ON A COLD, gray afternoon a nineday after they left Honeybee, Lainie and Silas approached Bitterbush Springs, riding down through the valley from the north. The cold wasn’t as biting and the snow wasn’t as deep as north of the Gap River, but now, in the depths of winter, the Bitterbush Valley was as cold and snowy as it got. Ahead of them, in the cloud-dimmed light, the town was a blackened smudge against the snow-dusted valley floor. A handful of buildings appeared to still be standing; the rest were burned to various stages of ruin.
Lainie reined in, swallowing a wave of sickness. Maybe Bitterbush Springs had been on the list of towns to be destroyed, after all, instead of being taken over. Maybe Elspetya wasn’t here; maybe no one was. There were people here who had hated Lainie, but she also hoped that some of her friends would have still been her friends, even knowing she was a wizard. Were they all dead now? And what about her Pa?
“Darlin’?” Silas asked.
She had to learn the truth, not hide from it. “I’m okay,” she said, and forced herself to nudge Mala forward.
As they got closer, the gallows at the north end of town, where Lainie had nearly been hanged a year and a half ago, came more clearly into sight. Five bodies hung from it, swaying slightly in the wind.
“Pa!” Lainie cried out, suddenly, horribly certain that her Pa was among those bodies. She drove Mala into a gallop towards the town. She didn’t want to know, but she had to know; she couldn’t think, she couldn’t even breathe, until she knew. Memories flooded through her mind: the roughness of the rope around her neck, the bone-melting terror as she struggled to break away from the hanging mob…
“Lainie, don’t!” Silas called, racing after her on Abenar.
She didn’t look back. She reined in before the gallows and scrambled down from the saddle. Standing in front of the gibbet, she took a deep breath, bracing herself for what she might see. Then she looked up at the dangling bodies, three men and two women. The cold had preserved them, but the hanging had left their faces swollen and darkened, nearly unrecognizable. Still, from their builds, hair, and clothing, she could guess who they were.
None of them were her Pa, or, she was sure, her friends.
“Darlin’,” Silas said from beside her.
She turned to him, and realized she was crying. His arms went around her. “It isn’t him,” she wept against his chest.
“I’ll take you somewhere safe,” he said, holding her tight. “Maybe to the A’ayimat in the Great Sky Mountains; they know us. You don’t have to do this.”
Was it the Great Sky A’ayimat whose children had been murdered to incite the attack on Bitterbush Springs? Or the ones in the Bitterbush Hills? Either way, more children and settlers were dead at her grandmother’s hands, and she had no business hiding, even if she wanted to.
“No,” she said, pulling back and drying her tears with her coat sleeves. “I do have to do this. She’s my flesh and blood, and I’m going to make things right. She hurt you. She killed these people, and A’ayimat children and my brother and Garis Horden and Bissom, and a lot of other people. I have to see justice done on her so she’ll never hurt anyone else.”
He pulled her into his arms again and held her for a long moment. “I know,” he finally said. “Just promise me you won’t get yourself killed.”
“I promise.” She looked up at him and forced a smile. “And I promise, if I do get myself killed, I’ll let you find me in the Afterworld and give me the whupping I deserve.”
“I promise, too.” He grinned down at her, though his grin was shaky. “And if I get myself killed, I’ll let you find me in the Afterworld and tie me up.”
She snorted out a laugh through her tears. “That was on accident, that one time, and you know it.”
A tender look replaced his smile, and he brushed tears from her face even as tears swam in his own eyes. “I know.”
He kissed her, then they held each other for a long time. Lainie filled her mind with his face and how his arms felt around her and the feel of him in her arms, trying to memorize them in case something did happen to him and so, when the fight got hard, she would remember part of what she was fighting for.
A gust of wind curled around them, colder than before, reminding Lainie that the afternoon was wearing on. She didn’t want to wait all through a long, sleepless night until morning to confront her grandmother. “You ready?” she said.
“I’m ready if you are, darlin’.”
“Then let’s go find my grandmother and finish this.”
* * *
THEY WENT IN quietly on foot. The town looked and felt like a ghost of the town where Lainie had spent her first nineteen years. Unquiet spirits teased at the edge of her mage senses. The icy wind whistled through the burnt-out buildings, carrying small, hard flakes of snow with it. Except for the eerie sound of the wind and the clopping of the horses’ hooves on the hard ground, the town was utterly silent. Lainie wondered if everyone except the people who’d been hanged had fled or been killed in the A’ayimat attack.
Silas suddenly stopped walking. Something tingled at the edge of Lainie’s senses, a feeling that someone was watching them. Silently, Silas jerked his head towards the stable between the half-built hotel and Mundy’s Boarding House, which was partly blackened but still mostly standing.
They settled Mala and Abenar in the relatively safe shelter of the stable, with buckets of water from the nearby pump and some armfuls of hay. They left the gates of the stalls unlatched so the horses wouldn’t be trapped if worse came to worst. Still concealed in the stable, they made sure their guns were loaded and that they had plenty of extra ammunition in their gunbelts and pockets. Then they went back outside, keeping themselves hidden behind the half-burned fence that separated the stable yard from the street. The fence was more holes than wood, but it still gave them some cover while letting them see what was happening in the street.
“I’m pretty sure someone’s out there,” Lainie said in a bare whisper. Despite the quiet and the empty street, her nerves screamed with the sensation of being watched.
“Not a mage, though,” Silas whispered back.
Lainie reached out with her mage senses. In the medium distance, in the direction of her Pa’s house, several leagues away, she sensed a number of mages. Strong ones; she recognized Lord Astentias’s power, and a couple of mages from the Hidden Council headquarters in Sandostra. There were a number of others that she didn’t recognize; at least one of them had Wildings-flavored power. Was there also an A’ayimat among them? Another had the sickly-sweet, peppery taint of demonsalts on his power. She couldn’t tell if her grandmother was there; Elspetya hadn’t used magic in her presence back in Sandostra, so Lainie wouldn’t recognize her power if she did sense it.
Closer in, in town, she felt plenty of life around her but no signs of magic. “You’re right. Plain. A bunch of them. I think there’s mages out at the ranch. In that direction, anyhow. I don’t know if any of them is her.”
They settled in to wait for the men watching them to grow impatient and reveal themselves. The snow came in fits and spurts, then finally stopped. Overhead, the clouds began to thin out and pull apart, revealing the weak winter sun lowering towards the mountains to the west.
Just when Lainie was starting to wonder if anyone really was out there, a man’s voice called out from down the street, “We know you’re there, Vendine, Miss Banfrey. We just want to have some peaceful conversation with you.”
Lainie peered over that way as best she could while staying behind the fence. The upper floor of the partly-burned Bootjack Saloon, on the other side of the street, was mostly intact, and the voice seemed to be coming from in there. There were likely other men holed up in the saloon as well, and in the other buildings that were still standing, including the rooming house next to the stable yard. She made a note to keep an eye on the upper-floor windows of the rooming house.
“If it’s peaceful depends on what you want to talk about,” Silas called back to the man who had spoken.
“That wizard woman told us to watch for you. She wants to see you.”
“Fine. We’d like to see her, too. Where is she?”
A soft footstep sounded behind Lainie. She and Silas spun around just as a burly man launched himself at Silas. Silas ducked aside; the man stumbled forward and fell against the fence. Silas wrestled him face down to the ground and pinned him with a knee in the small of his back, then pressed the muzzle of his revolver against the back of the man’s head. Lainie recognized the man as a ranch hand from one of the other ranches in the valley. “Where’s the wizard woman?” Silas demanded. “Out at the Banfrey place?”
“Don’t think I’m gonna tell you anything, you wizarding bastard,” the man said, his voice muffled by the ground. “We’re supposed to keep you here till she gets here an’ make sure you don’t cause no trouble.”
Silas shouted through the fence again, “Did you fellows ask yourselves why would she set a bunch of Plain folk to the job? We know she has other wizards working with her; why didn’t she set them to lie in wait for us? You think maybe it’s because you boys are expendable?”
“Gods-damned wizard!” The hand tried to buck Silas off his back. Silas shoved the man’s shoulders back down and prodded his gun against his head.
“She saved this town from the blueskins!” the man in the Bootjack answered. “Fought them off – killed them all! She’s the only wizard that’s ever done anything for Plain folk.”
“It don’t look to me like she’s done such a fine job of saving the town,” Lainie retorted. “Half burned out, and folks hanged on the gallows.”
“She made rules. Those folks broke them an’ brought the blueskins down on us.”
“You fellows ever stop to think why a wizard like her wants to help Plain folk?” Silas shouted across the street. “Or did you just roll over belly-up and let these outsiders move in and take over?”
In answer, a shot fired out from across the street. The bullet splintered one of the burned boards of the fence, and Silas swore and jerked back. Lainie gasped, then saw blood seeping from a hole in the upper right arm of his duster. At least he wasn’t shot in a bad place. “Damn it,” Silas yelled. “I just bought this coat!”
“Enough talking, Vendine!” the man in the Bootjack shouted. “What in all the hells are you doing over there, Nestor? You were supposed to get him under control!”
“Is Nestor this fellow who tried to sneak up on me?” Silas called back. The ranch hand tried again to throw Silas off. Silas rapped his revolver smartly on the man’s head, and Nestor dropped back to the ground as flat and still as a sack of beans.
“What do we do?” Lainie whispered. “Fight them, or give ourselves up, or just wait?”
“Let me think a bit. Can you bandage this up for me?” He shrugged off his coat and let Lainie examine the bullet wound in the muscle of his upper arm. It was deeper than she had expected. A sudden thought sent a chill into her heart. She checked the bullet with her mage senses, fearing to find that it was made of Sh’kimech ore, but it was just an ordinary bullet.
She started to work a little magic to stop the bleeding, but Silas stopped her. “I’ll be okay. You’d best save everything you’ve got for fighting.”
Lainie had stashed a couple of clean kerchiefs in her coat pocket, having learned long ago that they were good to keep handy when there was going to be trouble. She tied one around Silas’s upper arm. “Does it hurt bad?” she asked.
“Nothing I can’t live with,” Silas answered. “So, here’s how I figure. If we give ourselves up, I’m sure they have orders to make sure we can’t put up much of a fight against the Hidden Council people. If there’s only a few of them, we can defend ourselves easily, but if there’s a dozen or more it’ll be harder and we’ll probably end up killing some of them. I’d rather not have to do that if it isn’t necessary.”
“Me either,” Lainie said. “For their sakes, not that they deserve the consideration, and we also don’t need to give them any more cause to hate wizards.”
“Same thing if we keep fighting or if we make a run for it, try to shoot our way through. I’d like to get out to the ranch and meet Elspetya on our terms instead of hers, but we’d probably have to kill some of them and we’d risk getting hurt or killed ourselves, or at least running low on power and ammunition before we ever see her.”
“Maybe the best thing to do is hole up somewhere and wait for her to come to us.”
“I agree. But we’ll still have to hold these boys off. We’d need a good defensive position.”
“Yeah,” she sighed. “That’s the problem.” Their hiding place right now, in the open stable yard behind the half-ruined fence, was way too exposed.
“I’m getting tired of waiting, Vendine!” the man in the Bootjack shouted.
“You boys know you don’t have a chance against us!” Silas called back.
Lainie caught a glimpse of movement in one of the busted-out windows on the second floor of the rooming house. “Down!” she yelled at Silas.
They hit the dirt and rolled aside just as a shot rang out. A bullet plowed into the ground where Lainie had been sitting.
“Are you going to come out and give yourselves up?” the man in the Bootjack shouted. “We ain’t supposed to kill you if we can help it, just keep you from getting troublesome, but all bets are off if you’re gonna be difficult!”
Lainie felt around again with her mage senses. Still no mages close by, but more Plain people than she had thought at first. A couple dozen, maybe more. She and Silas might be able to handle them, but, like he said, it would take a lot of power and a lot of ammunition, and they’d have nothing left by the time they came face to face with Elspetya Lorentius.
Silas got up into a crouch again, gun in hand. Lainie also sat up, continuing to keep an eye on the boarding house windows. “We’ve got no quarrel with you fellas,” Silas called back. “We just want to see Madam Lorentius. If you’ll stand aside and let us go find her, we won’t have to hurt any of you.”
Faint sounds of voices raised in argument came from inside the Bootjack. After a moment, the spokesman called out to Silas, “We have our orders.”
“You’re crazy, Gus!” a man yelled from the upper floor of the boarding house. “Remember what Vendine did to Gobby when he was tryin’ to hang the girl?”
“The hells with all this,” another man shouted from Minton’s General Mercantile across the street. “I’ve had enough talking!”
A bottle with a light burning at its mouth came flying across the street from the doorway of the mercantile. “Shit!” Silas yelled.
He grabbed Lainie and dove with her away from the fence. A heartbeat later, the bottle smashed into the front of the wooden fence, and the fence burst into flames. Gunshots fired from the roof of the stable behind them, the second floor windows of Mundy’s on one side, and the half-built hotel on the other. Bullets pelted into the dirt around Lainie and Silas and exploded in the flames on the fence. Still flat on the ground, Silas fired left, behind, and right. A man holding a rifle fell from the window of the boarding house, and another one tumbled from the roof of the stable.
As Silas reloaded, Lainie exchanged gunfire with men to either side of them. She hit two more, but still another man appeared on the roof of the stable.
“We gotta get out of here,” she said. “We’re just a sitting target here.”
“We can’t get out the back way,” Silas said. “Let’s head out into the street and try to make it into one of the other buildings.”
“Shielded or attacking?”
“Attacking. Let’s hit them hard right away and take out a few more of them. Guns first, then magic if necessary. And be ready to shield right after we hit them.” They got up, crouching low on their feet. “Now!” Silas ordered.
They ran through a gap in the burning fence into the street, keeping low and moving fast as they fired at the upper windows of the surrounding buildings. Answering fire came from the second story windows of the Bootjack and the Rusty Widow, but as soon as Silas and Lainie’s guns ran empty, Lainie threw a shield and Silas added power to it, and the enemy bullets struck the shield and fell harmlessly to the ground.
While Silas reloaded, Lainie called up a ball of rose-colored power and let the shield down just long enough to throw the attack down the street towards the Bootjack. The ball of power exploded into the saloon’s front window, blowing the wall apart. Men leaped from the windows of the collapsing upper floor and poured out the front door – a dozen or more, Lainie guessed. Plus there were still the ones holed up in the Rusty Widow and Mundy’s, and the other buildings as well. Too many for them to fight.
With the shield back in place, Lainie reloaded her gun while Silas looked up and down the street for a place where they could take shelter. Gunfire continue to pound against the shield, the slowed bullets littering the ground. Lainie didn’t dare let the shield down enough for her and Silas to fight back, but the physical and magical demands of holding the shield against the barrage would wear them down before long if they couldn’t find a safe place to hunker down.
Gus, the leader, stepped out from the doorway of the ruined Bootjack and waved his arms. The gunfire paused. “The wizard woman told us not to kill you if we can help it,” he called out to Lainie and Silas. “Just keep you here and make sure you can’t fight back. Give yourselves up, and no one else will get hurt.”
“It’s that business about ‘can’t fight back’ we don’t much care for,” Silas answered. “We don’t intend on going helpless before her.”
“Can’t say we didn’t give them a chance!” Gus shouted to the other men. As though at a signal, they all opened fire again.
Lainie drew earth-magic from beneath her feet and poured it into the shield to reinforce it, and Silas also fed more amber and blue power into the shield. He jerked his head towards the burnt-out ruins of the cattlemen’s co-op office down the street, on the south side of the crossroads. No one seemed to be hiding in there, and there were no other buildings standing near it except the collapsing Bootjack Saloon, no other places where gunmen could hide. “Let’s run for it,” he said. “Drop the shield when we pass the saloons; I’ll throw something at the Bootjack.”
“I’ll take the Rusty Widow,” Lainie said.
Silas holstered his gun and began drawing power. Lainie felt the flow of power in the earth shift towards him, diverted from her own pull on it to feed the shield. He cupped his hands together and a ball of power began to form, blue and Wildings amber swirled together. There wasn’t any brown or black in it; he wasn’t drawing too deeply. The sphere brightened with concentrated power until it was so blindingly bright that Lainie had to look away as she shaped her own attack.
“Ready?” Silas asked.
She nodded.
“Let’s go.”