Golden by Cameron Dokey Read Free Book Online Page B

and I labored together in the garden, carrying water from the stream that ran at the base of the apple orchard. Even then, our plants drooped and languished, as if they couldn’t quite make up their minds to expend the energy required to stay alive.
    It was the only time I ever saw the garden look anything other than rich and abundant. And if even Melisande’s garden struggled as it did, I didn’t want to think too long and hard about what might be happening to the gardens, and the people, in the town.
    Some mornings, after our work was finished, I climbed to the top of the tallest apple tree, the one that grew at the very crest of the hill and so provided the best view of the surrounding countryside. This had been a favorite place for as long as I could remember. A place to sit and dream, to imagine where the roads I saw might go, or whether or not I might grow hair, and to watch for the arrival of Harry and Mr. Jones.
    And so I was the first to notice the exodus from the city. One day the land was mostly empty, the next there were people, sometimes singly, sometimes in groups, moving in weary fits and starts down the thin brown snake of dusty road. Some toward the mountains, but most in the opposite direction, as if they wanted to put as great a distance between themselves and their misery as they could, in as short a time as possible.
    Every once in a while, a single traveler would cutacross country and end up outside our back door. From them we heard tales of sickness in the city. Of a stillness of the air that was stifling the simplest breath and begetting a fever like none experienced before. Fear had come to live in the city, the travelers said, taking up more than its fair share of space and driving people from their homes. There were murmurs of some great evil magic at work in the land, the need to find its source and drive it out. Only then did I realize that most of those who came to us had known the way because they had been here before.
    And so I came to understand their words for what they truly were: a warning.
    The hot weather went on.
    Several times I caught Melisande looking at me with that considering expression on her face, or standing perfectly still with her head cocked to one side, as if gauging the approach of something. The first time I saw this I felt my blood run as cold as our stream did all winter.
She is listening for the mob,
I thought.
    But gradually I came to realize that it was some-thing else. Which was not quite the same as saying we did not fear the mob would come. As the days passed and we still remained in our small house in the valley, I came to understand that Melisande was listening for the approach of Mr. Jones. It had to do with that very first conversation between them, I think, and of all that had not been spoken when the sorceress had told the tinker he would be welcomewherever we might dwell. We would wait for him now, or so it seemed, even with the risk of danger growing closer by the minute while, as far as I could hear, Mr. Jones did not.
    One day, the day the radishes, the beans, and the spinach all expired at the exact same instant, I came to a decision of my own. I waited until the sorceress was busy in the house at the hottest part of the day, then I put my favorite kerchief on my head, the one that Harry had given me, with the black-eyed Susans embroidered upon it, and set off for the apple orchard. Not to climb my favorite tree, but to go beyond the orchard itself to the nearest farm.
    The man who farmed the property closest to ours had always been a good neighbor, unconcerned and unafraid of sorcery. Once, several years ago now, he had come to Melisande in the middle of the night. His wife had gone into labor before her time. It was going badly, and he feared to leave her to make the journey to the town to fetch the midwife. And so, though she was no more skilled in childbirth than any other woman might be, Melisande had returned with him and done her best;