be; he had taken it long ago and gladly, for a man can do worse with a life than be the one they come running for when the water goes wrong. He went off to clear the gravel from the third sluice’s seat, and did it cleanly and well, because the doing of it well was the one part of the whole business that had never, not once in forty years, felt in any way wrong.

The middle of the day went the way a trading day’s middle went, fast and with no quiet corner in it for a man to stand and think, and Fenn was glad of that as he was most days. He liked work that took his hands and asked nothing of his head. He lifted a stuck gate, cleared a fouled seat, reset a windlass that had jumped its pawl; he put his shoulder in with two carters to a barge that had found a shoal it had no business finding in water that low, and they got it off; and he did not the once go back to the post to look at the board, which suited him.

It was coming on for dusk when he climbed up off the landing and in at the tavern door, and the change of the air across that threshold — out of the river-cold and into the bread-warm — was the best single thing in his day, as it was in most of his days, and he stood in it a breath before he let the door swing to.

Sefa kept the landing-tavern the way a sound lock-hand keeps a lock: nothing came through it she did not know the whole of, and everything that ought to go through it went. The room was full and warm and loud with the trade of the high season — carters and channel-folk and a brace of bargemen down off the passes arguing happily over a price not one of them meant to be the last word on — and his wife stood in the thick of it with a jug in either hand and her sleeves shoved up past the flour and ale that lived, this stretch of the season, more or less for good on her forearms, running the whole loud room off her own good humour without appearing to steer at all. She saw him in the doorway before he was well through it. She always saw him first. It was a thing she did.

“There he is,” she said, to him and to the whole room at once. “The man that keeps the water in its channels. Mind your manners, the lot of you — he’s the reason your boats are floating and not sat on the bottom.” There was a rumble of agreement at that, friendly and entirely unserious, and somebody hooked the good stool out toward him with a boot, and Sefa came round by way of him and set down a cup he had not asked for and would not be let pay for, and bent in close under the noise.

“You’ve a face on you,” she said, low, for him alone.

“I’ve the face I have.”

“You’ve the face of a man who’s been down looking at that board again.” She said it with no heat at all in it, the way you would tell a man he’d been out standing in the rain. She knew the face. She had been married to it a good while, and to the man behind it longer.

“I look at it because it’s nailed to a post on my landing, in front of where I do my work. A man can hardly help where his eyes come to rest.”

“He can help what he makes of where they rest.” She straightened to send something cheerful and cutting back at the bargemen, who had appealed to her over their price as to a magistrate, and bent back when she had settled them. “Halla had her hand on it again coming up, so I’m told. Easy as you please in herself. The whole town’s easy, Fenn. It’s no bad thing, a town being easy in its own skin — you might give a little of it a try.”

“I’m easy enough.”

“You’re a great many fine things, and I’d not swap you for a barge-load of better ones. Easy is not the first I’d reach for in the dark.” But she said it fond, and laid her free hand a moment on his shoulder — a hand that smelled, as it always did by dusk, of ale and flour and the day’s work — and then she was away back into her room, because she had a room to run and would not stand about minding a husband who only dug the deeper in for the minding — a thing she’d known about him long before he got round to knowing it himself.

He took up his cup and let the warm of the place do to him what it did, which was to make the wordless thing in him go quiet without once troubling to argue it down; and that was the whole trouble with it, with the easy town and the easy tavern and the easy face on the works-master at the post. Not one of them told him he was wrong. They only made the being wrong such pleasant company that a man would feel a churl to go on insisting on it. The bargemen were happy. The trade was good. Halla had set down a fear she’d carried thirty years and gone easy in her own face for the first time he could bring to mind — and who was Fenn Beck, the surest hand at a sluice and nothing past it, to want to lift that weight back onto her?

He drank the cup down, gave his goodnights, and got back the small nods a town hands a man it is fond of and has never once known the first thing to do with beyond the being fond. And then, because he could no more govern where his feet carried him of an evening than where his eyes settled of a morning, he let himself out into the blue end of the day and went back down alone to the water, the noise of the tavern falling away up the hill at his back and its lamps coming yellow into the small windows one and then another.

The post stood up black against the last of the light off the lake, and the board on it had gone from a colour to a shape, a square of dark set on a darker upright. Beyond it the water lay out flat and low and quiet, clean the way the town best liked it kept, going from grey to a deeper grey and then to no colour at all as the light drained off westward over the passes. He came down to the head of the long race, where the whole day had started, crouched there with the old familiar protest in his knees, and put his hand to the stone he had scrubbed bare that morning a whole day gone.

The crust had begun to come back on it already. It always began to come back; by first-light there would be a new soft fur of the stuff laid over the stone, pale and faintly rough and waiting on the brush, as there had been every morning of his life and every morning of Dela’s before him. He ran his thumb along it in the dark, where his eyes were no manner of use to him and never had been the part of him that did this, and the colour he could not see was the colour he knew without the seeing of it that it would be — the flat give-up grey it had worn all that season, and the season before that one, and as far back down the years as he could lay his hand to a memory.

Behind him and above him the whole town had gone to its lamps and its suppers and its warm rooms, every last soul of it sure to the marrow that the lake was well: that the rite had been done and done right, the answer given and seen and cheered, the long fear paid off and finished and never to be taken down off its shelf again. They had the proof of it nailed up where every barge that came or went would carry it away in its eye. They had it in writing, you might say, if a wash of blue on a board could be called writing — and Weirmere, having wanted very badly for it to be, had long settled that it was.

Fenn took his hand off the stone and dried it on his coat. He had no board, no colour, no word for the thing his thumb went down into the dark to be told; and had he owned all three he’d have had no standing in the town to say them with. He had only forty years of grey come up under his hands, and the bone-deep, useless, unsayable certainty of the single man on a whole easy landing who was not easy. So he got back up off his knees, which had their usual opinion on the matter, and stood a while in the near-dark looking out across the low black water that the whole of Weirmere was certain of and that he — alone, and wordlessly, and with nothing in the world to show for it — was not; and then he turned and went up the hill home to his wife, because there was nothing else a sensible man could do at that hour with a feeling of that kind, except carry it up quiet, set it down by his own fire, and hope that it would keep till morning.