A Rope of Thorns (Hexslinger 2)

“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.