by Kyra Halland
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 s
hootout. 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.
Chapter 17
SILAS HAD SPENT the last few days holed up in his room. His only contact with the outside world had been when he had gone down to the boarding house’s bath house for a bath and a shave, sent his clothes and coat out to be cleaned, and ordered food sent up to his room. Whatever hostility the Mundys and their employees might have felt towards him for being a wizard gave way before the money he was spending. The rest of the time, he had slept, and thought about what to do with Lainie, and re-read the creased, ragged pamphlet he had kept with him for nearly twenty years.
Dozens of copies of On the Natural Equality of Man, by the foreign philosopher Pirs Abenar, had been smuggled into his school when he was fourteen or fifteen. The boy who had brought them in had been caught and Stripped, but the authorities had failed to confiscate all the copies. The pamphlet had put things Silas had secretly thought and felt for several years into firm, clear words and principles and had helped him decide what the purpose of his life would be. Even after all these years, it still served to remind him of what he was doing and why.
But it didn’t tell him what to do about Lainie.
A letter of credit good for twenty-five gildings – less than a tenth of what he’d been hoping for – had arrived in his Mage Council message box this morning, along with a note saying that while the Council certainly appreciated his efforts, Carden didn’t appear to have posed a serious threat to their authority. Like their authority was the only thing that mattered, Silas had thought bitterly, and not the danger Carden had posed to the people of the Wildings. He did have to wonder what part of planned to use the power of the ore to take over the Wildings and raise an army they had been unable to understand. The only explanation he could think of was that the mysterious “A” had considerable influence with the Mage Council. A mess in the Mage Council’s own house was something he did not want to get mixed up in, so there was nothing else to be done about it but move on to the next bounty and wait to see if the Hidden Council had anything to say on the subject.
Lying on his bed, trying to decide what to do next, he had drifted into a light doze when a commotion down in the street startled him awake. Another argument? With Carden gone, the mining trouble should have ended. Or had the people of Bitterbush Springs found something else to fight about? The sound of a woman’s cries rising above all the shouting caught his ear. He knew that voice…
In a shot, he was at the window. Up the street past Minton’s store, a mob of two dozen or more men and a handful of women was headed for the north end of town. The gallows stood some fifty measures beyond the edge of town, stark and empty against the grasslands and hills. The mob was being led by a big-bellied, bushy-bearded man carrying a long, coiled-up rope, and, screaming and kicking and thrashing in the middle of the crowd –
“Shit!” Silas jammed his feet into his boots, slammed his hat onto his head, and grabbed his gunbelt, buckling it on and making sure his revolver was fully loaded as he flew down the stairs and out the door. His mage ring was already in place on his hand; ever since that night at the Rusty Widow there had been no point in hiding it. He ran up the street after the hanging mob. “Lainie!”
Three men turned, drawing their guns. Silas shot the first one before he could fire. A bullet whizzed past his head and another grazed his right shirtsleeve. He fired again and again, and those two men fell.
Four more turned back to take their place. Silas threw a shield as shots rang out. The bullets, slowed by the barrier, dropped harmlessly to the ground. Still shielded, Silas ducked into a narrow space between the leather goods store and Minton’s and reloaded his gun. The four men ran towards his hiding place; using the corner of the building as cover, he took down all four of them in four shots, at the cost of a scratch to his left arm. Then he ducked back and reloaded again.
As he stepped out from between the buildings, a shot from the mob barely missed him. He ducked back into his hiding place and fired. At the same instant, a second shot from down the street hit someone else at the edge of the crowd. Mooden, the big, nervous miner, came running heavily up the street, firing a small revolver that Silas thought might be Lainie’s. Silas ran out from his hiding place, also shooting as more men returned fire. “Thanks!” he shouted to Mooden as the two of them raced towards the mob.
By the time the hanging mob reached the gallows, Silas and Mooden, who was a surprisingly good shot, had eliminated a good number of the remaining men. At the gallows, three men held Lainie, who was still struggling and crying, in place under the crossarm. Gobby tossed the rope over the crossarm and lowered the noose over Lainie’s head.
Terror like Silas had never felt before surged inside him, along with a newfound clarity – a world without Lainie Banfrey in it wasn’t a world he wanted to live in. An idea that had teased at his mind, illegal, impossible, became certainty. “Lainie!” he roared. As the miner and two other men started pulling on the rope to string Lainie up, he fed magic and intent into his gun, aimed, and fired.
A beam of blue shot out from his gun and cut through the rope. The loose ends dropped down among the crowd. Gobby glanced over at Silas, then grabbed Lainie in a chokehold and held his gun to her head.
Silas was out of bullets with no chance to reload, so he kept the magic flowing into his gun, making it glow bright blue. More men in the crowd drew, but hesitated at the sight of the glowing gun. Of course the sheriff was nowhere in sight; there was nothing in the few written and many unwritten laws of the Wildings that made it a crime to hang a wizard. At least the sheriff wasn’t actually part of the hanging mob.
Silas came to a stop in front of the crowd and aimed into the middle of it. “Out of the way,” he ordered.
The folks in the mob shuffled uncertainly. Silas cocked the gun and let the glow of his power intensify. At that, the crowd scattered, except for Gobby. Mooden, who had lagged behind Silas, now stopped beside him, aiming Lainie’s revolver at Gobby, even though Silas was sure it was empty by now.
“Mooden, you idiot, you’re on our side!” Gobby shouted.
Mooden swallowed, but he didn’t lower his gun. “I don’t hold with hanging a woman, wizard or no. An’ you know Carden was crazy, an’ that ore he was having us dig up was bad stuff.”
Silas kept his gun aimed steadily at Gobby as well. “Let her go, Gobby, and then no one else has to get hurt.”
Gobby cocked his own gun. Lainie was shaking, her face flushed and wet with tears, but she looked at least as mad as scared. “I was gonna be rich,” Gobby snarled, “and you an’ this birdie ruined everything. You make one move, I’ll blow her head off. Hanging, shooting, don’t matter, long as gods-damned wizards are dead!”
Silas didn’t waver. “Let. Her. Go.”
Gobby laughed.
Silas saw an opening for the attack he was going to use. He formed the spell with his mind and power and sent it into his gun, but if he attacked now, he risked startling Gobby into pulling the trigger and shooting
Lainie. He lowered his gun, though he kept it at the ready. “If it’s money you want, I got a bounty from the Mage Council in Granadaia for killing Carden.”
Greed lit up Gobby’s face. Distracted by the mention of money, he let his aim slip just enough…
Silas fired.
A blue beam pierced Gobby’s foot. “Hey!” he shouted, jerking back as the bolt entered his body. His gun fired; the bullet hit the crossbeam of the gallows. He dropped to the ground, writhing in pain. Freed from his grip, Lainie stumbled over to Silas. He caught her with his right arm and pulled her against his chest, his arm circled tightly around her. She clung to him, sobbing.
On the ground, Gobby’s body, unable to contain the large amount of magical power that had been fired into it, began to glow blue. Cracks appeared in his flesh, revealing streaks of brilliant light underneath. Pain and terror showed in his eyes.
“Twenty-five gods-damned gildings,” Silas said to him. “That’s what I got for Carden.”
Gobby’s body dissolved into a blinding flash of bluish-white light. When it cleared, nothing remained of him but a smear of gray dust on the ground.
Gasps and shouts of horror came from the members of the mob who still lingered near the gallows. Silas trained his gun on each of them in turn. “There’ll be no more hanging wizards in this town. And you won’t take your hatred of wizards out on Banfrey, or on Mooden here, either. Carden was your real enemy.”
They stood as though frozen. Silas holstered his gun, then loosened the noose and lifted it over Lainie’s head. Raw, red marks showed on the delicate skin of her throat and under her jaw; he wanted to kiss them, to soothe and comfort her. Instead, he settled for lightly touching the rope burns, sending a bit of a healing spell into them to ease the sting. “Let’s go,” he said to her and Mooden.
The three of them turned to walk back into town. No one disturbed them or tried to stop them as they went.