The Spring Between Us

Chapter 8: The Spring Map

I got to the ore cart before Silas did.

That was the only thing that went right. Cal had led me out of the record room and across the yard at a run, and the cart was where he had left it under the rock, and the rock was still there and the plate was gone. Someone had pulled the rocks off and taken the plate and put most of the rocks back, which is the kind of thing a wolf does when he wants the theft to look like an accident for a few hours.

I stood there with the empty cart and the sun on my back and my hands shaking. Elias was still in the record room with his packet on the table. Silas was on the porch. Ruth was somewhere between the two, and I did not know which of them had taken my plate, and I did not know whether it mattered, because either way the plate was gone and I had no proof of anything.

Cal was saying something about the stable and who had been on watch. I did not hear him. I was looking at the dust, and in the dust by the cart there was a boot print, narrow and neat and deep in the heel, the kind of print a small, light wolf makes when she is carrying something heavy. I had seen that boot print a hundred times in the pack house and in the hall and on the porch.

"Cal," I said. "Go and find Mira. Tell her I need her. Not in the hut. In my mother's room. Now."

He went. I walked back to the pack house through the yard and up the back stairs to my mother's room, and I did not look at the porch where Silas was sitting. Her door had been shut since the funeral. I had not been inside it in three weeks. I opened it and stood in the doorway and let the smell of it come over me, cedar and lavender and the beeswax she used on the furniture, and then I went in and sat down on the edge of her bed and put my face in my hands and did not cry, because there was no time.

Mira came up the back stairs ten minutes later with her bag. "The plate is gone?"

"Ruth took it. Or someone wearing her boots." I looked up. "I told you to keep it quiet. I told Cal to keep it quiet. And I told her it existed. I stood in the hall last night and told Silas and Ruth both that I had an iron plate with a mark on it, and this morning it is gone and the whole pack will hear that the Luna is making things up."

Mira set her bag down. "Then we need a second proof."

"That is what I was thinking." I got up and went to the wall by the window, where there was a wooden panel my mother had used as a sewing cupboard, and I pulled it open and looked at the shelves inside. Thread. Buttons. A tin of pins. "My mother told me something before she died. She said if anything ever happened to her I was to go to the old maps in the attic. My father's maps. Not the ones in the office."

"The attic," Mira said. "Ruth has the attic key."

"Ruth has the key to the attic door in the hall. She does not have the key to the attic hatch in the stable loft." I closed the cupboard. "My father had that one. He kept it on a nail behind the tack shelf and I do not think anyone has moved it since he died."

The stable loft smelled of hay and old leather and mouse. The hatch was in the far corner under a pile of empty grain sacks, and the key was on the nail behind the tack shelf exactly where my father had left it, and I climbed up through the hatch into the attic with a lantern and Mira behind me.

The attic was not a room. It was a long low space under the roof beams, hot and dry and full of things nobody wanted anymore. Chairs with broken legs. A spinning wheel. Three trunks. A stack of hides that had gone stiff. My father's old saddle. And in the far corner, under a sheet of canvas, four wooden crates with the Kızıltaş mark burned into the lids.

The maps were in the crates. There were more of them than I had expected. Some were on paper that had gone brown and soft, and some were on cloth, and some were on hide that had been scraped thin and stretched. Mira and I took them out one by one and spread them on the floorboards, and the lantern made a small warm circle around us in the dark.

Most of them were mine maps. My father had spent nine years with Elias at his elbow, walking the claim and drawing the seams, and there were a dozen versions of the mine workings, each of them annotated in his small, square hand. But at the bottom of the third crate there was one that was different. It was drawn on a sheet of heavy paper about the size of a tablecloth, folded three times, and when I opened it out I found the whole canyon on it, from the mesa to the creek bed to the Çöl border and the spring house beyond, and all of the pipe lines, every one, drawn in red ink.

"My father drew this," I said. "This is older than the mine maps. Look at the paper."

Mira leaned over it. "There is writing along the edge."

I turned the map toward the lantern. Along the left edge, in my father's hand, was a line of small square letters: The line from the welling hole to the cistern. Also the branch under the quarry. Do not let them take the branch.

"The branch under the quarry," Mira said.

"There is no branch under the quarry. The pipe runs from the spring house to the cistern. That is the whole line." I ran my finger along the red ink and stopped. It ran past the cistern. It ran down through the yard and past the pack house and down the long slope toward the mine, and where it reached the quarry it split, one branch going to the ore washer and one branch going down, into the rock, and off the bottom corner of the paper.

The bottom corner of the paper was not there. It had been torn away. There was a ragged edge where it had been, and the branch went into the tear and did not come out.

Mira said something under her breath. I sat back on my heels and looked at the tear and then at the rest of the map, and I thought about my mother coming up into this attic in her last weeks, and I thought about her asking Mira how much wolfsbane it would take to make a wolf sick.

"There is more writing," I said. "On the back."

I turned the map over. There was a note in my father's hand, dated the year before he died. It said: The Council man came again. He wants the branch surveyed and he wants it done quietly. I told him no. He said the Council has a right to the water under the quarry and I said the water under the quarry is Kızıltaş water and he laughed at me. I am writing this down in case. I am writing this down because I do not trust him.

There was no name. Just The Council man.

Mira crossed herself, which she did not do often. "Your father died that winter."

"Yes."

"An accident in the mine."

"Yes."

We sat there in the attic with the lantern and the map and the dust, and I heard the door at the bottom of the stable creak open and boots on the ladder, and I rolled up the map and put it in my jacket and had the lid of the crate down before the first head appeared through the hatch.

It was Cal, and behind him was Elias.

Elias came up the last rungs slowly, one hand on the ladder and one on his hat, and he looked around the attic at the crates and the chairs and the canvas and then at me, and his face did something I could not follow.

"You found your father's maps," he said.

"I found one of them." I put my hand flat on the crate lid. "Elias. What were you going to tell me in the record room before Cal came in? Who put the plate on the spring?"

He came forward and knelt by the crate and did not answer. He was looking at the lid, at the burned Kızıltaş mark, and his hands were in his lap and they had gone still.

"Do you remember the night my mother went over the south rim?" I said. "Mira says there were rope burns on her wrists. Do you know who did that?"

Elias's mouth worked. "Derya. There is a thing you do not understand about your mother's death. It was not the plate. The plate was three years old. What happened to your mother was about something else, something older, something your father knew about and your mother found out about last month." He looked up at me. "The Council man your father wrote about. I know who he is. He has been in this canyon longer than you have been alive, and he is not finished."

"Say his name."

Elias opened his mouth to answer, and his eyes went past me to the hatch, and his face went slack and grey, and he said nothing at all.

I turned around. Ruth was standing at the top of the ladder with the lantern light on her auburn hair and her neat grey jacket, and she was smiling.

"Luna," she said. "I thought I might find you up here. Silas is asking for you. He says the Council will want to see your father's maps, since you have been so kind as to find them." She looked past me at the map in my hand, at the torn corner, and her smile got a little warmer. "And I think he will be very interested in that one."