by Sean Platt
“Mai?” said Clint.
“ ‘Mai?’ ” she said, mimicking the gunslinger’s dry voice.
“Do you know who I am?”
“Nar. Because you never open up and talk about yourself. It’s infuriating.”
Clint looked the smiling woman over from head to toe. She wore no shoes, yet had sprinted up hills to summit a peak, losing both a marshal and a unicorn in bare feet. Her nightclothes, intended for a convalescent, were loose and full of frills. She would need a fighter’s outfit to replace them. The woman before Clint and Edward was no convalescent. Her expression was bright, her bearing strong. Her hair was smooth and dark and shiny. Like Edward, she seemed to repel dirt and sweat and grime, and looked as if she might forever appear radiant and clean.
“Are you mocking me?” Clint asked.
“Yar.”
“Then you do know me?”
“Clint Gulliver. Proud marshal to The Realm. Gunslinger. Exiled. About to hitch a woman — that’s me! — named Mai Man…” She stopped in the middle of her last name, thinking. “Did we hitch? We didn’t, did we?”
Clint couldn’t help himself. Instead of answering her, he crossed the room and wrapped his arms around her in a stunning display of unmanliness and weakness, entirely unbecoming of a gunslinger. The pistols on his belt clapped into her sides, useless and soft and beneath mention.
When Clint released her and pulled back, Mai looked at him, shocked. “You’ve changed,” she said.
“I’ve changed?”
“I can feel it in you. In your energy. You’ve always been polluted by sorrow, but this — this I feel in you now — is so much worse.” She sniffed the air as if overwhelmed by fresh sensations. “Oh, I can feel it wafting from you, Clint. So much scratching at your soul. So much…” Her eyes went moist, and a tear spilled over her lower lids and trickled onto her cheek. “It’s almost too much to bear. How long has it been since Solace? Since our hitching day?”
“More than four and a half years,” he said. Then he glanced at Edward, silently asking how any of this was possible. Mai wasn’t supposed to remember. Her soul was supposed to be in a vessel packed low in Dharma Kold’s saddlebags. But Edward only shook his head. His expression was just as shocked as the gunslinger’s.
“Four and a half years!”
“You don’t remember any of it?”
“Nar a bit!”
“You don’t remember Dharma Kold?”
Her expression darkened. “I remember Kold just fine, but not the interim. Where have I been?”
“With Kold. With his dark unicorn, Cerberus.” He couldn’t bring himself to tell Mai what Cerberus had been doing to her over the course of that time, though. Not yet. It was too soon.
“And you…?” she said.
“We followed.”
Her tears began to fall more freely, but she didn’t seem weakened by them. If anything, she seemed overwhelmed. In a few moments, Mai had gone from nothing to everything, from unknowing to full of dreadful awareness. Delight, sorrow, relief, and euphoria all rushed across her radiant face. She hugged the gunslinger. She stalked the room. She gave Edward knowing looks that spoke volumes, promising plots and plans and more, once the time was right. And Clint, seasoned fighter and walker, discovered that in the shoes of those she wanted to plot and plan against, even he would be terrified to face Mai as she was now.
“Something has changed in you,” he said. “Was it the magic?”
“She’s always been magic,” Edward reminded him.
“Not like this.” said Clint, shaking his head. “This is new. Something’s been added.”
“Not added,” said Edward. “Awoken.”
“Awoken?” Mai sounded angry. Her personality had been completely repressed for nearly half a decade, and now it was all spilling out at once. In time, hopefully, it would equalize, but for now it was like a busted faucet. “Awoken? I’ve never been like this. I’ve never felt like this.”
“Mai,” said Edward, “what Kold wanted from you… it was very powerful. Something you didn’t know you had, called…”
“I’ve never been like this!” she shouted. “What have I awoken from, Clint? What is this feeling inside of me, Edward the Brave?”
Clint flinched, hearing her speak that name and knowing she’d never heard it from him. He himself had never heard of Edward being “Edward the Brave” before Stone had said it outside of Nazareth Shiloh, and he still didn’t know what it meant.
Clint put his hands on her shoulders. “You’ve just woken,” he said. “Sit down.”
“Sit down? I haven’t just woken from sleep. I’ve woken to find I’m something different than I was! What do I feel inside of me? Can you tell me that? And what, pray tell, is this?”
Mai held out her hand and, as she’d done earlier, called Clint’s coin to her palm. She caught it and glared at him. “And what is this?” She held out her other hand. An alloy cup left the dresser and shot into her hand. The cup wasn’t empty; its contents sloshed onto the sheets of the bed in which, forever ago, Mai had slept. “I’ve lost four years, and I wake up to this? I don’t want it, Clint!”
She huffed, anger wafting from her body. The cup flew back where it had come, forcefully, shattering a clay vase. The coin shot away and blew a hole through the casito’s brick. At that, all three of them stopped, Mai now looking as shocked as the others. Clint walked over and put his eye to the hole. The coin had gone all the way through.
“Well,” he said. “That could come in handy.”
Mai’s temper seemed to diminish after that, and Clint and Edward were able to dress her in some appropriate clothes from the closet. Duly clothed, she sat back down on the bed and slowly returned to her old joking, upbeat temperament, having purged a sort of emotional plug. Once she was settled, they started to palaver. She told them she’d heard their last discussion as she’d lain in the bed, as well as much of what had been said above her while the magic water was doing its work. She understood roughly where they were, the present threat, and the decision at hand. And Mai, fresh from her sick bed, found dying as a fractional husk of a human not terribly long before, wanted to fight with them.
“Nar,” said Clint, pacing the room. “You cannot fight.”
“I want to fight, because it’s a fight that must be fought.”
Clint shook his head. “We’ve all but decided to leave.”
“That was before I woke up,” Mai said.
Clint repeated: “You’re not going to fight.”
“You don’t understand,” said Edward. “We can’t win.”
Mai seemed meditative. “I once knew a man before Solace,” she finally said. “He was bound by an immobile body, but his will could move mountains — not literally, but by persuading others. He once told me something about unwinnable fights. He said, ‘If you can’t win the game, change the rules.’ ”
“What are you saying?” said Edward.
“I’m saying that you should stop being so noble for once. If you can’t win by being fair, then stop worrying about being fair. Fight dirty. Cheat.”
“I won’t fight dirty,” said Clint, skulking around the room, his hands itchy and his fingers twitching.
“ ‘I won’t fight dirty,’ ” said Mai, again mocking the gunslinger. Then, in her own voice, she said, “Then you will lose. This is a righteous fight. It’s better to win a righteous fight by cheating than to lose it by fighting fair. And besides, I plan to cheat. So your side will be sullied by my actions anyway.”
“You are not fighting!” Clint blurted.
“Why?”
“Because you’re a woman!”
Mai lowered her brow. It had been nearly half a decade since Clint had last seen that look, but he recognized it all the same. It meant that he’d said exactly the wrong thing, and that he was about to pay for it.
Her hands came up. Both of Clint’s pistols left their holsters, flew through the air, and landed in her palms, the barrels leveled at the gunsli
nger’s chest.
“Oh, come on, let me play,” she said, putting a pout on her lips. “I’m the fastest draw across the Realm and Sands.”
CHAPTER NINE:
THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN
There was no more arguing with Mai. She stepped up, took her place as the seventh member of the posse, and — much to Clint’s consternation — took a large if not dominant role in the planning of their attack on El Feo.
The gunslinger’s doubts were many. In his mind, men were fighters and women were not. He didn’t want Mai at risk so soon after finally returning to him. He didn’t want to attack El Feo; Edward had convinced him moments before Mai awoke that there was no way to win. He didn’t believe the villagers were ready. And perhaps most of all, he didn’t want to cheat.
But Mai, in the way that only Mai could, good-naturedly made fun of the gunslinger’s sense of honor and duty until the idea of cheating became almost tolerable. How honorable was El Feo? she asked him. How kind and fair had he been to Baracho Gulch over the years? The bandit had taken nearly all they grew, none of which he had any right to. He marched in with guns while the villagers had nothing but machetes. He rode with a gross of men at his back — all wearing masks intended to frighten the men, women, and children into submission. Insisting on fighting an unfair man in a fair way was beyond absurd, she said. It was like playing a game of oblong with animals, adhering to rules that the animals were incapable of understanding.
Once Clint was convinced, the rest of the posse fell in line. Edward, who had always been a jerk, took to the spirit of Mai’s plan immediately. Stone, outlaw from the start, had zero qualms. Buckaroo would believe whatever he was told to believe, and Pompi was too slow to do much other than what the majority of his friends wanted. Rigo was infatuated with Mai and would have lit himself on fire had she told him to.
So they renewed training the villagers of Baracho Gulch, determined to win the coming fight by any means necessary. Stone made more bows and taught the villagers (both men and women; Mai insisted) how to use them. Edward carved clubs and slingshots using his magic and showed the people how to wield them in unfair, dirty-fighting ways — clubbing knees, groins, and backs when they were turned. They sharpened machetes. They made knives. They rigged nets and tripwires. They hid the supplies they had to keep, then buried their treasures. They sent those unable to fight into the hills, where Edward had hollowed them a sturdy cave for refuge and decked it with camouflage.
Rigo taught the villagers his fighting skills. It wasn’t possible for them to learn everything in the time they had, but he taught them punches and kicks, focusing on basics and not stretching the fighters beyond their new potentials.
“I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand kicks once,” Rigo explained to his students as they repeated the same set of actions on bags of flour over and over and over again in an endless loop. “I fear the man who has practiced one kick ten thousand times.”
Rigo himself focused on impossible striking routines, fighting anything that anyone could literally throw at him. He wanted to see if he could evade bullets — this time not literally, but by using his skills to approach a fighter by stealth. Clint refused to indulge him, declaring that he didn’t fire his weapons to miss.
Rigo’s students complained that they couldn’t do what he did. Rigo said they didn’t have to. They had to repeat the same actions over and over until they became automatic.
“Take things as they are. Punch when you must punch. Kick when you must kick,” Rigo said. “Less effort makes you faster.”
Mai worked on perfecting her own new skills — levitating, drawing, and propelling metals — which she was unable to explain and which Edward could only guess about. Rigo, still smarting from Clint’s refusal to shoot at him for practice, asked if she thought she could catch bullets. She told him that she she seemed to only be able to use metals that were attracted to magnets, and lead bullets were not. Rigo seemed disappointed. Bullets, he said, shouldn’t be so final.
Once the pueblo’s harvest was finished, the villagers found themselves as prepared as they were going to get. Still Clint was reluctant.
“Don’t ring the bell,” he said. “We may have scared him off, now that he knows this village will fight. There are other villages. San Sebastian. Salazar Valley. Other places for El Feo to pillage instead of Baracho Gulch.”
“And if you are wrong?” said Maria, Rigo’s grandmother. “If we do not ring the bell and he comes anyway… mayhap after you have left us?”
“She’s right,” said Edward. “We can’t stay here anymore, sitting back and allowing Kold to grow stronger across the river. If this is Kold’s doing, we must try to end it, then move on. If they ring the bell, at least he’ll show now, while we’re still here.”
“But they’ll be expecting a trap,” Clint said. “It’s nar a mystery that we’re here.”
“Yar,” said Maria. “They will expect a trap. And they will expect right.”
CHAPTER TEN:
C FOR CONCEDE
They rang the bell, then rang it again.
Nobody came.
The gunslinger was checking over his shoulder six times an hour when Rigo came running down the main street with a holler. Clint ran to the boy, but Rigo pushed at him, saying he needed the other señor, the other. At first Clint didn’t understand; Rigo was flustered and couldn’t catch his breath. Then he found his words and shouted, “EDUARDO!” Clint understood, and ran with him to the unicorn’s quarters under a large overhang outside the saloon.
Edward was lying down, taking a siesta, when the gunslinger and boy burst inside. At first the unicorn was annoyed, rolling up and making no effort to keep from kicking at them as he did. Rigo took a hoof in the chest and Clint took one to the chin, and then Edward was up and mumbling. Rigo cut him off, shouting about his sister, Paloma. At this, Pompi Bobo stormed in through the opposite overhang, as he was also too large for indoor quarters. Rigo cast him an eye, left over from his earlier animosity about the giant dating his sister, then seemed to remember his priorities and turned back to the unicorn, explaining.
“She’s hurt, señor! In the hills! It was El Feo. They made me tell you! We were walking in the east field, gathering loose corn stalks into bundles, and the masked men surrounded us. I did what I could, but they had guns, and after I’d struck three or four of them down, one simply leveled his gun at Paloma and shot her in the side. Then he leveled his gun at me and asked if I understood and would behave. I am not afraid, amigos; I am ready for NextWorld if Providence wills it true that I go, but for Paloma, I was afraid. So I let myself be tied and they took us into the hills, far, far up, and on the ride I started to see — thank Providence — that her gunshot was merely a flesh wound and that she would survive if patched. Still, she was losing a lot of blood and looked pale by the time we arrived. When we reached the ravine — it is way up; I can show you where — they cut our ropes and let us go. Paloma collapsed. I went to her, and she was weak. Then the men on the horses, with the masks, they said, ‘The unicorn can cure her. If you hurry.’ Then they rode off. I ran as fast as I could, but the ravine is at least fifteen minutes away and she may not last long. You have to come with me!”
Rigo started to climb onto Edward’s back, ready to ride the unicorn to the ravine, but Clint put a hand on his shoulder and pulled him down. He was just a kid, and didn’t realize the offense of what he’d done.
Listening, Pompi thrashed, beating his massive hands on the ground. Clint held out a hand, needing to think.
Edward looked at Clint. “They want me out of the picture,” he said.
“Yar.”
Rigo looked from Clint to Edward with panicked eyes. He tugged on the unicorn’s mane, urging him forward, muttering.
“I must go,” Edward said. “It’s what El Feo wants, but I have no choice. I must go anyway.”
“Señor! We must hurry!”
Stone had seen Rigo running. He stepped in as Edward was speaking, look
ed from one to the other, then asked what was going on.
“Paloma is hurt,” Edward said. “I can heal her, but I must fold to reach her in time. I can be back within seconds, but when I do, I will be useless.”
Stone said, “It’s a trap.”
“Of course it is. The minute I leave, that’s when El Feo and his men will attack. They think they can take the rest of you, but I, like all unicorns, am too powerful for them. So they are pulling me from the equation.”
“Don’t go,” Stone said. “Send someone else.”
“She may already be dead,” said Edward. “It must be me. Nobody else can make it in time. Nobody else can heal her instantly on arrival.”
“Then let her die. She is one person.” It was what Clint was preparing to say — just numbers, nothing personal — but Stone had beaten him to it.
“You can hold the town until I return.”
“She is one person,” Stone repeated.
“And you,” Edward snapped, “do not understand the nature of magic where it comes to sacrifice… although you, of all people, should.” He gave Stone a look that seemed to imply more than was being spoken, but Clint didn’t understand it and didn’t bother to try.
Behind the unicorn, Pompi continued to rage, now crushing boxes of clay pots and screaming. Rigo was still tugging at Edward, not hearing anything beyond She may already be dead. Clint and Stone were stoic, attempting to calculate the scenario before it unfolded.
“Go, then,” said Clint. “We will hold them off.”
“You understand that I cannot fold back? If I do, they’ll shoot me where I collapse, and I may nar be able to heal. I will need to fold to the ravine, then return on foot. That will give me time to recover. but in the meantime, you will be exposed. Are your irons ready?”
Clint nodded. “Yar.”