The Rancher's Daughter

by Kyra Halland

  “What is it? And make it interesting. I’m low on neighborly forbearance at the moment.”

  “That must have been a pretty tough loss tonight.”

  Silas’s left hand started to move for his gun. He gripped Lainie’s shoulder more tightly in an effort to restrain himself. “I said, make it interesting.”

  “My employer is looking for someone to do a job for him, of a rather delicate and difficult nature. You seem like just the man for it.”

  A job? Curiosity and penury warred with Silas’s longing to punch the smug bastard in the face, and won. “Who’s your employer? And what’s the job?”

  “My employer is Mr. Brin Coltor, owner of the BC Crown Ranch, just outside town.”

  He should have guessed, Silas thought, momentarily stunned into speechlessness. The BC Crown Ranch was one of the two or three biggest ranches in the Wildings, running huge numbers of both cattle and sheep through the Gap every year, and its owner, Brin Coltor, was arguably the richest man in the Wildings. Bentwood Gulch owed its prosperity mainly to him. No wonder Storts had hundred-gilding coins to throw around in card games, if he worked for the owner of the BC Crown. Silas glanced at Lainie; her mouth was open, her eyes wide in awe. Her father was a reasonably prosperous rancher himself, by Wildings standards, but Burrett Banfrey was a gnat to Brin Coltor’s eagle.

  “As for the nature of the job,” Storts went on, “I am not at liberty to discuss that with you. Mr. Coltor will tell you himself, if you’re interested. But I can tell you that it would pay more than twice what the little lady here lost in that game tonight. And I don’t mean the one drina she started out with.”

  “What do you mean, then?” Lainie asked in a slightly strangled voice.

  Smiling, Storts said, “I mean the whole tray at the end. This job would pay double that.”

  Double what had been on the tray. Silas tried to wrap his mind around that. Between six and seven hundred gildings. Two years’ worth of bounties, for – whatever this job was. It couldn’t be easy, not for that much money. There had to be a lot more to this than Storts was letting on. “That sounds good – a little too good. Why should we believe you, after the way you treated my wife?”

  “For one thing, if my guess is right, you can’t afford not to. Also, you’re curious. And you’re mad – you’d like the chance to tell Brin Coltor what a bastard his agent is.”

  Silas hated to admit it, but Storts was right on all three counts. He supposed it wouldn’t hurt to at least look into this job offer. He stood up, brushing dirt from the back of his brown duster. Lainie also stood and carefully brushed off her new second-hand rose-dyed coat. “All right,” Silas said. “I’ll listen to what Coltor has to say. No promises, though. Where will we find him?”

  “He’s at his office here in town tonight, taking care of some business. He’s looking forward to meeting you.”

  Looking forward… “Wait a minute,” Silas said.

  “This was a setup, wasn’t it,” Lainie added. “The game and everything.”

  Storts’s smile broadened. “Mr. Coltor keeps his ear close to the ground for anything that might come in useful sometime. He’d heard of you –” he nodded at Silas “– and your particular skills in carrying out certain difficult tasks. In his present troublesome circumstances, when he heard you were in town, he instructed me to ascertain the truth of the rumors about you as best I could. If they seemed to hold true, I was to do whatever was necessary to ensure that you would accept this commission. I’d heard that the little lady has a knack for cards, so I decided to put that rumor to the test. And I thought that a bad loss would guarantee that you would accept this job. It didn’t take me long to realize that what we had heard about her prowess at cards was entirely true; unfortunately, it also quickly became apparent that the only way to beat her was by cheating – or by making it look like she cheated. I do have to say, it’s been a long time since I’ve enjoyed an evening of Dragon’s Threes so much.” He bowed slightly and tipped his hat to Lainie.

  “Asshole,” Lainie said.

  Storts turned his smile to Silas. “That’s quite a woman you’ve got there, Vendine.”

  It figured that all the name-slip charms he’d used weren’t enough to keep his name from reaching Brin Coltor’s ears. Did Coltor have a mage in his employ? Name-slip charms didn’t work as well on other mages. Storts didn’t have power, Silas was sure of that, but Coltor could have dozens of people working for him, and any one of them could be a mage.

  Wondering what else Coltor knew about him, Silas made sure his gun was loaded and his power was shielded, just in case. He quickly checked Lainie’s power; of course she was sensible enough to have it buried. “Lead on,” he said. It looked like this was going to be interesting, after all.

  Chapter 3

  SILAS AND LAINIE followed Storts up the street to a large building that had the word Offices painted in ornate letters on the false front. A placard reading B. Tennir, attorney-at-law hung in one of the windows on the ground floor; a sign in another window advertised A. Oferdon’s Clerking and Bookkeeping Services. The building was dark except for a pair of windows on the second floor, where dim light barely penetrated through thick draperies. Storts unlocked the front door of the building and led Silas and Lainie up a flight of stairs to the second floor, then to a door on the right. He knocked and said, “It’s me, Mr. Coltor. I have your guests here.”

  From behind the door, a deep, rough voice answered, “Bring them in.”

  Storts opened the door and Silas and Lainie entered the office. The room was lit only by a pair of wall lamps mounted behind the massive desk and a third lamp on the desk, but Silas could make out dark wall paneling, thick carpeting, lushly upholstered chairs, dark polished wood. The furniture must have cost a fortune to buy in Granadaia – there was nothing like this available in the Wildings – and another fortune to have shipped through the Gap. And then there was the art hanging on the walls and the shelves of leather-bound ledgers and books and the crystal decanter of what was undoubtedly very expensive whiskey on the gleaming, heavily-carved sideboard. The whole room looked like it might have been picked up from a wealthy merchant’s house in Sandostra and set down here unchanged.

  At the desk sat an imposing man, large-framed and muscular beneath a sleek, prosperous-looking layer of fat. He wore an expensively-tailored black suit, but his crisp white shirt was open at the neck, revealing a dense growth of dark chest hair. A high starched white collar and black silk necktie lay discarded on the credenza behind the desk. His thick, dark hair was styled back with pomade, and the ends of his substantial mustache were waxed into points. Just his clothes and grooming aids probably cost more than the entire contents of Lainie’s father’s house.

  Acting on his guess that Brin Coltor had a mage working for him, Silas reached out carefully with his mage senses to do a quick check for magical power in the vicinity. Immediately, he drew back, astonished at Coltor’s expertly crafted, nearly undetectable shield.

  It seemed that the richest man in the Wildings was himself a mage.

  Clearly, Coltor didn’t want Silas or Lainie to know about his power, and, for the moment, Silas was willing to go along with that, though he was certain now that Coltor knew he and Lainie were mages. Coltor was no renegade; Silas had no reason to believe that he had used magic in amassing his wealth, and if he had, he appeared to have done no harm with it. Coltor was known as a man who looked after his own interests but who exercised strict honesty and integrity in doing so and who also looked after the interests of his people and his town with equal diligence. Silas wondered if anyone else in the Wildings had even the slightest idea that Brin Coltor was a mage.

  “Vendine,” Coltor said in brusque greeting. He glared at Silas from dark brown eyes beneath heavy eyebrows. The dark eyes, dark hair – a color Lainie called rusty black, a shade short of true black, the same color as Silas’s hair – and what appeared to be a moderate tan suggested Island blood. That in itself wasn’t enough
to give Coltor away as a mage; there were no small number of Plains who had a little Island blood from an ancestor or two who had been among the servants and slaves the Island mages had brought to Granadaia.

  “Brin Coltor, I take it?” Silas replied.

  Coltor gave a single curt nod and gestured to two elaborately-carved, thickly-padded chairs in front of the desk. Silas held a chair for Lainie. She had taken off her hat and was looking around, eyes wide. Now she sat down like she was afraid the chair might collapse under her. Then he took his own seat, leaning back with his fingers tented in front of him, determined to look unfazed by the evening’s turn of events. Manners dictated that he should take his hat off, too, but he preferred to leave it on, at least until he knew the lay of the land a little better. It didn’t do to look too eager to please too soon.

  “What’s this all about, Coltor?” he asked.

  “Care for a drink?” Coltor indicated a small cut-crystal glass of whiskey in front of him.

  “We’d be grateful,” Silas said.

  Coltor nodded at Storts, who went to the sideboard and poured from the decanter, then brought over two more small crystal glasses, each holding a finger-width of fragrant amber liquid. He handed one to Lainie and the other to Silas. Lainie sipped at her glass, then barely suppressed a cough and a wheeze. She wasn’t much of a drinker.

  Silas took a swallow of his own drink and nearly moaned in pleasure. His toes curled in his boots, ecstasy warming him as the rich, smooth liquor slipped down his throat.

  “Good, don’t you think?” Coltor asked.

  “Not bad.” Silas leaned forward and set his glass on the desk. “Now, what do you want with us that’s so important that your man there found it necessary to cheat my wife at cards and humiliate her in front of everyone in Dirty Deke’s?”

  “I apologize for any actions of my agent that might have caused you undue distress.”

  Lainie drew an angry breath, but Silas signaled her to let him do the talking. She settled for glowering down into her drink instead.

  “Funny,” Silas said. “A deck with two Fire Dragons in it.”

  “Is that how he managed it? He meant well; I hope you’ll forgive the unfortunate misunderstanding.”

  Silas was certain he heard Lainie snort softly into her glass. “Unfortunate,” he repeated. He picked up his own drink and took another sip. It didn’t do to let too much of that stuff hit your system at once. “Get on with it, Coltor. We’ve had a long evening.”

  “I hear you do odd jobs.”

  “I suppose you heard right.”

  “And that you prefer not to have to answer a lot of questions.”

  Silas only raised an eyebrow at that.

  “And that you’re in something of a difficult financial situation.”

  “Get to the point.”

  Coltor let out a long, heavy sigh. “I want you to find my daughter.”

  Silas didn’t know what he had been expecting, but that wasn’t it. “Your daughter?” He’d never heard that Brin Coltor had a daughter. Coltor was known as both one of the most eligible bachelors in the Wildings and one of the most elusive, though he did also have a reputation as a skirt-tosser.

  “She’s six years old. The A’ayimat took her.”

  “The A’ayimat?” That was another surprise. “How do you know? The A’ayimat almost never kidnap settlers, and then only when they’ve been provoked. I think it’s been years since the last time it happened.”

  “She disappeared from my ranch house a nineday ago. I tucked her into bed that night and in the morning she was nowhere to be found. This was on her pillow.” Coltor reached into a drawer of his desk and put an object made of a pinecone, beads, and several feathers on the desktop.

  “An A’ayimat wishcatcher,” Silas said. “That’s why you think it was A’ayimat that took her?”

  “That, and some blueskins were seen skulking along the boundaries of my land the afternoon before. My spread backs up to the Bluecloud range on the east, though I’ve got the fences well short of the markers. There’s some big clans up in the mountains, so I’m sure that’s where they took her.”

  “And you don’t think someone else took her, and left that so you’d think it was the A’ayimat?”

  “No. If anyone else kidnapped her, it’d be because they want ransom. There haven’t been any demands for money or anything else.”

  “So why would the A’ayimat take her and let you know it was them?” Silas asked.

  “How in the hells would I know?” Coltor snapped. “I haven’t done anything to provoke them; I keep my men and my stock well away from their territory. They just came down and took her for no good reason. I want her back.”

  “I’m sure her mother’s very upset,” Silas said, wondering who the mother might be.

  “Her mother and I parted ways not long after she was born.”

  “Ah.” One of those situations, then. If the child was living at Coltor’s house, that must mean the mother had abandoned her.

  “She’s the only family I’ve got, Vendine. Get her back.”

  Silas didn’t care for Coltor’s means of persuading him and Lainie to take the job, and he didn’t care for being ordered around this way. Whatever he thought of Coltor, though, the rancher was to be commended for his devotion to his child by a woman who had left him, and Silas couldn’t leave a little girl in the hands of strangers. “It won’t be easy,” he said.

  “I know that,” Coltor said. “Just get her back for me, and I’ll pay you two thousand gildings.”

  Silas’s heart nearly stopped. Two thousand gildings… With that kind of money, he and Lainie could make their trip to Piney Ridge without stopping, then head out somewhere far away and buy a house and land all their own, and live well for at least a couple of years on what was left. Or –

  The thought of Amber Bay stirred again. He tried to push it back; the coast was too far away, the trip was too expensive and too dangerous. But Lainie would be safe out there.

  No need to decide now. He turned his mind back to Coltor’s offer. Despite the rancher’s honest reputation, Silas had an itchy feeling that he was hiding something, and not just the fact that he was a mage. Surely someone who, as Storts had said, kept his ear as close to the ground as Coltor did would have some idea why his daughter had been kidnapped. “We’ll need half up front for provisions and expenses, a written guarantee of the rest, and whatever other information you can give us.”

  “You don’t need a thousand gildings’ worth of food just to go up into the Blueclouds and get my daughter back.”

  “No, but we do need to protect ourselves against the chance that you’re planning to cheat us, like your man Storts cheated my wife this evening.”

  “I’ve never cheated a man in my life!”

  Silas stared at him, refusing to give so much as a finger’s-width. The only way to deal with men like Coltor, who were used to having their own way, was to be just as stubborn. He would only lose Coltor’s respect if he backed down, and would gain nothing.

  “But I can see your concern,” Coltor finally said. “Half, then, and my written guarantee for the other half, deposited with the Bank of Bentwood Gulch.”

  “Which you own,” Silas pointed out.

  “All right, then. Deposited with the lawyer downstairs.”

  It seemed to Silas that Coltor gave in a little too easily, but with his daughter’s well-being and maybe even her life at stake, he might not want to waste time bickering over what was, for him, a trivial amount of money. “Good enough. What does your daughter look like?”

  “She’s six years old. Looks like her mother, except she’s got my eyes. Her name’s Shayla.”

  Silas waited for more details. None were forthcoming. Coltor’s relationship with the child’s mother must have been difficult indeed if he didn’t even care to describe her. “Your eyes,” Silas repeated. “Six years old, name’s Shayla, taken a nineday ago by whoever left that wishcatcher.”

  “T
hat’s right.”

  “Why did you wait so long to hire someone to look for her?”

  Coltor glared at him. “It’s not that I don’t care, if that’s what you’re implying. I didn’t want word to get out, in case some joker decided to make a false ransom demand. I’ve had my own men looking for her, but they don’t want to go too deep into blueskin territory. They don’t want to be captured themselves or provoke an attack on the town. I do have a contact or two among the A’ayimat; I asked them about Shayla, but they couldn’t – or wouldn’t – tell me anything. I’d heard of you two, and rumors that you had treated with the A’ayimat in the Great Sky range, out by Bitterbush Springs. When I heard you were heading this way, I decided you were the ones for the job.” He looked at Lainie. “You’d be Burrett Banfrey’s girl, right?”

  “Why, yes, sir,” Lainie answered. “I am.”

  “I know of your father. He’s a good man.”

  A smile flitted across her face. “Thank you, sir. He’d be proud to hear you say so.”

  Silas wasn’t pleased to learn of the extent of the rumors about him and Lainie, but he supposed it was too much to hope for that the miners, ranchers, and hands involved in the business in Bitterbush Springs would have kept their mouths closed about it.

  Coltor must have sensed his consternation. “Don’t worry,” the rancher said. “I’ve taken care to protect your identity and… other information that you might not want folks at large to know. So, do we have an agreement?”

  Coltor was hiding something. And venturing into A’ayimat territory was always dangerous. But between the money and the thought of a little girl stolen from her home, Silas decided it was worth taking a cautious risk. “Write out the contract, and we can sign it and deposit it with Tennir in the morning.”

  “Miss Tennir.”

  “Ah.” A lady lawyer. Another interesting turn. He wouldn’t have thought Coltor the kind of man to do business with a woman outside of the bedroom. Lainie being the exception, but even in this case it was Silas he was mainly talking to and treating with. Brin Coltor was just full of surprises. Silas wondered what other astonishing discoveries awaited him, and wasn’t sure he wanted to find out.