There had been no wall near Edgemont when Tara left, but they’d built one since, a low packed rampart near the road and circling south, a line against the Badlands.
She was so tired that when she saw the wall with its gate, saw the glint of steel and the holy light the Pastor wove about the guards to arm and strengthen them, she just pressed on. A slow and steady march. Even from this distance she could hear the guards’ songs and hushed chatter. They were distracted. They might not notice her until she knocked on the gate. Hells, she could knock the gate down if she wanted. She felt tired and raw and unsettled and weak, and this last obstacle fused all those to fury.
She tripped halfway to the wall, and looked down to see what tripped her. Her toe had caught in a thin trench carved across the road and into the dirt to either side.
A bell rang out.
They’d set an alarm. Of course. Not that there was any first-principle reason for Tara to expect one, save that its presence would be maximally inconvenient.
A muffled curse came from the wall, and flashes of torchlight off metal as guards found their feet, their bows, their aim. She let go of her suitcase and raised her hand. “Don’t shoot!”
Dawn surfaced from her stupor. Tara had given her painkillers. They’d worked a little too well. “What’s going on?”
“I know these people,” Tara said. “Let me do the talking.” She turned back to the wall. “It’s me! Tara Abernathy!”
An arrow thudded into the ground at her feet, shaft thrumming with the force of its impact. It glowed with the guard-light.
“Hey!” She stopped short. “What the hells was that for?” She snatched the arrow out of the ground and held it up; its light shone on her face. “Who’s up there? Is that you, Thom Baker?”
“No.” The voice was rough and proud, and the man who stood on the wall above the gate was thicker than she remembered. “Keep still, or we’ll shoot.”
“Grafton Cavanaugh.” She knew him. A hard man, a sheep farmer, heavy on his children, a happy drinker, player of banjos, her father’s friend. “Since when do you stand night watch? Where’s Thom?”
The helmets shifted on the wall, men whose faces she could not see turning to Cavanaugh for guidance. “Baker’s dead.”
She felt groundless as a kite loosed in a storm. She’d come here for her father’s funeral, and carried memories of John Abernathy with her all the way from Alt Coulumb. She was not done thinking of him, through him, out from under the long spread of him. The liquor she’d hoped to drink once she made it across this killing field was his whiskey, and the fire she’d hoped to drink it beside was his fire. But at least she’d charted the edges of what it meant that he was gone.
More than one man could die at a time. Death, actually, was all around—you didn’t need a Hidden Schools education to know that. She’d known Thom Baker since she’d known anyone. Edgemont wasn’t so large that people got lost.
Baker. The godsdamn wall. Her father. She was done with changes. She stared up at Grafton Cavanaugh. He looked larger and more grave than she remembered. “You know me, Cavanaugh.”
“If that is you, Tara Abernathy.”
“Your brother taught me to ride. I danced with your son at the solstice. And you know why I’ve come.”
“You wear the face of my best friend’s daughter, but many a monster can wear a face. You come at night, with a stranger, and the curse-bell rang when you crossed the line. Any word you say to prove yourself, the Raiders could have torn from you by force.”
She almost laughed at the whole sick situation, but to show scorn for the Raiders’ power, to scoff at his suggestion that they might have tortured Edgemont’s paltry secrets out of her, would not help her case. Grafton Cavanaugh was not joking. And her father was still dead. “This is Dawn,” Tara said. “From Blake’s Rest. Raiders hit the Rest this morning. She caught the curse from them.”
Murmurs spread on the wall—heads turned—but Grafton Cavanaugh sought no counsel. “Then she’s past help. Leave her, and come inside. The Pastor will see she’s buried safe.”
Tara could not see Cavanaugh’s eyes at this distance but she remembered them, small black points in a broad face. “I won’t leave her. She’s my student. She’s not past saving, so long as I have a clean place to work and starlight to work with.”
Dawn smiled, drug-dreamy, and waved.
“Edgemont is a good town,” Grafton Cavanaugh said. She knew what that meant. A simple town of simple magics, of local faith in a priest of a vague and personal god, untouched by your foul Craft. A place that burns people like you who don’t hide themselves behind manners and courtesy. “Your pa knew that.”
Tara felt herself go hard. She knew what would satisfy this man. Nothing much: just bow to his order, please him, and disclaim her Craft for a while. He might accept a simple lie about Dawn, that all she meant to do was a bit of surgery, a bit of prayer. There would be no Craft in Edgemont.
But this very nonsense had chased her from her home. Poor dead Baker and the others had faced her across an open grave in Edgemont’s cemetery, with a mob behind them, pitchforks and torches in the hands of people she’d known all her life. People she’d only wanted to help.
Admittedly, she’d tried to help by raising the dead to fight on the town’s behalf. In her travels since, she’d learned that certain kinds of people could not accept certain kinds of help. She would make different choices now.
But she’d run from them back then, and never stopped running. Because of them, she hadn’t seen her parents since that night, for all her offers to host them if they’d visit her in Alt Coulumb. If she’d been here, she could have helped them fight the Raiders. If these people had not been so godsdamn scared of her, maybe there wouldn’t be this letter in her pocket.
She was done.
She stepped forward, and pulled Dawn, still waving in drug-induced friendliness, with her.
“Stop!” Grafton’s voice, maybe meant for her, maybe for the other guards.
A bowstring sang.
An arrow trailed light through the air.
Shadows rolled from Tara’s glyphs to cover her. With a glare, she shattered the arrow in midflight.
Splinters of glowing wood rained onto the soil. The blunted arrowhead bounced and rolled to a stop beside her foot.
Power surged through her, all the softness of the human soul melted away, rendered useful as a blade. She wanted to tear down the stars, to drink the soil, to cast Cavanaugh from his perch and batter down the gates of Edgemont and march through town, revealed in the glorious dark self she’d never showed these fools before, all the way to her father’s grave.
Which would solve nothing. She’d just scare scared people worse and prove the Craft no better than Grafton Cavanaugh might think.
New lights gleamed on the wall: guards raised bows and took aim, arrows nocked and burning. What did it matter if they feared her, this particular handful of scared dumb farmers in a world full of scared dumb farmers?
The Craft, she’d told Dawn, was a way of seeing. Like most truths, that one was a prism that cast different rainbows depending on what light you raised it near. Here was the first meaning Tara had learned: you had to see things, people, places, as classes of being rather than isolated entities. This mob of villagers ready to strike her down might be any mob, anywhere, even if she’d grown up knowing them. Their individual identities dissolved once they joined together. She’d learned that truth early. It was the cornerstone of her power and sometimes she felt she’d spend her whole life since trying to see past it.
Dawn watched her, eager, hungry, feverish not just with the curse and her drugs. The girl had spent so long afraid of a power she could not control, a power that promised freedom, or at least revenge. And now she looked for Tara to stand unbowed, to break those who scorned her. To teach her what that power could do. If Tara fought her way into town, the mob would fall. She would pay her respects and leave them cowering, these men and women who chased her from their midst.
But when Grafton Cavanaugh played banjo, John Abernathy joined him on the fiddle, and they kept the whiskey passing round.
She gathered the shadow back into her glyphs. She drank no starlight, she ate no life. She stood straight, but let herself be small and soft beneath their aim. She reached into her coat and drew out her mother’s letter. “My father’s dead. I came for his funeral. I have a sick girl here who needs my help. Will you let us in?”
He did not say no at once. The archers kept their aim, and the guard-light gathered in their arrow tips.
Then the gate opened, and a voice that did not belong to Grafton Cavanaugh rang out into the Badlands silence. “Wait!”
Grafton looked down in shock no less than Tara’s. A young man in haphazard armor emerged from the gate, hands raised. His helmet was off, his black hair in tight curls, and his face belonged to a carving in a temple a long way from here, more than it belonged to his father on the wall. She recognized the man—the boy this man had been. They’d almost slept together, once.
“Connor.” Cavanaugh sounded a more private sort of dangerous when he addressed his son. “Get back.”
“That’s Tara, Dad.” He was halfway across the killing field already, closing fast, near enough that a poorly aimed arrow might skewer him if Grafton let the archers shoot. “She’s come back.”
“She’s a witch, Connor. She’ll get her hooks in you.”
“Then would you trust someone who knows her better?”
Tara’s breath caught. That voice was new—to this conversation, at least, though it was as near to Tara as her bones. She turned once more to the gate, and to the shadows beyond from which the words had come. Her breath stopped. Her heart might have done the same for all she would have noticed, or cared.
Her mother stepped out into the moonlight.