Bell Weather (41 page)

“Did he tell you how it happened?” Pitt said. “How exactly?”

“There were four of them,” she said. “It wasn’t thievery today. They blocked the way toward the inn. They knew him for a doctor when they opened up his bag and took his hand…” She gulped a sob. “They took his operating hand.”

“Davey Mun?” Tom asked.

“Showed his manhood and fought. They took his manhood to quell him,” Abigail said.

Tom removed his hat and almost tore it with his fists. The cold was like a razor slicing through his breeches.

“He walked with Benjamin a ways but finally lost his will,” she said. “Benjamin tried to save him, wouldn’t leave him there alone. Then he died and there was no good staying anymore.”

Tom backed up until he was arm to arm with Pitt.

“All to help a stranger,” Abigail said, taller than the two of them below her in the road. “I think of everyone in town Benjamin has healed. Nobody would join him. No one else would go.”

Tom swelled his chest, not defiantly but stoutly, swallowing the blame and holding it within him. Warmth escaped the door at Abigail’s back, candlefruit sweet until the night drove it in. Pitt bowed his head to hide beneath his hat.

“But it was me,” she said to Tom, “that put a wedge between you.” Then to Pitt, “And I’m the reason you were gone instead of here.”

She seemed to shiver deep inside, without a tremor on the surface. She was crystallized, breakable, and dangerously still.

“You’re riding out,” she said to Tom.

He answered with a stare.

“When you find them…,” she began, dispassionately voiced, and let her wish grow apparent, wrathfully severe.

Now he smoked until his tongue burned, remembering her words, and wondered how he’d bring himself to ride back home, to stand before Abigail and Benjamin again, if they didn’t find the Maimers and returned empty-handed. Each passing minute in the cold-clamped quiet made him angrier and lonelier. Knowing Pitt was near offered little comfort, so he smoked his pipe, and whistled again, and tried to blot his thoughts.

Hoarfur settled on his shoulders and his hat. Periodically he brushed it off Bones with his gloves, trying to keep the frost from stiffening his mane. The filaments gave the woods a moldering appearance, like a spiderwebbed crypt far below the earth. Masses of it drifted on the leaf-strewn ground. It draped off branches, delicate and pale, and now and then he parted it directly with his face and it clung, dead cold, to his stubble and his lashes.

Bones walked on, tirelessly patient even with the extra weight draped behind the saddle. They had passed Davey Mun ten miles out of Root, his body sitting up and stiff against a tree. Blood between his legs had frozen in the leaves. He hadn’t looked pained, only tired, only sad. Tom had studied him—the man he knew, able and courageous, whittled to a corpse and frozen like a warning.

No plan goes to plan,
Tom caught himself thinking.

He rejected any doubts. It had to work. They couldn’t fail.

He thought of Molly, how her clothes made her seem more petite, how exposing her had somehow made her more substantial. He could smell her even now, in spite of the pipe and cold, from when she’d hugged him in the stairwell and begged him not to go. The fire in the taproom, hot-brewed smoak—he would have it all again. He would find a way to keep it.

Bones shook his mane, lowered his head, and slowed, swishing out his tail and halting unbidden.

Tom’s boots strained the stirrups and he sat there, firm. The road was straight and narrow, covered by the interwoven wreathwood trees, and the longest wisps of hoarfur dangling from the branches didn’t drift, didn’t ripple when the Maimers first appeared.

There were two of them ahead, blocking Tom’s way. Their horses crunched softly on the leaves as they emerged, but otherwise the silence was remarkably intact, enough to give credence to their phantom reputation.

“Evening,” Tom said.

The Maimers kept their distance. It was too dark to see if either wore a mask.

“Hard night to ride,” the first Maimer said, sounding like his jaw had frozen at the hinges. “What’s your name and business?”

Tom puffed his pipe until it glowed:
Stay alive.

“My name is Tom Orange. I’m a tavern keep in Root.”

“A shit hole,” the Maimer answered, maybe about the tavern, maybe about the town. “What are you doing here?”

“I thought William Shepherd might need a hand,” Tom said. “We had news of an attack—a traveler shot and dying, taken to the inn.”

The second Maimer walked up closer on his horse, leaning forward with a slow, leathery creaking from his saddle. Bones held his ground, stamped twice, and flicked his ears.

The first Maimer asked, “What are you hiding there behind you, underneath the blanket?”

“A body from the road.”

“What is he to you?”

“A fellow man,” Tom said. “It seemed a sin to leave him.”

“How far did he get?”

“Say again?”

“Where did you find him?”

Tom drew upon the pipe and said, “Two leagues back.”

“Long way with such a wound,” the first Maimer said. “I applaud the man’s will. ’Twas his heart worth taking. And the doctor?”

“How’s that,” Tom said, low and taut.

“I wager he survived and told you we was here. It’s you I can’t figure, coming out alone.” He stepped his horse forward, next to his companion. He was angular and bearded, masked around the eyes, with the hoarfur grizzly in the whiskers on his chin. “Not a posse full gallop, but a tavern keep whistling. Don’t seem right, one against four.”

Tom sensed another two riders move behind him, coming from the trees and quiet as the others. He had passed them in the dark—even Bones hadn’t noticed—and despite having known they would block him fore and aft, it didn’t make the trap any more appealing.

The Maimer with the beard nonchalantly showed a pistol. Tom dropped the reins and put his arms overhead. “I haven’t come for trouble.”

“Didn’t expect us here tonight? Hope to fool us?” said the Maimer.

“No. Like I said, I’m riding to the inn.”

“That wouldn’t be an armed companion under the blanket now, would it?”

Tom’s hands seemed to freeze. Hoarfur gathered on his knuckles and his pipe, the latter still warm but slowly dying out. His gun was in his coat. All he needed was a second.

“I told you,” Tom said. “I found a body in the road.”

“And picked it up and took it with you, like a good Lumenous neighbor. Pull the blanket off.”

“My hands are in the air.”

“Do it now.”

“Not until you put away your gun,” Tom said.

“I’ll have your arms for that,” the second Maimer said. He pulled a knife. It was long and made a whisper-chime coming from its sheath, so sharp that even Nabby would have grudgingly respected it.

The bearded Maimer spoke to one of the rearward riders. “Get down and check the body.”

Here it is,
Tom thought. They were coming to it now, predictably and plainly, and he didn’t breathe once in the inevitable pause. A rider behind him cocked a gun and thumped off his horse. Tom faced ahead and listened to him walk: seven crisp steps in the ice-chip leaves.

“Get up,” the rider said, right at Bones’s tail and speaking to the body underneath the blanket.

No one spoke or moved.

The rider pulled the blanket off. Tom shut his eyes. There was silence for a moment when the rider stepped close, leaned forward, and declared, “This ain’t a body. It’s a scarecrow.”

Tom dropped the pipe over his back, behind the saddle. It landed where he hoped, near the rider’s puzzled face, on the scarecrow loaded up with smoak dust and gunpowder.

Even with his eyes closed, Tom saw the flash. It wasn’t an explosion but a huge, blooming flare, and the white-gold flames lit the forest like a sun. The Maimer at his back screamed and fell away. Heat billowed through the cold, singeing Tom’s ponytail and blowing off his hat. Bones reared and whinnied, frightened by the fire.

Tom spread his eyelids wide enough to see, drew the pistol from his coat, and shot the bearded Maimer.

Pitt was in the woods, having followed on foot. He shot the Maimer holding the knife, who was blinded from the glare: an illuminated target for a rifle in the dark. Tom trampled over the Maimer who’d been standing near the scarecrow, and Bones began to panic from the noises underfoot. The man rolled and groaned. Hooves cracked his ribs. A stamp broke his skull like a pumpkin in a bag.

The final Maimer, still ahorse, recovered his sight and fled. Tom spurred Bones and drew a second pistol. The powder in the scarecrow had mostly burned away but now the clothes were on fire, heating up the padding that protected Bones’s croup. Tom’s coat was burning, too, and flapped behind him as he rode. He felt the fire through his shirt, rippling to his shoulders while his face pressed forward in the pinprick cold.

Bones raced frantically to outrun the flames; if he wasn’t yet burned, he would be soon. Tom couldn’t shed his coat without hazarding a fall and wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t hesitate for anything at all. Bones’s panic had its use—they were catching up fast. The Maimer looked back and teetered on his mount, seemingly astonished by the fiery horse behind him. Tom cocked his gun, aimed hard, and took the shot. The flint didn’t spark. He tried again. It wouldn’t shoot.

The Maimer beat his horse but couldn’t pull ahead. Tom was at his flank, feeling fire at his neck. He flipped the pistol, held the barrel, steadied himself, and threw. The cherrywood stock hit the Maimer in the back, high between the shoulder blades, and knocked him off the horse.

Tom fought to halt Bones and rapidly dismounted. He singed his leather gloves pulling off his coat and quickly cut the mess of fiery padding from the saddle. The Maimer on the ground scrambled up and rushed forward. He was addled, he was wild. Tom drew his knife and caught him in a hug. The blade plunged deep into the man’s soft belly and his eyes stayed open, full of wonder, through the mask. There was a dimple in his chin. His breath smelled of licorice. The blood on Tom’s glove was comfortingly warm and the man didn’t struggle, only sighed and hugged back. Tom shoved the knife until it almost poked through, not sadistically but firmly, with respect for what was happening.

The Maimer slumped dead and Tom held him up. He laid him over the saddle of the man’s own horse, no small job with a body that limp. Tom and Bones had lost some hair and suffered minor burns, but they were mostly unharmed; they stood together, cheek to cheek, jittery and steaming in the bleak, smoky road. Once Bones began to calm, Tom remounted him and gathered up both sets of reins, and then he rode back to Pitt. There were things left to finish.

*   *   *

Pitt was standing with the bodies at the site of the attack, seeming more like an ordinary man than a sheriff. Was it affection Tom felt to see him trembling but alive? Did James Pitt smile when he recognized Tom, or were they both that desperate for a well-known face?

“Are you hurt?” Tom asked.

“No. You?”

“No.”

Pitt’s legs looked spindly and exposed beneath his coat when he hunched up tight, blowing on his hands. Hoarfur had already formed a veil upon the bodies. Tom dumped the final Maimer off and into the road and then they lay together, frosted, oddly beautiful and still. Tom’s first shot had killed the Maimer with the beard. The rider they had trampled hadn’t survived the hooves. Pitt had winged the third—the Maimer with the knife. Tom didn’t ask how the man had finally died, and Pitt did not explain the numerous cuts that marked the body. There were things you didn’t judge, things you might have done yourself, unforgivable but better left to conscience than discussion.

The trampled man’s coat showed the least blood. Tom put it on in place of his own burned coat. The Maimer’s warmth was in the sleeves and Tom was troubled by its source, by the intimacy of soaking in the dead man’s life.
I stole your heat,
Tom thought—
all you really needed.

He removed the Maimers’ masks and studied all their faces. One was handsome in a roguish way. One had freckles. The bearded man was oldest, with a grandfather’s eyes. The Maimer Tom had chased and gutted was a boy, no more than sixteen, with a once-broken nose that had not been properly set. What had possessed such a boy, such ordinary men?

Tom turned away. “We should have tried this months ago,” he said, remembering the limbs they might have saved if they had done so.

“Why didn’t we?” Pitt asked.

“It might not have worked.”

“Then why now?”

“Because of Benjamin and Davey.”

“Why really?”

Pitt was right. It hadn’t been guilt, not entirely at least, and it hadn’t been a spur as slippery as justice.

“Threats to me and mine got too close. They made it personal. I had to threaten back,” Tom said. “What did you come for?”

“It’s my job,” Pitt said. “I know you don’t respect that.”

“Tonight, I truly do.”

Tom began untying the Maimers’ horses from the trees, roping them together for the ride to Shepherd’s Inn. Pitt had walked the whole way to follow along in stealth. He mounted a Maimer’s stallion now, a beast too enormous for a man of Pitt’s height, and refused to reconsider though he struggled to reach the stirrups.

“That was a good first shot,” Tom said. “What was the distance?”

“Thirty yards.”

Meaning twenty. Still a long way from danger. “It occurred to me you might have let ’em have me,” Tom said.

“It occurred to me, too. But I’m a sheriff, not a scoundrel.”

“Was it a sheriff or a scoundrel chasing after that traveler this morning?”

Pitt’s horse was still jumpy from the earlier attack, his agitation heightened by an unfamiliar rider. He swished his tail and snorted, stamping on the ground. Pitt calmed him down with gently spoken words. He took his glove off and laid his hand softly on the withers.

Tom mounted Bones. “Did you find him, then?”

“Aye.”

“And got your facts about Molly?”

“That can wait.”

“Not forever.”

“Not forever,” Pitt agreed.

They left the bodies in the road to carry back later and continued on to Shepherd’s Inn to see what they could learn.