The-New-Well-Digger
In Edderton they did not believe in magic, and they were nearly right.
It was a flat, honest sort of village, three lanes and a mill and a church with a leaning steeple, the kind of place where the most wondrous thing that happened in a year was twins, or a comet, or a stranger. Tomas was the stranger. He had come in the spring with a spade over his shoulder and a way of finding water that the village put down to a good eye and a lucky thumb, and within a month he had given the dry end of the lane a well that ran sweet and cold, and that was that. They liked him well enough. They did not ask where he'd learned the trade, and he did not tell them, because the truth was not a thing you said out loud in a place like Edderton.
The truth was that Tomas could hear the ground.
It was not a voice. It had never been a voice. It was more like the way a cold room remembers a fire after the fire is out — a faint held warmth, a pressure on the inner ear, the difference between a field that had only ever grown barley and a field where something had happened. Old digging left a taste like iron. Old roots hummed low and patient. And water, deep water, sang; that was the whole of his gift, that the wet places under the world had a note to them, and he could follow it down through clay and chalk and stone the way another man follows a path he has walked since boyhood. His grandmother had