by Kyra Halland
He only wanted to stop those wicked men, Lainie said to the Sh’kimech.
He invited us in! He wants to serve us!
If he invites you in, you’ll do what he says, just the same way you obey me. The force of her will pressed hard into Silas’s mind.
The Sh’kimech fought against the compulsion to back down, and Silas struggled as well, torn between knowing what would happen if he allowed the Sh’kimech to take control of him and his desire for the power they offered him, that would make him unbeatable, unstoppable –
A sudden burst of emotion and physical sensation shocked him out of the Sh’kimech’s grip. Just like that time in the cavern beneath Yellowbird Canyon, the feeling of Lainie’s soft, warm lips against his broke through the all-consuming longing of power, tempting him with something even more desirable…
You can give him power, Lainie told the Sh’kimech, but this is what I can give him. My heart, my body, my love, my life, our baby growing inside me.
Lainie had power that they did not. Greed gave way to a sense of awe, and the force of the Sh’kimech’s will retreated slightly.
That’s what I really want, Silas told them, pressing his advantage in their moment of weakness. I won’t serve you, not even for the power you promised me. Your job is to help me protect her and our baby and our home. With a mighty effort, asserting control as much over himself as over the Sh’kimech, he pushed the dark beings back down into the earth.
Thus rejected, they had no choice but to go.
His senses cleared. Lainie let the kiss go on a heartbeat longer, then, with a sigh, she broke it off. “You have to be careful with them,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” he answered, breathless.
“Hey, Halias!” Kort shouted, startling Silas out of the moment. He had almost forgotten about those two beef brains. “What’re you doing, just laying there while he kisses his birdie?”
“He’s got his gun pointed at me,” the mage lying at Silas’s feet answered. And so he still did, Silas realized. “What about you?” Halias shouted back. “Why aren’t you doing anything?”
“I can’t move! He put a gods-damned paralysis spell on me!”
Silas sighed; he really wasn’t in the mood for this. He moved Lainie aside, still keeping an arm around her waist, and cocked the trigger of his gun.
“Don’t –!” Halias yelped.
Silas fired a binding spell at him, wrapping him head to foot in a blanket of dark orange-brown power mixed with blue. “Begging your pardon, but we’ve got more important things to worry about right now than you two. The spells will wear off in a while. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay out of our way if you don’t mean to help us. I might not be so patient and good-natured next time we come across you.”
“Gods-damned renegade,” Halias grumbled, helpless inside the cocoon of magic.
With the Hidden Council mages dead and the mage hunters subdued, at least for the moment, the excitement of the fight drained out of Silas. Now he could feel the pain in his hip and back from when Halias had knocked him down, and every nerve in his body felt strained from the enormous amounts of power he’d been using. He turned to Lainie. “You okay, darlin’?”
Her throat was reddened from Kort’s chokehold, but otherwise she seemed unhurt. She gave him a short, sharp nod, though she frowned and her brows furrowed together in worry. “I think she’s going to Bitterbush Springs. Because of my Pa.”
It made sense. Knowing what he knew about Elspetya Lorentius, Silas also thought it likely that she would use the home of her despised Plain son as her headquarters, to show him and herself how far she had come. “That’s where we better go, then.”
The townsfolk had gathered around again, watching and listening in wary silence. Finally, the sheriff stepped up to Silas. “You killed the men who was protecting us. What do we do now?”
Silas let go of Lainie and rubbed his hands over his face. So many people, so many towns… He couldn’t take care of all of them. “They weren’t protecting you. You heard the whole thing – they provoked the blueskins to attack so they could move in and take over. And you let them. Since when do Wildings folk let outsiders take over like that?”
The sheriff looked down. “We was awful scared, and they was mighty convincing… You’re right, though. We was fools. We let our fear make us stupid.”
“I don’t think the A’ayimat will attack now. I think taking over your town was part of the next stage of the plan. But keep your guns loaded and a close watch out for trouble. And don’t let anyone provoke you into doing anything else rash.”
“Wise words, mister. What should we do about them fellas?” The sheriff jerked his chin towards Halias and Kort.
“They’ll recover in a while. If you want to put them in jail in the meantime, keep them out of your way and ours, that’d be fine. Just don’t try to hold them any longer than they’re willing to be held.” Silas didn’t think the sheriff would be able to keep the hunters in custody for very long, but any head start he and Lainie could get on them would help.
“They do seem troublesome. We’ll keep them as guests of the town as long as we can.”
The sheriff stepped away from Silas into the middle of the street. “People of Discovery!” he called out. “This fella says we should be safe now. Says the whole business with the blueskins was to trick us into letting those wizard fellas take over our town. I was told,” he nodded to one man in the gathering, a cowhand by the looks of him, “this fella and his wife is the ones that saved the herd last summer. So I judge they mean us well, even if they is wizards. Now, maybe we shouldn’t trust any wizards at all, but I do know we was fools to depend on someone else to take care of us. There’ll be a town meeting in two hours to settle on new rules and prepare our defenses. In the meantime, let’s see to the dead and start cleaning up.”
As the townsfolk went about their business, Silas and Lainie walked over to where Jasik was sitting on the wooden sidewalk across the street from the jailhouse and the ruined saloon. His arms were still tied behind him and he looked decidedly the worse for the wear, covered with cuts, scrapes, burns from the magical rope, and blossoming bruises, darker shadows on his dark bluish skin. Silas squatted down, his own bruised hip twingeing in protest, and cut the rope binding Jasik’s wrists with his knife. “You okay?” he asked.
The warrior stretched his arms and rotated his shoulders. “I’ve been worse.” He grinned. “Wrestled a grovik once. He decided I didn’t taste good. That was worse.” His expression grew sober again. “If there are more of these Hidden Council wizards, they could already be in those other towns. There’s no time to lose. Where do we go next?”
Silas considered the list of towns Umberton had given him. Bentwood Gulch, Strawdale, Canyon View, Bitterbush Springs… And no doubt there were other towns the mage hadn’t told him about. It looked like the Hidden Council was targeting every major settlement in the Wildings.
“The towns are spread out too far apart for us to reach them all,” he said. “Lainie and I are heading southwest, to Bitterbush Springs. That’s her hometown. And we think that’s where the boss of this gang is setting up her headquarters. It’s her grandmother,” he explained.
Jasik’s eyes widened, then he nodded. “That’s where you better go, then.”
“If you’re willing,” Silas went on, “I need you to go northeast to Bentwood Gulch near the Bluecloud Mountains, to a ranch called the BC Crown.” He wrote the name with his finger in the churned-up snow and dirt in the street, so Jasik would recognize the words on the signs leading to the ranch. “Tell the rancher, Brin Coltor, what happened at Thornwood and Stone Creek, and what happened here. Warn him about these Hidden Council mages, or if they’re already there, help him deal with them.”
“Will he talk to an A’ayimat?” Jasik asked. “Or will he kill me on sight?”
“He’s a good man. And he has a half-A’ayimat daughter. I think he’ll talk to you.”
Jasik’s eyeb
rows rose. “That’s the first I’ve ever heard of a Grana settler and an A’ayimat having a child. Some of my people don’t think it’s even possible; they say Grana folk aren’t really human, not the way we are.”
“We’ve seen her for ourselves; she lives with him. A’ayimat skin and hair, Coltor’s dark eyes. For her sake, at least, Coltor will listen to you.”
“I’ll go, then. How far is it?”
Silas pictured a rough map in his mind and figured time and distances. “About six hundred leagues. Fifteen days of hard riding. Maybe a little shorter if you go straight through the mountains.”
“I’d best get going, then.” Jasik stood, brushing off Silas’s offer of a hand up.
The three of them went to the hotel to fetch their belongings and the horses, then returned to where the sheriff was overseeing the cleanup and asked for Jasik’s weapons. The sheriff went into the jailhouse and came back out with the curved sword and short spear and a couple of sheathed knives. “We don’t mean your folk no harm,” the sheriff said to Jasik as he handed over the weapons.
“My people don’t mean yours any harm, either,” Jasik said. “Let’s see that it stays that way.”
Silas, Lainie, and Jasik mounted up, then Jasik rode off, heading towards the mountains north of town.
“If it would help,” the sheriff said, “I can send a couple of my deputies up northwest, to Strawdale and those parts, and warn those folks.”
“I’d be much obliged,” Silas said.
The sheriff walked away to rejoin the townsfolk, and Silas and Lainie reined the horses around to ride west out of town. Lainie cast a glance back in the direction of the gallows; a party of people were bringing in the bodies of the hanged man and woman. She watched briefly, then turned away, a haunted look on her face. “What if she hangs my Pa to make an example of him? Or hurts him to make me help her?”
Silas felt her fear as though it was his own, for her sake and because he liked and respected Burrett Banfrey. “I swear by all the gods I won’t let her hurt your Pa,” he said, making the vow in his heart as well as with his mouth. “And if we’re too late, I won’t rest until I’ve seen justice done for him.”
Chapter 19
HONEYBEE, ONE OF the mustering towns along the cattle drive trail, lay a hundred and seventy leagues west and south from Discovery across the rangeland of the Gap River Valley. On the sixth day after leaving Discovery, Silas and Lainie approached the town to see a commotion of noise and activity beneath the gallows outside town. Lainie gasped. Then, instead of freezing up, she kneed Mala into a gallop. “We have to help!”
Silas pushed Abenar after her. Whoever was being strung up, they were fighting hard. Reason dictated caution in approaching a hanging in progress that likely involved both enemy mages and hostile Plains, but reason and caution be damned if it meant leaving someone who was fighting so valiantly for their life to fight alone and in vain.
As Silas raced towards the gallows, passing Lainie along the way, he could see that a number of buildings in the town were partly-burned. A’ayimat attack? he wondered. A small range of hills, hardly more than bumps on the prairie but A’ayimat territory nonetheless, lay a few leagues north of the town. How many more dead, both A’ayimat children and innocent settlers, did those burned buildings represent?
When he got closer to the gallows, he could see that the hanging party had managed to get the noose over the victim’s head and a man was starting to pull the rope to haul him up. Without stopping, Silas drew, took aim, and shot through the rope. Amidst shouts of anger and surprise from the hanging party, he rode up to them and reined in Abenar.
“What’d you do that for?” a big, burly man demanded. Two other men wrestled with the would-be victim, who was still fighting to free himself. He was a skinny young man, little more than a boy; his freckled face was streaked with tears. The rope was still dangling from around his neck.
Silas aimed his revolver at the big man. “Let him go. What’d he do, that you’re hanging him for?”
“I didn’t do nothin’!” the boy shouted as he struggled. Silas fired into the trampled snow and dirt near the feet of one of the men holding him; both men let go of the kid and jumped back. The rest of the gang except for the big man also backed off.
“Hey,” someone said, “ain’t that what’s-his-name, Shark, from the drive? The one what saved the fella from drownin’ an’ fought off those wizards that made the big storm?”
The man who had spoken, a skinny fellow with long gray mustaches, looked vaguely familiar to Silas, and his words brought more lost memories from the drive back to his mind. Shark, huh? Not a bad nickname. He tipped his hat to the man. Awe and maybe a bit of respect replaced the hostility in a few of the men’s faces. “That’s me,” Silas said. “Now, what’s going on here? Why are you hanging a kid?”
“He brought the blueskins down on us,” the big man said. “He broke the rules, an’ the blueskins came in an’ tried to massacre us all.”
“I went out to see my girl! Away from the hills! I wasn’t nowhere near blueskin territory. You’ve known me all my life, Ollis! You know I wouldn’t be that stupid.”
“All I know is you was seen going out one night after curfew an’ the next day the blueskins came in an’ tried to burn us out an’ kill us all,” the big man, Ollis, replied.
“How’d you folks come through alive?” Silas asked, though he thought he could guess.
“Wizards, believe it or not,” the skinny, mustached man said. “These fellas, they showed up one day, not long after we got the news about Thornwood and Stone Creek, sayin’ they know the blueskins’ fightin’ secrets, and offerin’ to protect us. We didn’t believe ’em, then they showed us their powers. Some folks still said no, wizards ain’t good for nothin’ and never mean to do Plain folks well, but others of us remembered what you and the little lady did on the drive and decided we should trust ’em.”
Another crime, though relatively minor, to add to the Hidden Council’s charge, taking advantage of the hard-won trust Silas and Lainie had managed to gain. By the time this was over, unless they managed things very carefully, mages would be even more hated in the Wildings than before.
“They told us to just pay ’em whatever we could afford,” the mustached man went on, “an’ told us to do as they say. So that’s what we been doin’. An’ everything’s been fine.”
“Or was, until Jimmo here went an’ stirred up the blueskins,” Ollis growled.
“It weren’t me!” Jimmo protested.
“The boy’s telling the truth,” Silas said.
“How do you know?” Ollis asked, his eyes narrowing in his beefy face.
“Those wizards who are supposed to be protecting you, they’re the ones who’ve been provoking the blueskin attacks. We spoke with some blueskins who took part in the attacks on Thornwood and Stone Creek, and they told us that children of their clans had been raped and murdered, and magical trails were laid leading to the towns.”
“You believe what them lyin’ savages say?” a man with a bushy dark beard demanded.
Lainie had come over to stand next to Silas. He wished she had stayed back, well away from the trouble, but this was her fight at least as much as it was his, and he had learned his lesson about trying to protect her when her sense of right and wrong demanded she get involved. “Not just them,” she said. “We saw the trails for ourselves, and found they were faked, and a wizard in Discovery admitted that’s what the gang was doing.”
“Now look here,” Ollis said. “We don’t care what you say those savages or those other wizards said. Fact is, blueskins attacked our town and these wizards fought them off, and we won’t stand for you makin’ trouble with them. So why don’t you just move along –”
“String ’em up!” the bearded man yelled. “That’s what we should do with ’em!”
Silas pushed a resisting Lainie behind him, then reached into the earth beneath his boots and drew in power. In response, the connections with his
own power blazed and strengthened, and his magic began to flow through them.
Despite hardship, danger, and tragedy, his soul sang at the swell of magic inside him. He had his power back, and more; he could draw and use the power of the earth in his adopted home, something that should have been doubly impossible. He let his own power and the Wildings power he had drawn flow into his hand. His ring glowed blue swirled with amber, then the power spilled forth from his whole body, not in a shield but in a display of strength, as a warning. A confidence he had once possessed and lost filled him again. Damn, but it felt good.
“There’s wizards with good intentions towards Plain folk,” he said, “and wizards whose intentions aren’t so good. Make sure you know who is who before you pick your friends and your enemies.”
“Now, now,” said a deep, rich voice, “what’s all this?”
The men at the gallows all turned to look at an elderly man who came striding over, moving with surprising vigor. He had Island-dark skin and wavy white hair that flowed to his shoulders, and was wearing a finely-tailored white greenfoot suit and a tall white greenfoot hat. Power rolled off of him; Silas could sense it without even trying. He looked vaguely familiar, but Silas couldn’t remember where he had seen him before.
Lainie drew in a sharp breath. “Astentias!” she hissed in an undertone.
Lord Merlovan Astentias. Elspetya Lorentius’s highborn lover, and the traitor on the Mage Council. That was why he looked familiar; Silas would have seen him the handful of times when he appeared before the Mage Council. Silas’s whole body tensed as a burning, implacable resolve formed inside him. This man was their enemy, second only to Elspetya Lorentius; he shared the responsibility for bringing so much suffering and sorrow to the people of the Wildings, settlers and A’ayimat alike. Silas would see justice done on him, no matter what it took.
“Is there a problem?” Astentias asked pleasantly in a crisp, cultured Granadaian accent that he didn’t even try to hide.
“No problem except for these men trying to murder an innocent boy,” Silas replied, his anger grating at his voice.