Chapter 1: The First Storm

The village of Dust Hollow had not seen rain in nine years. The wells ran thin, the fields cracked like old plates, and the elders spoke of the sky the way people speak of a friend who has moved away.

Little Tamsin was ten, and she did not remember rain at all. She only knew it from her grandmother's stories, and from the paintings she made on scraps of flour sacking with berry juice and charcoal. Her favorite subject was a storm: gray clouds heavy as sleeping animals, silver lines slanting down, puddles full of sky.

One evening, she finished her best storm yet and propped it against the window to dry. By morning, the sack was bone dry, but the air smelled strange. Cool. Green. Far away, thunder grumbled.

Tamsin ran outside. A single dark cloud had gathered over the well, and from it fell a thin, shy shower. The villagers poured into the lane with open mouths and open arms. Old Barnaby wept openly. Children danced barefoot in the mud.

Tamsin looked down at her paint-stained fingers and noticed that the red berry juice had vanished from her jar. Not dried. Gone. When she tried to paint again, the color red simply refused to appear on the cloth.

She understood quickly. Each painting that came true took a color with it.

Over the following weeks, she painted the fields green, and lost green. She painted ripe wheat, and lost gold. She painted the sky blue again, and for a long and frightening day she could not remember what blue looked like at all. The village flourished. Wells filled, goats grew fat, and the elders held feasts in her honor. Tamsin watched it all in shades of gray.

On the last night, she had only one color left, a soft and stubborn yellow. Her grandmother found her sitting at the window with a blank cloth.

"You can stop now, little one," the old woman said. "We have enough."

"But the village is still thin in places."

"The village will manage. Tell me, what is the yellow for?"

Tamsin thought. Then she picked up her brush and painted something small and simple: a window with lamplight glowing inside, and two figures sitting close together.

In the morning, the colors had not come back. But Tamsin's grandmother sat beside her with a pot of warm tea, and the lamp on the sill burned a gentle gold. Outside, the rain fell soft and steady, and for the first time in her life, Tamsin did not need to paint it.