by Nora Roberts
“It’s beautiful.” The stone was set in silver, the words inscribed on its back read: WISDOM, COURAGE, LOYALTY. THE SPIRITS OF THE ONE. “And, like Arlys said, gracious. I’ve never seen work this fine outside of the vault we found in D.C.”
“Her craftsmen do more than make the practical. She has jewelers, silver- and goldsmiths, those skilled in working with silks, velvets, furs. Quebec will be a monarchy under her. I believe she’ll rule well.”
Because it touched her, Fallon hooked the pendant onto the chain with Max’s wedding ring, Simon’s St. Michael’s medal. Rubbing her fingers over the faces, she spoke casually. “She didn’t tempt you?”
“She’s too fancy for me,” he said, clearly amused. “And not my type. What do you need to ask of me?”
She looked at him then. “I wanted to give you time at your cottage, but instead I’m asking you to stay in New Hope, to help Duncan season some of the recruits. I’m sorry to—”
He waved her off before she finished. “Fifteen centuries I’ve waited to fulfill my duties. This is what I’m made for.” In a rare show of affection, he closed a hand over hers. “I answer the call of The One.”
“You could have Colin’s room while you’re here.”
“Now, that does tempt me. But I’d do better with the seasoning if I stayed at the barracks. Perhaps I’ll be invited to a meal when your mother returns.”
“I’ll make sure of it. In the meantime, I can tell you they eat well at the barracks. We’ve seen to that.”
“Then I’ll join Duncan and Travis, and get a meal. A safe journey west.” He rose, retrieved his bag, then looked back at her. “You’ve done well, girl.”
“High praise from the old man.”
Alone, she sat a moment longer. Not just battle plans now, not only training, readying troops. Now alliances, politics, diplomats, borders. Now visions for the tomorrows must come through the smoke. She had no desire to be a queen, to rule over the re-forming world. But if she took up the sword to lead that world to war, she needed to know the ways to embrace the peace, and hold it.
Once, she’d drawn back the curtain to show Colin the blood and battle, the worst the dark demanded. She held the hope that one day, she’d draw it back to peace, to unity, to all the light offered.
But for now she rose to prepare for the journey, for her quest to find more souls to lead to war.
While Fallon packed provisions, Lana sat in the pristine living room of Tereza Aldi, Lucy’s grandmother. A handsome woman, her stone-gray hair coiled in a braided bun at her nape, she sat stiffly in a chair.
She offered no refreshment.
A wood-burning stove, obviously scavenged and added after the Doom, squatted in the corner and sent out some stingy heat.
Still, the chill in the room came as much from the woman as the winter.
“I appreciate you seeing me, Mrs. Aldi.”
“I’ve told you we have nothing to say to each other, but you’re persistent.”
“Women raising children in this world have to be. I’d hoped you had some message you’d like me to take to Lucy.”
“She made her choice.”
“She told my daughter you once hid a magickal from Purity Warriors.”
“We’re not heathens.” She lifted a hand to the cross she wore around her neck. “Or fanatics, like that godless cult.”
“It was an act of kindness, of humanity, that involved considerable risk.”
“They would have killed the boy—one no more than ten. We don’t wish your deaths, Mrs. Swift. We only insist you keep your distance. We live quiet, peaceful lives here.”
“You have a lovely community. As do the magickals who live across the river.”
“They stay on their side, we on ours.” She kept her hands folded, implacably, on her lap. “The boy wandered over, and should have known better.”
“I have three sons,” Lana said with a smile. “I can’t count the times they should have known better. I have a daughter, too.”
“I know who you are. Know who she is, and what she claims to be.”
“She doesn’t claim, she is. But more directly to you, she saved your granddaughter’s life.”
“I told you I have no desire to hear—”
“But you will hear.” Lana’s voice changed, snapped. She’d tolerate the chill, even what she considered the rude, but she wouldn’t tolerate ignorance. “You’ll hear, then I’ll go. The child you raised—”
“You hear!” Tears as much from anger as grief sparked in dark eyes where lines fanned out in deep grooves. “I raised Lucia. I raised her because her father died in the Doom, and her mother, my own daughter, my only surviving child, changed.”
In turn, Lana folded her hands in her lap. She considered the temper progress when measured against the cold stone wall she’d hit before. “How?”
“Became like you. Cursed, she was. Cursed, and mad with it. The world dying around us, friends and neighbors sick or already buried. My husband dead, my two sons dead. And my only daughter wild, wild and violent where she’d once been kind and loving.”
When Mrs. Aldi looked away, her knuckles white as bone on her lap, Lana said nothing. Better to wait, Lana thought, let it all come out.
“She tried, my loving daughter, tried with fire from her own hands, to burn down the house. Burn it down while the baby she’d wanted so much screamed in her crib. The baby’s room, she started that fire in Lucia’s room, and laughed like a mad thing, wept like a mad thing. Reason couldn’t stop her, pleas couldn’t as I rushed in to grab the baby, as others rushed to put out the fire. She only laughed and wept and threw more flames from her hands. Those flames struck one of the men who’d come to help, and she laughed and laughed as he burned. Laughed and wept as others dragged him out to try to save him.
“And when she turned to me, to the child I held in my arms, I saw what she meant to do. I shot her. I killed my child, one I loved with all my heart, to save her child.
“So don’t speak to me of witchcraft and magicks.”
“I’m sorry for your daughter, for all you lost, and for the terrible choice you had to make.”
“You know nothing of it.”
“You’re wrong,” Lana said quietly. “I’ve seen the madness. I faced it. I understand loss. I suffered it. I’ve known evil, with power and without. All of us who survived had to make terrible choices. The boy your granddaughter loves made a choice, like yours. To try to save the child you saved, he made a choice. It was Raiders, Mrs. Aldi, not magickals who attacked them. Just men, cruel men. Johnny could have gotten away, he could have left her and with his elfin abilities, run or hidden. Instead he fought to save her, and nearly died in the attempt. Would have died, as she would have if my daughter hadn’t come to their aid.”
Mrs. Aldi looked away, but those tightly pressed lips trembled. “He took her away.”
“It seems nearly the other way around, according to Lucy. Johnny wanted to fight against the Dark Uncanny, against the dark that threatens us all. Lucy begged him not to leave her. They left the home they know because you forbade them to love.”
“No good can come of mixing.”
“Oh, I so disagree. My husband isn’t magickal, our oldest son isn’t. We’re a family, Mrs. Aldi, one I love, one I’m proud of. We’re in this world together, and if you push back, push away from that world, your own becomes smaller and smaller. Has the community across the river offered yours any violence?”
“We leave each other alone.”
“Except when you hid a frightened boy, or when they offer healing balms or other aids to people here. You should ask your neighbors,” Lana said when Mrs. Aldi blinked in shock. “Ask yourself if your pride and your bias—and it is bias—is more worth clinging to than the child you saved at such a terrible cost. A child who loves and misses you. She asked me to give you this.”
Lana rose, laid a letter on the table by the chair.
“Thank you for seeing me,” she said, and left the woma
n with a choice to make.
Fallon spent ten days in the West. Despite the purpose, she found time for amusement watching Meda flick Travis away like an over-eager puppy. She enjoyed watching Taibhse glide through western skies, over land that offered mile after mile of open. They often slept in that open, under stars so brilliant it made her throat ache, drifted off to the music of coyote and wolf.
She found the potential for a base in Sedona, a place she hoped to revisit, with the staggering beauty of the red mountains, the magicks that whispered in the air.
In the canyons, by boiling rivers, Faol Ban raced and hunted. Near crystal lakes that reflected the spearing mountains, hawks cried and circled overhead, deer roamed thick through forests, leaped through high grass with white tails bobbing. Elk bugled at dawn and swarmed like an army over grasslands with no fences left to block their path.
Bear larger than she’d ever seen fished in streams while cougar and lynx hunted over rocky slopes.
She watched the majestic flight of an eagle, the stunning dive of a peregrine, and understood the wonder Duncan had felt during his time in the West.
In settlements and camps, she spoke to leaders, conversed when it suited in Arapaho, in Sioux, and once, to an old woman’s delight, in Dutch.
They roamed through ruined cities, empty towns where ghosts roamed as thick as the deer and elk. It amazed her how many useful supplies had been abandoned, like the cars and trucks, the ranch houses, the cabins, even the weapons inside them.
Wild horses ran the plains in living rivers of speed and grace. Buffalo, hides thick with winter, cropped the swaying grasses.
“Generations ago, this land was taken from my people.” Meda scanned the land, the mountains, from the saddle. “We’ll have it back. It won’t be taken from us again.”
“Do you think that’s what I want? To take?”
“If I did, I wouldn’t fight beside you. But like the North Queen wants what she sees as hers, me and mine want what is ours. There won’t be reservations. We won’t be driven off again. This is home.”
“And for those, not of your tribe, who see this and believe it is or could be home?”
“There’s room.” Meda shrugged. “There’s room for those who respect our sacred places, who work the land with respect, or leave it as they find it. I’ve already given you my allegiance. This isn’t bargaining. It’s truth.”
“I’ve already given you my allegiance,” Fallon returned. “This isn’t bargaining, but another truth. The land here, or in the east, over the oceans, the oceans themselves, isn’t mine to give. But it will be held in the light by your people, and all people.”
“I pray for the day we see that truth. But we have a war to win first.”
As she rode on, Travis let out a long sigh. “She just gets hotter.”
Fallon rolled her eyes, and nudged Laoch into a trot.
Later, as the sun dipped, sent its first roses to bloom over the peaks in the west, she spotted a settlement tucked into the basin near the foothills of what her map told her was the Sierra Nevada.
“Should be good farming land,” Travis commented. “Good pasture.”
“Whatever’s left of Reno’s to the northwest. And Lake Tahoe. It could be a good spot for a base.” Fallon scanned the houses, the farmland—probably ranch land out here, she corrected. “Let’s see if we can convince them to join up, maybe we can spend the night here before we head north.”
“I don’t see much security.” Meda continued on in an easy walk.
“We’re still, what, a mile away?” Scanning, Fallon looked for any sign they’d be met with hostility. “They’ve got cook fires going. I can smell them. Meat cooking. No electric power. I can see solar on a few roofs, and somebody built a couple windmills. We’ll ride in slow, so they have time to look us over.”
And the crows came.
With their first shriek, an alarm sounded with the manic clanging of bells. Even as Laoch leaped into a gallop, riders on horseback poured out of the trees, headed for the settlement. The air rang with gunfire, tore with screams. Fallon saw a flash of fire streak from one of the houses, take out a rider.
On the gallop, Meda nocked an arrow, took out another.
“Travis! Grab that kid, three o’clock.”
He looked where his sister indicated, said, “Oh hell,” and veered off toward the little girl who stood frozen with her hands over her ears.
Fallon drew her sword and rode into battle.
At least thirty, she thought, most armed with handguns or rifles, a few with axes or swords. They shot wildly, indiscriminately, and even without Travis’s empathic ability, she sensed a kind of desperation.
She blocked bullets, slashed with sword. If she enflamed the guns, she’d disarm the defenders as well. Even as she considered it, Faol Ban leaped on a rider, tore him off his mount. She caught the symbol of a PW tattooed on his arm.
On another slap of magick, a fireball whizzed by. She felt the heat from it—entirely too close. She wheeled Laoch, shot her own fire at another PW. When he fell to the ground, a woman rushed outside, began to pummel him with her fists.
As she charged a swordsman, Fallon had to throw up her shield to block an arrow. She glanced up to the boy perched on a roof with a bow.
“Goddamn it, watch it! We’re the good guys.”
It took less than ten brutal minutes. At the end of it, bodies littered the ground, blood soaked into it. She looked up at the crows, circling under an endless sky painted with reds, golds, pinks, and a magnificent beauty.
“You’re done here.” She thrust her sword up, and added their bodies to the rest. “It’s done,” she called out. “They’re down. Travis?”
“A-okay. They’re not all dead,” he added.
“Good. I want to know where they came from. Meda.” She turned. “You’re hit.”
“A graze.” With as much disgust as discomfort, Meda looked down at the sleeve of her jacket, torn by the bullet, stained with the blood from the wound. “I bartered my ass off for this jacket.”
“I’ll fix it, and you. It’s done,” Fallon called again. “We’re here to help. I’m Fallon Swift, with my brother Travis, and Meda of the First Tribe.”
A man stepped out on the porch of a house. Maybe thirty, she thought, with a scruffy beard, a mop of brown hair under a cowboy style hat.
“Yancy Logan. Thanks for the assist.”
“Glad we were in the neighborhood. Are you in charge?”
He took off his hat, dragged his fingers through the mop before he set it back in place. “I might be, seeing as they killed Sam Tripper, who more or less was.”
A woman stepped out behind him with a wailing baby on her hip. Fallon felt a quiet power from both of them. “You’re welcome here. Yancy, she’s The One.”
“Okay, honey.” He blew out a long breath. “I guess we should start cleaning up this mess out here.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
They burned twenty-two PW bodies and three from the settlement they called Bright Valley. Fallon worked with a healer on wounded, both friend and foe.
She tended last to the knuckles of the woman who’d run out to use her fists on a downed PW.
“I don’t think we’d have held them off if you hadn’t shown up, so thanks. I’m Ann.”
“Ann. You’re welcome.” She glanced over as Yancy’s wife—Faith, half-Apache on her mother’s side, Fallon remembered—brought her a mug of tea. “Thanks. I gave some balm to Wanda, your healer. You should use some a couple times a day for a day or two.”
“They feel fine now.”
“The balm will keep it that way. I noticed you’re mostly women and children.”
“Out of a hundred and fifty-six—sorry, fifty-three now—we have fifty-five men over eighteen. We haven’t had much trouble before.” Faith handed Ann another mug. “Small groups of nomads or Raiders, but nothing like today. We thought we were ready, but we weren’t.”
“We got complacent,” Ann decided. “I haven�
��t seen a PW raid since I got here.”
“How long ago?”
“Almost five years now.” Ann, a small, diamond-shaped scar on her left cheekbone, flexed her healing knuckles. “We got hit by one outside of Reno, and had to run for it. I had my sister and little brother—not blood, but heart.”
“I understand.”
“Well, we got out. Lost everything but what we could carry and ran for it.”
Fallon heard the bitterness, understood the pummeling fists. “Sometimes you fight, sometimes you run.”
“My brother got horses. He’s got a way with horses and animals altogether.”
“An animal empath. My youngest brother—blood and heart—is the same.”
“Then you know. We rode south, and ended up here. Bright Valley, it’s a good place, with good people.”
Ann paused, rubbed both hands over her face. Her voice wavered. “Sam, I want to say Sam was a real good man. One you could depend on, and everybody here . . .”
She dropped her hands again, straightened her shoulders. “He’s going to be missed. People around here aren’t bloodthirsty, but they’re going to want to hang the ones who killed him that aren’t already dead.”
“Yancy will calm everybody down,” Faith predicted with a steadiness that rang with truth. “He’s got that way.”
“If anybody can, Yancy can.”
Faith smiled at that, then the smile died away. “But I don’t know what in hell we’re going to do with them. Where we’d put them, how we’d deal with them.”
“We’ll take them.”
“Where?” Ann shifted her attention back to Fallon.
“I’ll explain, but we need to talk to the prisoners.”
“Yancy’s got Sal watching them. They’re tied up tight in the sheriff’s office—Sam’s office. Sam,” Faith said and pressed her fingers to her eyes for a moment. “We don’t have a jail, but they’re tied up, and Sal won’t let them pull any crap. Ann, can you take her? I’m helping ride herd on the young ones.”
“Sure, I can.”
They went out of the small building into the street, where blood still stained the ground. But people worked to board up broken windows or led horses back to a town paddock. She signaled to Travis and Meda.
