A Rope of Thorns (Hexslinger 2)

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?”

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?”