16

SILAS, THE BANFREYS, and Dobay reached the Banfrey place early in the afternoon the next day. Silas left Dobay and the Banfreys there, with many heartfelt thanks and handshakes from Banfrey and a bare nod from Lainie. When he got back to town, his rented room was as he had left it. He dropped off his gear and Carden’s mage ring there, confirmed with the landlady that Carden had been rooming at the Rusty Widow, then went next door to the saloon. He told the saloon owner that Carden was dead, then invoked his authority as a mage hunter – which meant next to nothing here in the Wildings, but at least proved he wasn’t just a common thief – and asked to be shown to Carden’s room on the second floor of the saloon. He usually preferred not to reveal his true occupation, but sometimes it was necessary, and anyhow, everyone in Bitterbush Springs already knew he was a mage and had shown that they weren’t inclined to mess with him.

“You can’t take anything,” the saloon owner said in response to Silas’s request.

“If I find evidence against Carden for the Mage Council, I have to take that,” Silas said. It was part of his job, and the more evidence he presented, the larger the payout for stopping Carden was likely to be. “But I’ll leave everything else alone.”

Agreeing to that, the owner led him upstairs to the lavish two-room suite Carden had been renting. Silas shooed out the handful of house ladies who seemed to have taken up residence in the suite, then searched the rooms. In the bedroom he found an expensive black leather valise, which held spare clothing, a message box kit, and a sheaf of documents. The documents were letters of credit good at the banks in the Wildings that had connections to Granadaian banks, authorizing the payment of funds to Arbrey Carden. The letters were signed only with an inked stamp in the form of an elaborate “A”. Clearly, this mysterious “A” was the person or group who had been funding Carden’s acquisition of the ore. Silas could ask about the letters at the bank here in Bitterbush Springs, but he doubted any Wildings banker would know who the “A” represented; it would just be a mark, or, at best, a false name, on their lists of depositors.

The silver message box was square, like Silas’s Hidden Council message box, but with markings he didn’t recognize. From the markings, it might be possible to track down the silversmith who had made the box and learn who had commissioned it. He opened the box; an unopened note lay inside. He unfolded it. You have failed to answer my last three messages, the note read. I demand that you enlighten me on the current state of the project, and explain your silence, or else funds will be cut off and your association with the project terminated. The note was unsigned.

Silas sat on the bed with the note in one hand, the message box in the other, and the letters of credit next to him. He really wanted to know who Carden’s backers were and what they were doing with that ore. He briefly considered answering the note and taking the message box with him, to see if he could learn anything else.

Then he discarded the idea. If he let whoever had been giving Carden his orders know that something had gone wrong, that would give them the chance to hide their tracks. Also, the location of a message box could be traced. Going by the amounts of money involved, this matter could reach to the highest levels of Granadaian mage society, and, no matter how curious he was, he had no desire to get himself mixed up in a mess like that. He had done his part by stopping Carden and preventing the harm he was doing in the Wildings. If something was going on in Granadaia, that was the Mage Council’s problem, not his. All in all, it would be best to shake this from his feet and move on.

He left the clothes and the valise, items of real value in the Wildings, for the landlord to use or sell, however he saw fit, and put one of the letters of credit in his coat pocket, so he could identify the “A” sigil if he ever came across it again. On the backs of two more letters, he copied the markings from the message box, and pocketed them as well. Then he took the message box and the rest of the letters downstairs with him. At the stables next door to the boarding house, he borrowed a shovel from a puzzled stable hand and buried the message box and the letters deep in the muck and dirt of one of the stalls.

Back in his room, he took his own message boxes from their hiding place in his pack. He wrote his report to the Mage Council, describing Carden’s activities and the megalomaniacal madness he had fallen prey to, fueled by the power in the ore, and giving an abbreviated version of the fight in which he had killed the renegade. He didn’t mention the Sh’kimech; as far as he was concerned, the Sh’kimech were strictly a Wildings matter, none of the Mage Council’s business. He also made no mention of the A’ayimat’s involvement in the matter, and he said nothing about Lainie. Difficult though that situation was, he still didn’t want to turn it over to someone else who would force the issue with no care or concern for her.

He folded one of the letters of credit with the drawings on the back inside the spelled sheet of message paper on which he had written his report, tucked them into the message box with Carden’s ring, and worked the spell that would send them to the Mage Council’s message chamber.

His report to the Hidden Council included details about his dealings with the A’ayimat and the nature of the ore. He also described Carden’s message box and the note, and folded the other letter of credit on which he had copied the message box markings inside his report. The Hidden Council would discreetly look into the activities of Carden’s backers and let him know if they posed any further threat to the Plain people of the Wildings and whether he should investigate some more. Again, he made no mention of Lainie. Although the Hidden Council would be more sympathetic to her dilemma, they would still feel bound to uphold the training law.

His reports sent, he lay on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. He had successfully stopped a very dangerous rogue mage, but for some reason the victory didn’t seem complete while he still didn’t know what to do about Lainie. He went over the options again. He could keep trying to persuade her to go to Granadaia voluntarily, but that looked more and more unlikely, especially since he couldn’t seem to say anything to her that didn’t make things even worse. Or he could carry her away without her consent. No one would be able to stop him if that was what he decided to do, but it would be a violation of her rights and freedom and of everything he believed in.

He didn’t even like the idea of her going to school in Granadaia, which only made it harder for him to force himself to force the issue. The instructional system built on the twin pillars of competition and humiliation would likely destroy her. She was too different, in itself an unforgivable sin in the Granadaian schools of magic. She was too free-spirited, and felt things too deeply. She would almost certainly either be so broken that the only thing to be done with her was to Strip her after all, or twisted into something that would horrify her.

Then there was Burrett Banfrey. Silas had found himself genuinely liking the rancher. The man had lost nearly everything – his childhood home, his family, his son – to mages. Losing his daughter would destroy him, and Lainie would be devastated at being separated from her father. Silas just didn’t have the heart – or lack of heart – to do that to them.

But if he left her for someone else to deal with, there would be nothing to stop that other mage from doing the harm to her that he couldn’t bring himself to do. And the consequences if their disobedience of the law was discovered would be serious for both of them. Not to mention the danger that she could be hanged, now that the whole Bitterbush Valley knew she was a mage.

She had said she would rather be Stripped than go to Granadaia to train in magic. It was certainly her right to make that choice, but he could never do that to her, or ask someone else to do it. It would destroy her as surely as hanging or the Granadaian schools would.

But untrained mages, especially ones as powerful as Lainie, were a danger to themselves and everyone around them…

His thoughts chased themselves around in circles while he thought of a young woman, a pure beauty like a desert flower, with wide hazel eyes and a shy – and sometimes not so shy – smile, and recalled the passion they had shared in that starlit mountain meadow and how it had been the best thing that had ever happened to him, and knew less and less what he should do.

ONCE SHE WAS home and had her Pa comfortably settled in bed – though not without argument – Lainie took a long bath and slept the rest of that day and all the next. When she woke up the day after that, she lay in bed for a long time, remembering her adventure with Mr. Vendine and that night in the meadow, and wishing things could be different. Then she told herself sternly she could wish her life away and it would never do her or anyone else any good, and it was time to get up and get on with her life.

She cooked breakfast and cleaned up, then she patched the clothes Pa and Dobay had been wearing when they were shot. She wished she could make new ones for them, but try though she might, she had never been able to sew a piece of clothing that anyone could wear without looking like a ragamuffin. At least she was good at sewing on patches. She had heard tell of a machine of foreign invention now being made in Amber Bay, far away on the west coast of the Wildings, that could sew. Some seamstresses used them now to make the ready-made clothes that were sold in the mercantiles faster and more cheaply. If she had one of those machines, maybe then she could stitch a seam worthy of the name, maybe even sew herself a dress someday.

The mending done, she started working on the beans for that night’s supper. She sat at the kitchen table, picking through dried beans to sort out the moldy ones and bits of dirt and gravel. Without the distraction of sewing, her emotions started churning around inside her again, and she tossed aside the debris as though it had personally offended her.

She didn’t know if Mr. Vendine was still around. It didn’t seem likely that someone like him would stick around Bitterbush Springs for days, waiting for her to make an impossible choice. More likely, he had gone off hunting the next rogue mage and had sent a message to the Mage Council in Granadaia telling them about her, and one day someone would come to either take her away or destroy her mind.

Not that she would let them. She would fight them, and she knew that her Pa’s ranch hands would fight them as well. If it came down to it, she would die before she let them take her away and turn her into someone like her grandmother.

It was just as well if Mr. Vendine had left, she told herself. It didn’t matter to him what happened to her. She had been silly to hope that what had happened in that mountain meadow meant anything to him, that it was anything more than that magical hunger. And anyway, who was she to talk? Hadn’t it only been the hunger for her, as well?

Her hands slowed in their task as, despite her best efforts, she found herself unable to deny what she already knew. It had been more. Mr. Vendine – Silas – was the nicest, handsomest, most interesting man she had ever known. He cared about Plain folk and risked himself to protect them from his own kind even though there was no thanks in it for him. He was kind to her, and treated her like someone worthy of respect. And, more than that, he was the man who made her spine tingle and her senses glow, just as if he was the hero and she was the heroine in a penny-thriller novel. It had been wrong for her to do what she had done with a man she wasn’t married to, she didn’t deny that; when no one was looking, she had made a prayer for forgiveness and an offering to the Joiner, whose gift she had wantonly misused. But it had also felt so natural, so comfortable, as though she was made to be with him like that.

It was all water down the creek, though. Her life was here, and she would make it a good one, with or without handsome mages coming into it, breaking her heart, and leaving her behind. Soon she would tell her Pa that she was ready to marry Mr. Dobay – she hoped Dobay wouldn’t mind too much that she wasn’t a virgin – and she would have her kids and work her ranch, and she would bury her power so deep inside of her that no other mage would ever find it and force her to go away to Granadaia.

She also wouldn’t let the folks here in the valley make her cower in her house, afraid to show herself in her own hometown. The whole way home, and as she settled him in bed and then checked on him, her Pa had kept saying that she had to be careful now, she must never go into town alone, but only with him or Dobay or one or two of the hands, or preferably not at all.

Well, to all the hells with that. She threw a moldy bean aside so hard it bounced off the table and went skittering across the floor. The people of Bitterbush Springs were her people, more than any mage could ever be. She’d been born here, had lived here all her nineteen years. This was her home. She belonged here, damn it; she had as much right to be here as anyone. More than that, she had saved the people of the valley from the monster that Carden would have become under the Sh’kimech’s control. And Mr. Vendine had helped, and had also saved them from the blueskins. They had to understand that not all wizards were bad.

She suddenly felt restless; she couldn’t stand to look at those damned kitchen walls another moment. She and Mr. Vendine had saved this valley, damn it. And she had never done anyone any harm. They had to see that; she was going to make them see it, no matter what.

She dumped the beans she had sorted into a pot and filled it with water, swept the bad bits onto the floor and out the door, and wiped her dusty hands on her apron. There wasn’t enough salt pork for tonight’s beans; it was time for a trip to town. She took off the apron, hung it on its hook, and left the kitchen. From their hook by the front door, she took her hat and gunbelt; she wouldn’t make the mistake again of running off without her gun.

As she saddled up Mala, the stablehand asked her, “Going somewhere, Miss Lainie?”

“Just for a ride.” At least she hadn’t been forbidden to ride out around the ranch.

“Take care, an’ don’t stay out too long!” the hand said as she mounted up. She didn’t answer; she kneed Mala into a gallop and headed around back of the house, taking a roundabout way, hidden by the windbreak of trees, to the road.

LAINIE’S ARRIVAL IN town didn’t go unnoticed. By the time she rode up to Minton’s, half a dozen men were following her. She did her best to give no sign that she even noticed them; she wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. She dismounted and hitched Mala to a post. As she started into the store, the men, now numbering nearly a dozen, blocked her way.

“Miss Banfrey,” the banker’s assistant asked in a pompous tone, “is it true that you are a wizard?”

Thunder rumbled in the distance; after a dry spell of several days, the storms were resuming. “I got business in Minton’s and I want to get home before this storm breaks,” Lainie said. She tried to move forward, but the men crowded around her. Another handful of men – hands from other ranches, Mr. Holus, a few men she recognized as some of Carden’s miners who hadn’t gone up into the canyon – had joined them.

“You can answer our question first,” a cowhand said.

“What’s it to you? I’ve done no harm to any of you.”

“What about Carden?” one of the miners asked. “You done harm to him – I heard you an’ that wizard fellow killed him with magics.”

“Yeah, he’s dead. Carden would have brought something even worse than the blueskins down on us. Mr. Vendine an’ I saved this town.”

“Mr. Carden was the best thing that ever happened to this town!” the banker’s assistant said. “Wherever his money came from, it was money we badly needed.”

“You boys don’t know what you’re talking about! Carden was fooling with powers that no sane wizard would ever touch. He had to be stopped, an’ me and Mr. Vendine stopped him!”

“There, you heard her say it!” Lainie’s stomach clenched in fear at the voice she had hoped to never hear again. Beyond the crowd, which had grown to two dozen men or more, and even a handful of women, stood Gobby, holding a long, coiled rope with a noose at one end.

“Wizardry an’ murder! In her own words!” Gobby crowed. He pushed his way through the crowd to her. “Of course, Miss Lainie, all can be forgiven if you an’ me can come to a… accommodation.” He brushed stubby, filthy fingers down her cheek.

She spat at him. “You can rot in all the hells, Gobby.”

He laughed. “I’ll catch up with you there an’ then we can have our fun.”

She tried again to push her way through the men surrounding her. They closed in more tightly, pushing back against her. One man seized her left arm. She drew her gun; another man wrenched her right arm, forcing her to drop the gun. Panic rising inside her, she kicked and twisted and struggled, trying to break free. “Let me go, dammit! We saved this gods-damned town!”

“A wizard’s a wizard!” a man shouted. “Don’t matter what you’ve done! Wizards made life like all the eight hells for us honest folk for generations. There’s no such thing as a wizard that does no harm.”

“Only thing to do with ’em is hang ’em!” Gobby yelled, and a shout of agreement went up from the crowd.

They started dragging Lainie towards the north end of town, where the gallows stood. She dug in her heels, fighting their pull. “Stop!” she cried. “I never done no one any harm! Ostrey, you know me an’ my Pa,” she pled with a hand from Mr. Dinsin’s ranch, hating to beg but wanting even more not to die. “We’re good neighbors, we always lend a helping hand when your folk need it!”

“I’ll shed no tears for Carden, but the only wizard who never done anyone any harm is a dead wizard,” Ostrey answered.

Gobby shoved her from behind. “Shut up an’ move, birdie.”

“You just want to hang me because I won’t let you knock me! You don’t care about wizards or no; Carden was a wizard an’ you knew it, an’ you was all, ‘Yes, Mr. Carden, sir, whatever you say, Mr. Carden, sir!’”

Gobby backhanded her. “Shut up!”

She screamed and struggled and fought as they dragged her up the street, and even bit a hand or two that came within reach of her mouth, but there were too many of them and they were too strong. She lashed out with her power, as she had done against Carden and when she had made a shield to stop the bullets during the shootout. The unfocused burst of power buffeted a few of the men holding her, surprising them into letting go, but there were more to take their place, their grasp rougher and more merciless.

“She’s using her magics on us!” a man shouted. “She’ll kill us all if we let her!”

“I heard if you cut a wizard’s hands off, they can’t do magic any more,” another man said.

“If we hang her fast enough, we won’t have to cut her hands off!” Gobby answered.

Lainie tried to attack them again with magic, but her power slipped out of her grasp, like she was trying to grab a handful of mist. She didn’t know how to shape it and control it like Mr. Vendine did. But even if she couldn’t fight her way free, she wasn’t going to go down easy. If they were going to kill her, she would make damn sure they knew what they were doing and that they had to fight for it. “You’re nothin’ but a bunch of gods-damned murderers!” she shouted, struggling and thrashing as hard as she could.

Undeterred, the mob went on towards the gallows, pulling her with them.