A Rope of Thorns (7 page)

For herself, whatever the Pastor might say, Yancey’d long since learned to appreciate any system made folks want to keep their word. But she’d also begun to glean why Cardinal Dagger John Hughes’ Boston wouldn’t’ve seemed the friendliest town twenty years back, not as a flood of even more Church-rode Irish poured in. Couple the burden of secret Jewry with falling hard for a half-gypsy girl from the Old World’s darker parts—a girl whose disquietingly apt predictions would draw eyes anywhere, but particularly amongst those attuned for witchery’s traces—and Yancey thought Lionel might well have been just the sort of fellow to broach the idea that perhaps the West would offer a far more secure future than the East.

Experiance (thus named due to a drunken clerk’s misspelling, which Mala Colder had refused to correct) having been less than a year old when they arrived in the Hoard, it was safe to say she knew literally no other place. The town, and the hotel, had grown as she had; she could track her years as well by recalling when certain chairs had first begun to grace the lounge or china patterns to fill the shelves as she might by reckoning her height’s increase through those faint marks Lionel cut into the kitchen door frame.

In an odd way, this familiarity mitigated that restlessness Yancey knew stirred in the breast of most young folks—she felt too close to the Cold Mountain and the Hoard, too much a part of them, to ever feel easy at the thought of leaving. Oh, she dreamed of seeing the world; who didn’t? And that yearning’d grown only more acute after Mala’s passing, two years previous . . . along with another class of future vision entirely, the kind you didn’t tend to talk about, except with those who shared the same facility.

On the cold April night after her first courses—a cause for quiet celebration, seeing her schoolhouse friends had all passed that milestone some time hence—she’d gone to sleep happy, only to wake shuddering with cannon-fire images ringing through her head. Thunder, broken walls above a moonlit ocean, a falling flag. When she’d asked Mala what it meant, Mala had said only,
Wait and see
. Three days on, papers began to ship in with the answer as their headlines: FORT SUMTER ATTACKED, varying tales of predawn bombardment, the Carolina outpost’s capture. The War Between the States, begun at last.

It
wasn’t
hexation, Mala had hastened to assure her; something less powerful but also far less dangerous, in the main. Still, these sudden flashes of insight (nighttime and otherwise) did come with a perilous knack for attracting the strange, as well as knowing it upon sight.

We are nothing so grand as they,
Mala had said,
yet these . . . hexes . . . may be drawn to us, nevertheless. And though they can’t batten on us as they do their own, the younger may kill you by trying before figuring that out, while their elders may decide that to brook no competition is always the better policy. It behooves us to know how to spot them, therefore—so we can run the other way.

Remembering, also,
she’d added, after a pause,
that to most without even a touch of the strange, such difference in degree means nothing. What they’ll do to hexes they’ll do to us as well, if we give them reason.

An image had flashed between them, then—shared memory made visible, something Yancey’d never thought unusual, until that day. Didn’t
all
mothers and daughters occasionally know what the other was thinking, after all? But here it came, spilling out palpable as if Yancey’d lived it herself, with no prompt but Mala’s cool hand on hers:

A rake-thin girl, half-naked and bruised, fleeing her hovel while the rest of the village celebrated, unaware / a smaller child turning to see, alerted by some unstruck bell—Mala, as was / fire, flaring from the girl’s blood-stained palms as a drunken man emerged after her, setting both him and his home ablaze / screams rising as light leapt from roof to roof, hungry-searing, eating
everything—

And then, what was left of the village smoking black, the witch-girl bound fast amidst a pile of kindling, too tired even to weep. As the headman declaimed hoarsely, black coat flapping in a frosty wind:
We burn
her
, or they burn
us.
No other way. You
all
know it!

Were those tears frozen to his face?

The torchbearer, approaching. Mala’s parents stood elbow-to-shoulder with the rest, mouths resolutely shut, her mother trying to angle her away. But the witch-girl’s eyes sought her out, needle-through-cloth deft, to stitch their minds together just as the torchbearer’s hand dipped down—telling her, without a sound—
Watch them burn me now, sister, like the
gadje
will burn them anyhow, half a year on. Like they’d burn you too,
if only they knew what you are. . . .

Yancey’d wrenched herself free, then, knowing—as Mala already knew she knew—that this was the one possible future they could never flee; that even poor, adoring Lionel, only half-aware of his wife’s true talents, could never be allowed complete comprehension, lest he admit his doubts to the wrong person.

At Mala Colder’s funeral, everyone had praised Lionel for raising such a self-possessed daughter, so strong and steady, her tears kept decorously muted. But what none of them understood was that Mala’s fatal sickness had been no surprise to Yancey, or to Mala. It had been long months since they’d noticed a shadowed figure first standing by the Cold Mountain’s saloon door, then at the end of every hall, reflected in every mirror’s middle distance. Far more sad than menacing, oddly enough, but as inexorable as any laid pyre. So Mala and Yancey had said their goodbyes already, long before the doctor ever broke it to Lionel, who would never be quite the same again.

Still, nothing in this world came entirely unleavened by its opposite. It had been at the wake following that Uther Kloves, then but new-come to town, hesitantly asked her and her father both at once—a courtesy she’d found impressive—if he might court her for a time, see if they suited. Yancey had become honest enough with herself by then to admit she was flattered: the Marshal, undeniably pleasant to the eye, seemed decent enough, an impression borne out by his patient and gentlemanly behaviour. And so . . .

And so.

She crossed briskly through the parlour, doling out smiles and taking orders.

Near the window, she observed Hugo Hoffstedt deep in whispery congress with Mister Frewer—or Hugo talking
at
Frewer, rather, while Frewer sipped his shot. “Bein’ a family man yourself, I know you understand,” he said. “So just tell me
nothin’
followed you, and I’ll be well-content.”

“Never said that.”

“. . . what?”

“Out in the desert, ridin’ hard to get here . . . might be I saw something then, far off, with a sort of glister to it. All white, like snow—or salt.”

“Keeping pace with you?” Frewer nodded. “And you didn’t think to mention this, upstairs?”

“Thing is, Mister Hoffstedt, I don’t think it was
us
it was following. Just that we happened in between it and whatever it
was
after, is all. And given how fast it travelled, I reckon it could’ve caught up pretty easy, we
were
what it wanted. So . . .”

That same weary shrug, one more mystery in a string of mysteries. Yancey reckoned that was how a surfeit of miracles hit most folks—just plumb wore ’em out.

“But what
was
it?”

“As to that . . . hope I never come to find out.”

She sensed Uther a second before his hand touched her shoulder; could almost hear his smile as he leaned close, to murmur in one ear. “I’d tell you not to fret about this, but you’d just give me that look, wouldn’t you?”

Yancey let one corner of her mouth quirk up. The Marshal did sometimes let his chivalrous inclinations get the better of him, but he could usually be relied upon to be straight with her; too much the pragmatist to pass up any fresh perspective, no matter its origins. Which meant he’d tell her what she needed to know, sooner or later.

Yet another reason (as Pa kept on reminding her) it’d be so advantageous to find herself this nice young man’s wife. But she couldn’t think too long about that, in any great detail, or she might figure out exactly what affections she had for Uther, beyond the sadly practical.

By Mala’s own admission, there’d been a fair bit of flat calculation in her choosing Lionel Colder—a charming man with his own secrets to keep, who’d have little inclination to paw through his wife’s metaphorical lock-box. Whatever detachment she’d brought into the marriage-bed had long since vanished by the time Yancey was old enough to look for it, however. Her parents had loved one another deeply, by the end—a bond all the stronger for having been forced to grow steadily, rather than flare high and fizzle.

The Marshal, meanwhile, was solicitous, brave, fair set up for future prosperity. But the difference between his love and her parents’ was like a rope bridge set against an iron-girdered train track. Though both would get you over the gaps, one felt merely . . .adequate.

Nevertheless, she leaned forward, eyes crinkling. “Do I
need
to fret, Uther?”

“Can’t really say, as yet. The Weed
has
seemed to cut itself a path, though I don’t know . . .” He stopped. “Yancey? You all right?”

She shook her head, knowing the smile she’d worked so hard over must be abruptly gone. “Just realized there’s a whole other round of chores needs doing—gotta swap out the linens.” She stretched up on tiptoe to gift him with a brief peck. “I’ll see you tonight.”

“Yancey! Enough canoodling!” Pa was trying for a glare, but his voice held that slight crack she knew proved him more jocular than angry. With a wave to them both, she ducked her head and slid from the room, soon halfway to the second floor, where her true errand awaited.

Avoiding the hall’s creakiest boards, she eased her way down to the door of what Pa still optimistically insisted on calling the Bridal Suite—their largest bedroom, refurbished with an excess of lace doilies, fine quilts and pomanders. Certainly, the two guests who’d checked in a half-week back didn’t meet anyone’s definition of a honeymoon couple.

’Cept for their own, perhaps,
she thought. And blushed for herself, at the very idea of someone of her tender age being well aware what that euphemism might mean.

A hotel was no fit place for a lady of true delicacy, she’d always heard. But then—from Yancey Colder’s point of view, safe was better than sorry. And to
know
was always safer, by damn far, than not.

Took one moment more for her to find the nerve she needed. Then she lifted one brisk fist to rap on the door—only to see it cracked open with unexpected abruptness, grey-brown eyes peering down hard at her through the narrow gap.

“Don’t need any towels,” growled the man, who’d given his name as “Chester,” on registration. (“Mister . . . Chester, that is. Senior.” “And your brother, sir?” “Well . . . he’d be Mister Chester too, ’course. Junior.”)

But Yancey, who could tell the ostensible irritation masked wariness, felt suddenly that much more confident.

“Not what I’m here for, sir. Would you let me in to check the levels in your oil lamps?”

“Would
you
go away, I tell you no?”

“Honestly? No.” Yancey didn’t smile, holding his hazel eyes with her own similar-coloured gaze. “Because, you see—I know who you really are, Mister Morrow. Both of you.”

At this, he just stared, open-mouthed. While she, in turn, indicated the unseen room beyond—along with its other, equally unseen, occupant.

“May I come in?” Yancey Colder repeated, patiently.

“Might as well,” Chess Pargeter replied, from inside.

Five days back:

The dream took hold without warning—one moment Morrow was alone in his own skull, sunk deep in darkness and not missing all too much, so long as the pain in his jaw stayed gloriously absent. Next, however, he found himself sat up alongside Reverend Rook in one of a matched pair of chairs cunningly cobbled together from what looked—and felt, horribly—like bone: slim, slick, yellowed like ivory, bound haphazardly together with sinew and hexation alike.

What hit Morrow like a knife through the gut, though, was the
where
of it all: a wide plain, acres in size, wheat rippling like a wind-tossed sea. At the far edge, Morrow knew, a zigzag splinter-board fence divided their lot from its neighbour; a tall man silhouetted against the sunset light was using the day’s last hours to continue scything there, slow and steady. Morrow felt the land’s faint slope under his feet, rising gradually to the three-roomed farmhouse and silo behind him. The air smelled of grain, woodsmoke, and autumn.

Rook breathed deep, smiling. Huge, black-clad, framed in jagged yellow bone, his very presence made a tangible hole. “Now
this
,” he said, “is a place for the righteous, Ed. No wonder you got so much do-gooder in you.” He leaned back, hands behind his head. “I wonder if you even know just how lucky you were.”

Morrow shut his eyes a second; he didn’t want to remember those chairs, or Rook, in this place. “Ain’t it strange,” he said, carefully, “how the friendliest thing you ever said to me comes out like you mean it to insult.”

Rook chuckled, deep in his throat. In the distance, unseen, Morrow’s father kept on cutting. “Well, well. Guess you ain’t quite so scared of me as you used to be, after all. How’s the tooth?”

Morrow’s hand went to his face, involuntarily. “This’s just a dream, ain’t it? So I don’t reckon it matters a damn what it’s like,
here
.”

“Dream world, real world—no border’s exactly what it used to be, given what’s passed. You’ve already seen how hard it is to hurt Chess now, and make it stick; well, stand by him, stay close, and that’ll be you, too. Can’t have the Skinless Man’s prophet kickin’ off premature from something as stupid as tooth rot, either, even hex-imposed.”

Morrow considered that. “So . . . nothing can kill me?”

“
Chess
could.”

“He’s had more’n enough chances to, he wanted.” Morrow faced Rook square on, no longer afraid. “Which means . . . he don’t. And he won’t.”