A Rope of Thorns

by Gemma Files

  “Well, he left, right after. So . . . no, we didn’t. Not like that, anyways.”

  Pa frowned too, but refrained from expectoration. “Hold up, though. Pargeter’s a pistoleer only, I’d always heard.”

  “Don’t know why the Doc would’a tried to take a pull on ’im in the first place, he wasn’t good for the effort. And believe me . . .” Frewer shook his head again, as though to clear it. “Seemed like Pargeter gave just as good as he got, in that direction.”

  Haish blew out a breath. “Well, that ain’t good news. Damn little redheaded . . . creature was touched enough, back when he was only humanish. And how’d two mages get cleft together in the first place anyhow, even with one of ’em not yet at full effect? ‘Don’t meddle,’ my ass.”

  The other conclavists looked each-to-each, equally unhappy. “Maybe it really is catchin’,” Mergenthal suggested.

  “Highly unlikely, I’d think,” Pa began, in reply, colliding headlong with Haish’s: “Goddamn, man, shut your hole! Think we most’ve us all know a happy load’a horseshit, when we hear it. . . .”

  “As it turns out—yes.”

  Marshal Uther Kloves normally spoke so deadpan that most folks tended to suspect him of jesting, whatever he said. It was one of the things most endeared him to Yancey, but it did make for difficulty in terms of figuring out exactly where he was headed, in public addresses.

  “I’ve had telegrams from all the other Territories,” he explained. “Utah, Colorado—far north as Wyoming, even west of the Colorado River. Always it’s the same: once the Weed gets a foothold, there’s only one thing makes it die.”

  “Fire?”

  “Blood.”

  “Any blood?” Mergenthal said, his interest suddenly piqued—he’d his share of back-stores, after all, Yancey knew. And if perhaps there was money to be made . . .

  Yancey could imagine Kloves giving that near-imperceptible little shake of his head. “Human. Fresh-spilled.”

  A beat of silence, eventually broken by Pa, bewildered: “But . . . that don’t make any sense.”

  “Hexation’s at the bottom of all this, Lionel,” said Kloves. “Don’t go holdin’ your breath, waitin’ for things to add up square.”

  Someone else cleared their throat. “Well, they do say the Weed doesn’t usually grow up so fast as Mister Frewer tells of.” Incongruously light and pleasant, this voice, though Yancey thought she recognized it as belonging to the mysterious Mister Grey, a tall, youngish fellow just starting on a serious walrus moustache, who’d rode into Hoffstedt’s Hoard only a few days ago. “But that may indeed be overspillage from this hex-battle ’twixt Pargeter and—Glossing, was it? The blood part, however, that’s true. I’ve seen it. Bleed a cupped double-handful from, say, five or six folks, spill it over the Weed and it dries up to powder inside of three days.” He paused. “Even heard a few claim their soil was the richer for it, after.”

  “That so?” Frewer’s mouth twisted, teacup slipping to thump the thick carpet, thankfully unbroken. “So all’s we have to do is offer up abomination, like the damn Philistines and Pharisees, and hey presto? Good Christ above, let that rumour fly free and folk’ll be pulling bad neighbours in off the streets, tellin’ ’emselves it’s better to cut one to save ten! You ever seen Weed-infected livestock, Mister?”

  Yancey hadn’t—but recalled all too well accounts she’d read, sprinkled over every news-sheet the Cold Mountain Hotel received. A cattle drive coming up through Bisbee had stopped in the wrong place for the night; the cowboys had woken to find their thousand head staggering ’round like they had worms—kicking, falling, dying. And then, once the renderers arrived to do due diligence, they’d found turkey vultures scattered dead every which way, wings and beaks entangled with fibres . . . after which the first tentative cuts had loosed a flood of guts stuffed with Weed, whose blossoms raised themselves up like snails’ stalk-eyes to the sun, seeming to peer ’round for fresher prey.

  Excise such places by fire, to the ground, then salt them over as Biblically prescribed, that was the common-held wisdom. Or wait for the government men to do much the same, under strict legality—but people seldom did. Most, like Mouth-of-Praise’s former citizenry, this ragged band of new-made refugees now shivering in Pa’s first-floor saloon-cum-parlour arrangement, simply fled.

  “We had to burn near everything, in the end,” Mister Frewer said, at last. “’Fore it seeded. And since blood won’t bring that back, I don’t hold it’d do the rest of us any manner of good, to know we might’ve saved ourselves the trouble.”

  A long tick of Pa’s desk clock passed, before Sheriff Haish spoke again. “Mister Frewer, just how many of your fellow townsfolk came with you, after the fire?”

  “All of ’em, near as I figure. A hundred and twenty, thirty—fifty? We didn’t take no census.”

  Kloves nodded. “Hard to fault you. All the same, Mister Frewer, we are going to have to talk this over somewhat. So, your kind permission . . .”

  “Yeah—yes. ’Course.” Though stumble-footed, Frewer still made the door fast enough that Yancey barely had time to duck into the linen closet, reduced to watching him stagger back down to where the rest of his delegation waited, through the half-cracked door. Then, soon as he’d vanished, she counted herself safe to take up station outside Pa’s doorway once more.

  “. . . can’t just let ’em in!” Hugo Hoffstedt, the tobacconist, was saying; a distant cousin of the town’s founding family, he was a coward and a snob, but wealthy. “Am I the only man here not a fool?”

  “Now, Hugo,” Pa protested. “Christian charity—”

  “Don’t you preach at me, Lionel Colder, with Miss Yancey set to marry and your son-in-law-to-be right here within earshot—your family’s jeopardized, just as much as mine! What if the Weed chases after their stink and we have to burn down the Hoard, too?”

  Sheriff Haish rolled his eyes. “There’s no proven evidence the Weed follows folks—”

  “There’s no proven evidence it don’t!”

  An argument impossible to pursue, let alone rebut—but the Marshal, often the coolest head in any room, didn’t even try.

  “Mister Hoffstedt has a point,” he allowed. “In these disordered times, might be all too easy to think Mouth-of-Praise’s ‘misfortune’ a tad convenient, a good excuse to get ’emselves dug inside our borders, so they could kill us in our beds and take all we have . . . but lookin’ at poor Mister Frewer, how likely does that seem?”

  A murmur of agreement ran through the room, and even Hoffstedt had the good grace to look a tiny bit ashamed for something he hadn’t actually stated directly. Easy to see how Kloves rose so quickly to his current position, by the relatively young age of seven-and-twenty; he’d parlayed leadership skills hard-won in battle into a peacetime efficacy. Yancey knew all too well he had already impressed her Pa as worthy of every support he could afford . . . including the boon of her own hand in marriage.

  He’s a good man, gal. I have to think of your future, what with your Mama gone—don’t want to work my hotel ’til you’re staring at spinsterhood, do you? All I want’s your happiness.

  She felt her head dip at the truth of it, automatic. For there were no fairy tales in this life, only patterns of supply and exchange—rules, regulations, methods and manners of payment. And she knew all that well enough, too; had the very job Pa thought to save her from, to thank for it.

  “No,” Kloves said, “the Weed’s undeniable, as both fact and threat. ’Sides which, you don’t want to back rats into a corner, when they’re desperate . . . not if it’s a whole bunch of rats, armed, and it’s your corner.”

  Hoffstedt said: “Well, that’s your job, ain’t it? To keep us safe.”

  Pa: “Easiest way to do that is act like we ought. Right, Sheriff?”

  “Right.”

  “Then let’s put it to the vote, shall we?” Kloves said. “Just so nobody thinks what I suggest carries—this bein’ a democracy, same’s every other part of these United
States.”

  You diplomat. Yancey shook her head, amused despite herself. Albeit one with a nice shiny tin star, and a gun to back it up.

  Seemed that shame counted for just as much as fear, however. The vote was unanimous, letting Mouth-of-Praise’s stragglers stay—for now.

  “All right, gents,” Pa said, rising, “I believe we’ll end in the loungerie, with drinks on the house. And Experiance, don’t think I don’t see you there, gal. Gonna be a sight of extra toil to do today, so go finish up with your regular chores, will you? I expect I’ll need your help most of all.”

  Flatterer, she thought; costs you nothing, ties me up all day. But merely said, out loud: “Yes, Pa.”

  He snorted, unimpressed by such acquiescence. To Kloves: “Cute little missy, she is—too much so for her own good, or mine. I do believe you’ve got your work cut out for you, Marshal.”

  Kloves, meanwhile—Uther—looked full at Yancey, mouth tightening in something which might as well be a smile as a frown. Am I work for you? she felt like asking.

  “I know,” the man who would soon be her husband replied, with preternatural aptness—to Pa, supposedly, though Yancey knew better. So she turned away, dropping a little bobbed half-curtsey to them both, yet still unable to avoid smiling a bit herself, as she did.

  Oh, she supposed she did feel for him, after all, “arrangement” or not. And most ’specially so at times like these.

  Then again, wasn’t as though there was any other option.

  Hoffstedt’s Hoard had gotten its name from the wealth its founder used to build it, the yield of an early strike of ’48, after ’Frisco’s California Star set off what folks now called a Gold Rush by trumpeting the find near Sutter’s Mill. Built around a grouping of strongly fed wells, it formed a natural way-station in the midst of the Gadsden Purchase of ’53, near-exact between Las Cruces and Tucson and close upon the Arizona border. The Cold Mountain Hotel was one of its oldest buildings.

  ’Course, Yancey herself never had quite gotten a clear answer from Lionel on the question of why a promising young clerk in Boston would suddenly up stakes, hauling his new wife and baby girl clear across the continent and headlong into a vocation she wasn’t even sure he derived all that much enjoyment from. But her Mama had let slip some hints, and Yancey’d made some guesses.

  Considered closely, Lionel’s claim to Christianity seemed an absentminded, perfunctory thing at best, and this skill with finance had often provoked the odd angry mutter about “moneylenders”—mutters she would have disregarded entirely if Lionel himself hadn’t always flushed and changed the subject, and gained context once she’d heard a few sermons from Pastor Cambrell on the Bible’s low opinion concerning usury.

  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 pyr
e. 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?”