The frontier is wide and the roads between towns are long, but Silas, Artie, and Lark have been riding them together long enough that the silence between words is as comfortable as the words. They’re Aetheric Trail Walkers — one who can bend time, one who can read the truth in any voice, one who can strengthen the bones of the world with iron and will. They travel light, sleep rough, and make themselves useful wherever the road takes them.

The road takes them to Tallow Creek on a dry summer morning, when the grass is going gold at the edges and the water in the stock troughs is running thin. The creek that the little ranching settlement depends on has been dropping for six weeks, slow enough that nobody noticed at first and fast enough now that everyone is worried. Upstream, a well-meaning man made a practical decision. Downstream, sixty people and a great many cattle are feeling the consequences.

What follows involves a stubborn fence line, a boy who can slow a moment to a near-standstill without quite meaning to, a First People elder who knows this creek the way most people know their own names, and a supper table that gets a little too crowded and a great deal too loud in the very best way.

_What the Creek Knows__ is the first novel in the _Aetheric Trails__ series — cozy frontier fantasy set in a world of open country, quiet magic, and people who are, on the whole, doing their best.