Very few townspeople visited the tavern: most were busy at home, feeding hearths, tending livestock, and cooking until the air, despite the windless chill, smelled of woodsmoke and meat and hard, defiant cheer. It frightened Molly—all the desperate ritual and defense only seemed to emphasize the depth of their beleaguerment. Leaves fell lifeless in the sunset red. She watched candles disappear as people locked their shutters. When the sky bruised purple and the tables had been cleared, Nabby and Bess cleaned the kitchen, Tom went to work in the stables, and Molly swept the taproom floor, pausing frequently to marvel at the smoakwood fire. Such little black logs, such consoling orange flames. She hoped that Benjamin and Davey had reached a fire of their own.
The front door opened and the cold rushed in. It was Pitt, his face as scarlet as his customary clothes, which were covered by a coat snugly buttoned to his chin. He’d tied a scarf around his ears, underneath his hat. He came inside and closed the door and walked up to Molly, giving her a look of untold doom.
She had an impulse to hit him with a poker from the hearth. Then he sniffled at the fire and appeared to lose his confidence. She saw in him the boy whose father had been hanged; there was more to him tonight—a neediness or doubt.
“Go get Tom.”
“Sheriff Pitt—”
“Please,” Pitt said.
He tucked his gloves under his arm and held his fingers to the hearth. Molly backed away, hesitant to turn and walk through the kitchen, thinking about the cold dark distance to the barn. But Tom had heard the horse and come directly in. He walked through the kitchen, met them in the taproom, and stood at Molly’s side with an ice-cut scowl.
Pitt spoke first. “Benjamin was maimed.”
Molly slumped against Tom. They propped each other up.
Ichabod entered through the front looking winded, presumably to warn them that the sheriff had returned. Pitt surprised them once again and said, “Ethel’s home safe?”
Ichabod nodded, looked at Tom without a sign, and then retreated outside to care for Pitt’s horse.
“I stepped off the ferry and Ethel Kale was running up the street,” Pitt explained, referring to a girl who lived near the Knoxes. “Abigail sent her up here to bring word. I sent her home with Ichabod, said to keep it quiet.”
Pitt crossed the room and went to the unlocked bar, where he poured himself a gin and drank it down quick. Molly took a chair, changed her mind, and wobbled up again.
“They let him keep his clothes but the bleeding almost killed him,” Pitt said. “They took his right hand. That’s his operating hand.”
Tom joined him at the bar and raised the bottle for a drink, but it slipped from his hand and shattered on the floor. Molly flinched. Pitt didn’t.
“Davey Mun went, too,” Tom said.
“He isn’t back.”
Molly vomited in the corner. What came up was minimal and thin—she hadn’t eaten since the morning—but she felt as if her stomach had been wrenched to her tonsils. Tom explained to Pitt about the man the Maimers had shot and how Benjamin and Davey had ridden back to Shepherd’s Inn.
“Hell and death,” Pitt said and slapped a glove against his thigh. “No one else went along?”
Tom crunched fragments of the bottle with his shoe. Molly smelled the gin, juniper-sweet and toxic, as the pulverized glass ground between the boards.
“They’ve never stayed put after an attack,” Tom said. “It’s why we’ve never caught ’em.”
“They stayed put today,” Pitt said, thinking hard. “Why the sudden change, and at deadfall to boot?”
“To find the man they shot. They didn’t want a doctor riding out to save him. I’d like to know the reason.”
“So would I. Shepherd’s Inn. Couple hours at a gallop.”
“Less,” Tom said. “Davey and his friends saw four of them together. They ran from greater numbers but they didn’t run from two.”
Molly’s gut sank low like the opposite of sickness, leadening her stance and lightening her head. Tom and Pitt scrutinized each other up close, not with animosity, it seemed, but resolution.
“You and me,” Pitt decided.
“Aye,” Tom said. “We can’t have a crowd riding out with guns and lanterns.”
“No,” Molly said, stepping forward in the glass. “It can’t be just the two of you. They’re waiting in the woods.”
Tom ignored her, seeming desperate not to look her in the eye.
“Have another drink before we go,” he said to Pitt, “and stand near the fire. You’ve been riding all day.”
He went to the closet for his rifle. Molly followed him over, rubbing her wrist bones and trying not to picture Benjamin’s hand, Davey bleeding in the dark, or, worst of all, Tom disfigured. What would they remove? she couldn’t help thinking. Which part of him is best? She feared to make a list.
They stood before the closet in the hallway off the taproom, where the colder air had cracked a frozen panel in a window. Night looked in, opening its jaw.
Molly told him not to go.
“They took his hand.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said. “You stayed here for me.”
He moved around her, took his ammunition bag and rifle out, and faced her. “I’ve run bloodier gauntlets. These are cowards wearing masks. They won’t expect two of us alone on such a night.”
She hugged around his arms and squeezed with all her might, hoping to make the bullet in his shoulder hit a nerve—hoping to remind him what he really stood to lose. But Tom was already gone, down the forest road without her, and she let her hands drop and felt the draft between their bodies.
“Stay with Bess,” Tom said. “You’ll have Ichabod and Nabby. Keep the door locked until I’m back.”
Molly nodded.
“Promise me,” he said.
“I promise. Don’t get killed. And don’t get maimed.”
“When this is done, whatever is left of me is yours.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Shepherd’s Inn was a small public house, one of several along the road from Grayport to Root, where travelers could spend the night or stop to rest their horses. Tom was midway there and hadn’t seen a single living creature in the forest. Pitt was out of sight—he had yet to make a sound—and Tom whistled like a man in need of consolation. The song was “Jack o’ March,” a tune he knew from childhood. The melody reminded him of Benjamin’s frequent humming, of the doctor’s failed attempts to learn the violin … of how he’d struggle now to dress himself and work without his hand.
They had visited the Knoxes’ house before riding out and Abigail had met them in a damp, gory smock. She fought for self-control, standing firmly at the door, but her high-strung voice and unbound hair gave her the appearance of a very young girl. An extraordinary girl, one of unfeigned grit, and yet afraid and overwrought and willing to be hugged. Tom held her in the cold but the hug didn’t last. She quickly pushed him off to keep herself from needing it.
“So much blood,” Abigail said. “He’s frostbit and feverish. I’ve sewn and dressed the wound but he’s delirious and pale.”
She paused while her thoughts rushed up and overran her, and they waited at the door—Tom in front, Pitt behind him. The street was dark and empty. She would not invite them in.
“He walked for two hours, bleeding all the way, and might have died except he tied his own tourniquet with vine.”
“Did he tell you how it happened?” Pitt said. “How exactly?”
“There were four of them,” she said. “It wasn’t thievery today. They blocked the way toward the inn. They knew him for a doctor when they opened up his bag and took his hand…” She gulped a sob. “They took his operating hand.”
“Davey Mun?” Tom asked.
“Showed his manhood and fought. They took his manhood to quell him,” Abigail said.
Tom removed his hat and almost tore it with his fists. The cold was like a razor slicing through his breeches.
“He walked
with Benjamin a ways but finally lost his will,” she said. “Benjamin tried to save him, wouldn’t leave him there alone. Then he died and there was no good staying anymore.”
Tom backed up until he was arm to arm with Pitt.
“All to help a stranger,” Abigail said, taller than the two of them below her in the road. “I think of everyone in town Benjamin has healed. Nobody would join him. No one else would go.”
Tom swelled his chest, not defiantly but stoutly, swallowing the blame and holding it within him. Warmth escaped the door at Abigail’s back, candlefruit sweet until the night drove it in. Pitt bowed his head to hide beneath his hat.
“But it was me,” she said to Tom, “that put a wedge between you.” Then to Pitt, “And I’m the reason you were gone instead of here.”
She seemed to shiver deep inside, without a tremor on the surface. She was crystallized, breakable, and dangerously still.
“You’re riding out,” she said to Tom.
He answered with a stare.
“When you find them…,” she began, dispassionately voiced, and let her wish grow apparent, wrathfully severe.
Now he smoked until his tongue burned, remembering her words, and wondered how he’d bring himself to ride back home, to stand before Abigail and Benjamin again, if they didn’t find the Maimers and returned empty-handed. Each passing minute in the cold-clamped quiet made him angrier and lonelier. Knowing Pitt was near offered little comfort, so he smoked his pipe, and whistled again, and tried to blot his thoughts.
Hoarfur settled on his shoulders and his hat. Periodically he brushed it off Bones with his gloves, trying to keep the frost from stiffening his mane. The filaments gave the woods a moldering appearance, like a spiderwebbed crypt far below the earth. Masses of it drifted on the leaf-strewn ground. It draped off branches, delicate and pale, and now and then he parted it directly with his face and it clung, dead cold, to his stubble and his lashes.
Bones walked on, tirelessly patient even with the extra weight draped behind the saddle. They had passed Davey Mun ten miles out of Root, his body sitting up and stiff against a tree. Blood between his legs had frozen in the leaves. He hadn’t looked pained, only tired, only sad. Tom had studied him—the man he knew, able and courageous, whittled to a corpse and frozen like a warning.
No plan goes to plan, Tom caught himself thinking.
He rejected any doubts. It had to work. They couldn’t fail.
He thought of Molly, how her clothes made her seem more petite, how exposing her had somehow made her more substantial. He could smell her even now, in spite of the pipe and cold, from when she’d hugged him in the stairwell and begged him not to go. The fire in the taproom, hot-brewed smoak—he would have it all again. He would find a way to keep it.
Bones shook his mane, lowered his head, and slowed, swishing out his tail and halting unbidden.
Tom’s boots strained the stirrups and he sat there, firm. The road was straight and narrow, covered by the interwoven wreathwood trees, and the longest wisps of hoarfur dangling from the branches didn’t drift, didn’t ripple when the Maimers first appeared.
There were two of them ahead, blocking Tom’s way. Their horses crunched softly on the leaves as they emerged, but otherwise the silence was remarkably intact, enough to give credence to their phantom reputation.
“Evening,” Tom said.
The Maimers kept their distance. It was too dark to see if either wore a mask.
“Hard night to ride,” the first Maimer said, sounding like his jaw had frozen at the hinges. “What’s your name and business?”
Tom puffed his pipe until it glowed: Stay alive.
“My name is Tom Orange. I’m a tavern keep in Root.”
“A shit hole,” the Maimer answered, maybe about the tavern, maybe about the town. “What are you doing here?”
“I thought William Shepherd might need a hand,” Tom said. “We had news of an attack—a traveler shot and dying, taken to the inn.”
The second Maimer walked up closer on his horse, leaning forward with a slow, leathery creaking from his saddle. Bones held his ground, stamped twice, and flicked his ears.
The first Maimer asked, “What are you hiding there behind you, underneath the blanket?”
“A body from the road.”
“What is he to you?”
“A fellow man,” Tom said. “It seemed a sin to leave him.”
“How far did he get?”
“Say again?”
“Where did you find him?”
Tom drew upon the pipe and said, “Two leagues back.”
“Long way with such a wound,” the first Maimer said. “I applaud the man’s will. ’Twas his heart worth taking. And the doctor?”
“How’s that,” Tom said, low and taut.
“I wager he survived and told you we was here. It’s you I can’t figure, coming out alone.” He stepped his horse forward, next to his companion. He was angular and bearded, masked around the eyes, with the hoarfur grizzly in the whiskers on his chin. “Not a posse full gallop, but a tavern keep whistling. Don’t seem right, one against four.”
Tom sensed another two riders move behind him, coming from the trees and quiet as the others. He had passed them in the dark—even Bones hadn’t noticed—and despite having known they would block him fore and aft, it didn’t make the trap any more appealing.
The Maimer with the beard nonchalantly showed a pistol. Tom dropped the reins and put his arms overhead. “I haven’t come for trouble.”
“Didn’t expect us here tonight? Hope to fool us?” said the Maimer.
“No. Like I said, I’m riding to the inn.”
“That wouldn’t be an armed companion under the blanket now, would it?”
Tom’s hands seemed to freeze. Hoarfur gathered on his knuckles and his pipe, the latter still warm but slowly dying out. His gun was in his coat. All he needed was a second.
“I told you,” Tom said. “I found a body in the road.”
“And picked it up and took it with you, like a good Lumenous neighbor. Pull the blanket off.”
“My hands are in the air.”
“Do it now.”
“Not until you put away your gun,” Tom said.
“I’ll have your arms for that,” the second Maimer said. He pulled a knife. It was long and made a whisper-chime coming from its sheath, so sharp that even Nabby would have grudgingly respected it.
The bearded Maimer spoke to one of the rearward riders. “Get down and check the body.”
Here it is, Tom thought. They were coming to it now, predictably and plainly, and he didn’t breathe once in the inevitable pause. A rider behind him cocked a gun and thumped off his horse. Tom faced ahead and listened to him walk: seven crisp steps in the ice-chip leaves.
“Get up,” the rider said, right at Bones’s tail and speaking to the body underneath the blanket.
No one spoke or moved.
The rider pulled the blanket off. Tom shut his eyes. There was silence for a moment when the rider stepped close, leaned forward, and declared, “This ain’t a body. It’s a scarecrow.”
Tom dropped the pipe over his back, behind the saddle. It landed where he hoped, near the rider’s puzzled face, on the scarecrow loaded up with smoak dust and gunpowder.
Even with his eyes closed, Tom saw the flash. It wasn’t an explosion but a huge, blooming flare, and the white-gold flames lit the forest like a sun. The Maimer at his back screamed and fell away. Heat billowed through the cold, singeing Tom’s ponytail and blowing off his hat. Bones reared and whinnied, frightened by the fire.
Tom spread his eyelids wide enough to see, drew the pistol from his coat, and shot the bearded Maimer.
Pitt was in the woods, having followed on foot. He shot the Maimer holding the knife, who was blinded from the glare: an illuminated target for a rifle in the dark. Tom trampled over the Maimer who’d been standing near the scarecrow, and Bones began to panic from the noises underfoot. The man rolled and groa
ned. Hooves cracked his ribs. A stamp broke his skull like a pumpkin in a bag.
The final Maimer, still ahorse, recovered his sight and fled. Tom spurred Bones and drew a second pistol. The powder in the scarecrow had mostly burned away but now the clothes were on fire, heating up the padding that protected Bones’s croup. Tom’s coat was burning, too, and flapped behind him as he rode. He felt the fire through his shirt, rippling to his shoulders while his face pressed forward in the pinprick cold.
Bones raced frantically to outrun the flames; if he wasn’t yet burned, he would be soon. Tom couldn’t shed his coat without hazarding a fall and wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t hesitate for anything at all. Bones’s panic had its use—they were catching up fast. The Maimer looked back and teetered on his mount, seemingly astonished by the fiery horse behind him. Tom cocked his gun, aimed hard, and took the shot. The flint didn’t spark. He tried again. It wouldn’t shoot.
The Maimer beat his horse but couldn’t pull ahead. Tom was at his flank, feeling fire at his neck. He flipped the pistol, held the barrel, steadied himself, and threw. The cherrywood stock hit the Maimer in the back, high between the shoulder blades, and knocked him off the horse.
Tom fought to halt Bones and rapidly dismounted. He singed his leather gloves pulling off his coat and quickly cut the mess of fiery padding from the saddle. The Maimer on the ground scrambled up and rushed forward. He was addled, he was wild. Tom drew his knife and caught him in a hug. The blade plunged deep into the man’s soft belly and his eyes stayed open, full of wonder, through the mask. There was a dimple in his chin. His breath smelled of licorice. The blood on Tom’s glove was comfortingly warm and the man didn’t struggle, only sighed and hugged back. Tom shoved the knife until it almost poked through, not sadistically but firmly, with respect for what was happening.
The Maimer slumped dead and Tom held him up. He laid him over the saddle of the man’s own horse, no small job with a body that limp. Tom and Bones had lost some hair and suffered minor burns, but they were mostly unharmed; they stood together, cheek to cheek, jittery and steaming in the bleak, smoky road. Once Bones began to calm, Tom remounted him and gathered up both sets of reins, and then he rode back to Pitt. There were things left to finish.
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