Nessa Holt's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Nessa Holt promised the village she would baptize every soul in Ribbitmaw by first frost, and the black water would make them one flesh. She said it with her arms open and her marsh-flower crown crooked. The villagers had nodded. Now she stood behind her mother's house with no pool at all. Rainwater had drained from the low ground. The old pit she'd scraped was a shallow puddle, warm and clear, not deep enough to cover a child's knees, let alone a grown soul. She found the shovel leaning inside the shed. Rust ate its blade, and the shaft had gone rough as bark. She spat on her palms and drove it into the mud. The first cut came easy. The second struck clay. By the tenth she was grunting, hauling wet earth over her shoulder, her white robe streaked brown. The door of the house opened. Her mother stepped onto the porch, one hand tracing the rail. Marin Tidewell had been blind since before Nessa could walk, and she read the world through sound. She turned her face toward the scrape and thud of the blade. "You're digging again," Marin said. "The ground here won't hold water. It never has." Nessa kept working. "It will hold enough." "You'll drain into the marsh by morning." Marin came down the steps slow, feeling each board. "Your father dug a well on this very spot. It ran dry in a season." Nessa stopped. Sweat stung her eyes. Her mother was right about the water, but wrong about the reason it mattered. Nessa didn't need a well. She needed a basin the marsh itself would fill and keep filling. She dropped the shovel and walked past her mother, out to where the ground turned soft and black under her boots. The marsh sat lower than the yard. The dark water there never drained, because it was fed from below. She knelt and pushed both hands into the muck. It swallowed her wrists. Cold. Bottomless enough. "Here," she said. "Not the yard. The marsh." She carried the rusted shovel to the marsh edge and cut a channel from the deepest black pool inward, widening a hollow between two hummocks. Water rushed to fill each bite she took. Within an hour she stood in a pit up to her chest, and it kept rising on its own. She had her font. Deep, dark, and always full. Marin stood at the yard's edge, listening to her daughter splash in the risen water. "Whose soul goes first?" she asked. Nessa climbed out, dripping black to the waist. She looked at the porch, at the woman who had warned her and followed her down anyway. "Yours," she said, and smiled the smile that never left her face. "You should be the first to rise." Marin's hand tightened on the rail.