by Kyra Halland
“Miss Lainie, then. You’ve been a great help to me. Now, one more thing – I want you to promise me that you’ll be very, very careful to not use your power until I’ve determined whether or not there is a renegade in the area and dealt with him. He’ll most likely know if you use magic, and I don’t want you getting in a tangle with someone as powerful and dangerous as most rogue mages are. Can you promise me that?”
“Yes, sir. I promise.” He really did seem concerned about her. It was odd that mages could be just as bad as Pa said, and also as good as Mr. Vendine appeared to be. Like with Plain folks, she supposed; it just depended on each person and their choices, if they were good or bad.
“Good.” He tipped his hat to her. “I wish you a good day, Miss Lainie.” He mounted up on his big gray and rode away back towards town, while Lainie stood watching him and hoping he really was what he seemed to be.
Chapter 4
AS LAINIE WASHED the dishes after supper that evening, her mind went back to her conversation with Mr. Vendine. To know it was possible for a wizard – a mage – to be a regular person just like Plain folk, with a heart and a soul and the ability to chose whether to do right or wrong, was a great surprise and relief to her. She wished she could talk to her Pa about this; maybe it would help him feel better about her power. But he was so hard to talk to lately. He wouldn’t listen to her, and even if he did, he wouldn’t believe her, and she didn’t want to get him all riled up on the subject of wizards again.
Besides, talking to him about it would mean telling him that Mr. Vendine was a wizard – and that she had gone riding with him. Her Pa would probably blow right through the roof. Even aside from the wizard business, he would still kick up a fuss if he knew she had been out alone with a man he didn’t know. She was nineteen, of age to be married, and with Blake dead, she would inherit the ranch. No man worth marrying would settle for living on his wife’s property, dependent on his wife’s support, so custom demanded she deed or sell a portion of the ranch to whoever she married. Which meant that her Pa was picky, to the point of being a little crazy on the subject, about who she married.
Some of the ranch hands were good-looking and fun to be around, but marrying one of her Pa’s own ranch hands would raise that man above the other hands and lead to bad feelings, which would only hurt the ranch. Several of the other ranchers in the valley had marriageable sons who were nice and not bad-looking and would make good husbands. But marrying one of them would mean putting part of the ranch in his name, and in the event of death or divorce, depending on the circumstances, that portion could be absorbed into the man’s family’s holdings instead of coming back to the Banfrey line.
Then there was the son of Mr. Minton, the store owner, and the son of Mr. Unrad, the banker. Lainie had attended the full six years at the Bitterbush Springs Town School and stood to inherit a good-sized ranch that made pretty decent money every year, which made her a respectable match for them. But neither of them knew the first thing about running a ranch, so her father had no desire to turn over part-ownership of his ranch to one of them. And anyway, Lainie didn’t think she would make a good banker’s wife or storekeeper’s wife, and they both struck her as being a little too used to having life a little too easy.
So her Pa had decided that the best husband for Lainie would be his foreman Dobay, who had worked for him for over twenty years. Burrett believed that his ranch would be in good hands with Dobay, and Dobay had no other family for his part of the ranch to go to. As far as Lainie knew, Pa and Mr. Dobay hadn’t discussed the matter yet, but her Pa made his disapproval very clear whenever he thought she might be setting her eye on anyone or that someone might start courting her.
Of course, being of age, Lainie could marry whoever she wanted. But she loved and honored her Pa, as commanded by the gods and the inclinations of her own heart, and she had no wish to marry without his approval. At the same time, she didn’t want whoever she married to have to live with her Pa’s dislike and disapproval.
Lainie finished scrubbing and rinsing the first dishpan-full of plates and put them on the sideboard to dry. All the years she’d been doing this, as people at the table came and went, the number of dishes to be washed only seemed to grow. Even with a few of the hands away right now on the yearly cattle drive, there seemed to be just as many dishes to wash as ever. She sighed, looking at the piles of plates and spoons and pans still waiting.
Rat, the fat orange-striped tom with the chewed-off ear – a reminder of the rat that had given him his name, his first catch when he was a kitten – appeared in the kitchen and began rubbing against her legs, purring loudly. He knew that when the dishes were done she would go out to milk Pepper and Polly, the ranch’s two milk cows, and that the barn cats’ evening plates of milk would soon follow. Lainie reached down and scratched his head, then loaded more dishes into the dishpan.
She didn’t have to marry at all. She knew all the workings of the ranch inside and out, and had been pulling her fair weight of the work almost since she could walk. She didn’t need a man to help her manage. But if she never married, the Banfrey line would come to an end and the ranch would be taken over by another family anyway.
Besides, she wanted a family of her own. She wanted to love and be loved. She didn’t want to grow old alone.
She could do worse than Mr. Dobay. He was a good man, honest, a hard worker, and he didn’t get drunk or avail himself of the favors of the house ladies at the Bootjack very often. He had known her all her life and had always been kind to her. But he was old enough to be her father himself. He was like an uncle to her, not a sweetheart. And he disliked and distrusted mages as much as anyone. She didn’t like to think what his reaction would be when he found out about her power, and chances were that he would, sooner or later. She couldn’t imagine keeping a secret like that from her husband for the rest of her life. Even if he didn’t turn her over to be hanged, he could still divorce her and keep his portion of the ranch. Women weren’t so rare in the Wildings that a decent man would have to settle for having a wizard as a wife.
It would be the same thing with any Plain man she married, though. Maybe, if she saw Mr. Vendine again, she could ask him if there was a way she could bury her power so deep inside of her she would never be able to use it again.
Her face warmed up at the thought of Mr. Vendine. Now there was a man she wouldn’t mind spending more time with. He was handsome, and kind, and interesting to talk to, and though he was older than her at least he wasn’t old enough to be her father. She liked the way his arms had felt around her as he comforted her after she had taken fright. Strong and warm and gentle; somehow, though he had an air of danger about him, though he was a wizard, she had known that she was safe in those arms.
Stop it, she scolded herself. She was being a silly calf-brain. She barely knew the man; she had no business thinking of him this way. He would be in town long enough to catch his renegade wizard, and then he would leave. A man like him would have no interest in staying put on the ranch. Besides, for all she knew he already had a wife.
She sighed, and looked down at the dishes that had sat, forgotten, in the dishpan while her mind went wandering. Resolving to keep her mind on things that were real, she started scrubbing the next pan. Blake should have lived, and should have been getting married soon to Mari, and then it wouldn’t matter so much what Lainie did. But things were the way they were, and nothing could change that. So she would be a good daughter and do what her Pa wanted, and marry Dobay so that the ranch would stay in the family and be in good hands, and she would hide her power and never use it again, and the rest of her life would go on the way it was now.
Except there would be children; that was the bright spot. Even though she had grown up among men, wearing men’s clothes and doing men’s work – she could ride herd as well as any man, and everyone knew it – and hadn’t had a woman’s touch in her life since her mother died when she was six, she had always longed, with something near to a physical ache,
to have babies. If she couldn’t marry a man who made her heart race and her senses glow, like the heroes in the penny-thriller novels she read, at least she would have children.
The getting of babies with Dobay was hard to think on, though. She knew how that worked; she had grown up among breeding animals, had heard the cowhands talk about their exploits with house ladies and other women when they didn’t know she was listening, and had read the scandalous scenes in the novels. The whole thing seemed like it could be romantic and exciting – with the right man. And Mr. Dobay just wasn’t that man. But he would be kind, she was sure, so submitting herself to him in that way wouldn’t be so bad.
It would be a good life, she told herself firmly as she finished wiping the dishes. A better life than Plain folk had back in Granadaia, and she should be grateful. One day soon, she would tell her Pa that she was ready to agree to marry Mr. Dobay, and that would be that.
With that resolution, she headed out to the barn, followed by the eagerly purring Rat, to do the evening milking.
* * *
AFTER HIS CONVERSATION with Miss Lainie, Silas decided to have supper at the Rusty Widow that evening and take another look for his elusive rogue mage. While keeping his shield in place as much as possible, he tested and probed with his mage senses, searching every man and woman in the saloon for magical talent or signs of shields. Carden was there, engaged in a card game with several miners. Silas’s probe slid past the men, snagged on the house lady clad in lurid yellow silk perched on Carden’s knee, who showed a faint glimmer of never-used, never-noticed power, then moved on. The winner in another card game across the room showed a faint spark, also unremarkable.
Other than that, Silas came up empty in his search once again. As he dug into the mutton chops, stewed greens, and biscuits on his plate, he turned his mind back to the problem of the mage he did know about. He was going to have to do something about Miss Lainie whether he wanted to or not. He had nearly brought up the subject when he was talking to her earlier, but then his nerves had gotten the best of him and he had turned coward and not done it.
Dealing with a renegade was much easier than this.
The next morning, he rode out into the countryside just past the outskirts of town, looking for campsites or other signs of a vagabond mage, then continued his search that afternoon at the Bootjack. As he joined his card mates from the other day in a couple of games, he did another careful scan for mages. Like at the Rusty Widow, a very few of the customers and employees showed faint traces of inborn power in quantities too small to be of any use. It could very well be that the renegade was shielding, but the shield would have to be expertly-formed to evade Silas’s well-honed detection skills so thoroughly.
Of course, not everyone who patronized the Bootjack was there during the day. He would have to come back in the evening, when more of the local ranch hands were likely to be there after their day’s chores were finished. And then there was the possibility that the renegade didn’t frequent either of the two saloons. Silas decided to spend the rest of the afternoon visiting the other business establishments in town.
By the end of the day, having made the rounds of the entire town, Silas still hadn’t found a candidate for his rogue mage. The man he was hunting – or woman, though female renegades were rare – could be hiding somewhere farther out in the valley, in the creek beds and thickets of scrub oak and lowland pine. It would be worth taking a few days to travel the full length of the Bitterbush Valley, just to make sure.
No matter where the mage was hiding, though, he couldn’t maintain his shield indefinitely, especially not one so powerful and well-crafted. Sooner or later, he would have to let his shield down, and when he did, Silas would catch him.
Silas returned to the Bootjack after sundown and found all the customers abuzz with a new rumor: Carden was picking a team of miners to take up the canyons in the Great Sky range in search of larger deposits of ore. “Damn fool greedy bastard,” Dinsin grumbled. “He’ll get the blueskins all riled up, going in there like that. We leave them alone, they leave us alone. That’s the deal. The blueskins got powerful magics, and they’re fierce fighters. We don’t stand a chance if they attack us!”
“We gotta try to stop him,” Winnard said. A general outburst of agreement followed his words, along with a noticeable movement of hands towards guns. Silas could almost feel the itching of trigger fingers as men considered the fastest and easiest way to put an end to the rumored plans.
“Now, hold on,” said a rancher Silas hadn’t met yet. “So far all we got’s a rumor. You know how rumors are, as like to be false as true. Let’s not go starting a gun battle over something that may be nothing. An’ even if it’s true, the miners might not be so willing to go along with Carden on this. I say we let them sort it out among themselves.”
“Kill each other, you mean, instead of us,” Holus, the dealer from the card game, said. Laughter followed his words, and the tension in the saloon dissipated.
What, Silas wondered, could those foreign scientists possibly be doing with the ore that made it worth paying Carden enough that he was willing to violate the Compact and venture into A’ayimat territory? Suspicious activity of foreign scientists, dark magical forces being disturbed, violations of the Compact… Silas figured he’d best get to the root of the business before all eight hells broke loose.
Chapter 5
SILAS SPENT THE next few days riding the length and breadth of the Bitterbush Valley, searching among the washes and thickets for possible hideouts. He didn’t find anything, not even an abandoned campsite. Here and there across the valley he spotted rickety wooden structures, four angled beams topped by what seemed to be a lookout platform, that looked like they might shelter mining digs. But, given the ranch folks’ irritability about the digging on their land, he decided he’d better not investigate those without permission.
When he returned to town, he paid for another nineday on his room and the stabling; he had learned not to let his rent go to the last day when he was in the middle of a hunt. As he went about his business in town that day and the next, he kept an eye out for Lainie Banfrey, and spotted her riding into town the next afternoon.
He retreated into the Bootjack and seated himself where he could watch her out the front and side windows of the saloon. She hitched her brown mare in front of the cattlemen’s co-op and went into the office. A short time later, she came back out and walked up the street past the Bootjack to the bank next door. When she left the bank, she paused and looked up and down the street. Apparently she didn’t see what she was looking for; her shoulders slumped a little as she walked back past the Bootjack to where her horse was hitched.
Silas waited while she mounted up and headed out of town. When enough time had gone by that it wouldn’t look like he was following her, he left the Bootjack and fetched Abenar from the stable. He didn’t want this particular meeting with her to come to anyone’s attention, especially not anyone connected with Carden.
The day was even hotter and stickier than the days before had been. Tall white and gray thunderclouds had piled up high over the mountains to the west and were beginning to slide down the slopes towards the valley, promising long-awaited relief from the hot, dry weather, a promise echoed by the tension in the air. Once Silas was out of clear view of the town, he pushed Abenar to a gallop to catch up with Lainie. It didn’t take long; she had her mare going at an easy walk in the heat. “Miss Lainie!” he called out to her.
She reined in her horse and turned to look at him. A brilliant smile, not shy at all, lit up her face, and she brushed some loose strands of hair out of her eyes. Then, with a visible effort, she suppressed the smile. “Why, Mr. Vendine,” she said. “What brings you out here?”
He pulled up next to her, and they started riding side by side at a walk. “You’re looking well today, Miss Lainie,” he said.
Her smile came back, shy this time, and she blushed in the shade of her hat. “Thank you, Mr. Vendine. You look well your
self, though it’s so hot today.”
“Looks like there might finally be some rain.”
“I hope so; we could sure use it by now.”
The polite pleasantries out of the way, he said, “Miss Lainie, you said that miners have dug up ore for Carden on your father’s property, is that right?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Do you know where they’ve been digging?”
She nodded. “We’ve found four pits so far. They don’t even try to hide them.”
“Would you be kind enough to take me to one of them? It might be worth my while to take a closer look at that ore. I want to know what makes it so valuable to whoever’s paying Carden for it. What makes it valuable enough that Carden would risk trouble with the A’ayimat to find more of it.”
“And why a rogue mage might be interested in it?”
“That too. And…” He paused, wondering how much information to trust her with. “If it presents a danger to the settlers here, there are other mages I’m allied with, who also support the rights and freedoms of Plain folk, who might want to know about it, as well.”
“You mean there’s other mages like you, who care about Plains?”
“Yes. It’s a secret, though; the Mage Council would call us traitors if they found out about our alliance. We’d be hunted down and killed or Stripped.”
She looked at him intently, as though trying to decide if he was telling the truth. “I won’t tell anyone,” she finally said. “There’s one dig I can take you to without risking that my Pa will see us. I told you how he is, he gets so worked up over things, what with all this trouble, an’ Blake getting killed an’ all.”