Dead Iron (9 page)

Too wild, they said. Touched in the head. A pity she’d never amount to anything. A pity she hadn’t died young. No wonder her mama left her on a doorstep.

Now, at the ripe age of seventeen, it was clear she was unmarriageable.

Rose tipped her face up and blew out the breath she’d been holding, trying to push some of the old pain away. Yes, she’d wanted a husband and children. Once. But that life wasn’t ever coming her way.

She’d lost it the day she told her daddy she wasn’t like other children.

It was the blacksmith, Mr. Gregor, who had taken her in. Let her sit at his bench and watch him work metal over fire so hot, it took her breath away.

She didn’t hear the metal like she heard living things. But she seemed to understand it better, the way it could be dug up, melted, hammered, and molded. She would sometimes stop still in whatever she was doing, caught by the realization of how a brace could change the power a matic could muster, or how an extra wheel, a shorter chain, or bits never put together before could make something different. Something new. Something worthwhile and good.

Some women were clever with thread and cloth. Some with cooking and gardens. Rose was clever with metal, spring, and cog.

Next spring, she planned on leaving. She’d take what money she’d tucked back for herself, and she’d ride until she found a place in this wide world where she could make things, turn things, devise things, no matter that she was a woman. Maybe she’d come up with a medical device, something that helped the lame walk again. Maybe she’d find a way to catch the light of a star and stick it in a jar for the kitchen table. Maybe she’d devise an airship powered by nothing but a song.

One thing was for sure: she refused to die out her days here, pitied, scorned, and alone. She even had a hope, though it was small and wan, that she might stumble across kin. That there was family out there somewhere, who knew the color of her mother’s eyes, and had once heard her father’s laughter. That there was family who knew her real name.

The matics puffed again, a loud thump of air pounding down. Rose wished she’d thought of bringing a coat or shawl. Even though there was still heat in the day, that Mr. LeFel sucked all the warmth out of a person.

He was clever; that was clear. He was charming and breathtakingly handsome. But he had the feel about him of a snake hidden in reeds. The strangest thing was that all the trees and plants and growing things went dead silent around him.

She’d never seen that happen before. Not once in all her years with all the folk who had stopped through her parents’ shop. Living things didn’t stop living just because a man walked by.

Unless that man was Mr. Shard LeFel.

Rose rubbed at her arms to take the chill out of her skin. Whatever sort of man he was, she wanted nothing more than to be away from him. She’d done her part and delivered the papers. If luck was with her, she wouldn’t need to be anywhere near that man for a long, long while.

M
ae didn’t have much time. By the new moon, she’d be headed back to the coven, whether she wanted to or not. She’d vowed her life to Jeb, and those vows bound them together stronger than anything else on this earth. But now that he was dead, other vows, older vows, were tightening down on her, digging in like a thousand small fingers, and dragging her home.

She paced the floor of her cottage, restless, already feeling the need to turn east. Cedar Hunt had refused to help her. Unless he changed his mind, she would have to find her husband’s killer on her own. And soon.

It wasn’t just the vows that would force her home. It was the coven’s magic.

Mae picked up a bowl of water that had sat in the moonlight, and walked with it to the hearth. Most magic could not be used for curse, for darkness, for pain. But in her hands, magic always followed a darker path.

The sisters refused to believe magic could be used for evil things. Mae wanted to believe that too. But when she called upon magic, it changed in her hands. And pain was always the way of it.

She’d done her level best to use it for good. Dark spells to speed the death of an animal who suffered. Dark spells to curse vermin so they wouldn’t enter the garden. With time and practice she had found a way she could use magic as a binding between two things. Health to a bone, ease to a soul. Love to a heart. These were all good things, healing things. But it didn’t take much for a binding, even the kindest of them, to become a curse.

And so she’d learned how to break bindings, untie vows, end curses, and stop magic from answering a prayer. It was not an easy thing to do. But she had practiced and learned.

The sisters were frightened of her and how magic bloomed dark in her hands. Though they never said it, she saw it in their eyes.

They had insisted she bind herself to the soil beneath the coven before she was even thirteen. And she’d done it, used her blood, and the blood of the strongest witch among them, to make it a binding that even she could not break. That binding was a rope around her foot, and if ever there was too much hate in her heart, or if ever she used magic for too dark an end, she would have no choice but to return to that soil so that the sisters could cleanse her of the darkness in her soul.

No matter what was in her way.

No matter her grief.

No matter if she wanted to stay in the home she and her husband had built, stay in the land where her love had died.

She had to return.

Mae absently wiped away the tear caught on the edge of her cheekbone. She knelt and placed the bowl in front of the heart of her home, the heart of the life she and Jeb had built together.

A small, bright fire crackled there, flames from the hickory burning clean and sweet.

To find him, she’d need a direction. Jeb had asked for work with the rail man, but he had turned him down—Mae had been there and seen firsthand how poorly Mr. Shard LeFel treated her husband. It had made her angry, but Jeb bore it like it was no matter. But when Jeb heard a rancher out in Idaho was looking for hands to drive cattle across to Oregon City, he’d gone to see if the rancher would take him on.

He should have been home more than a month ago.

She drew a strand of wool out of her pocket, twined with a thread of her hair. At the base of the string was her wedding ring.

She had been sixteen when Jeb Lindson came walking through town on his way out west. She’d fallen in love with him from the first time she set eyes on him, heard his warm laughter, his kind words. She became his lover that winter, and his wife that spring.

And those vows, to love him and keep him, until death did them part, were the strongest and truest she had ever spoken. Those vows had overtaken even her ties to the coven’s soil.

Jeb and she headed west to Oregon, with hopes of a quiet farming life on fertile ground beneath the shelter of the mountains.

It was a good life for seven years. Then something changed. Darkness crept across the land like a shadow cast by the railroad.

In that shadow, as mile after mile of iron was laid down, something Strange grew stronger and stronger.

And now her husband was dead. Fallen under that creeping shadow.

Mae drew the back of her hand across her cheek, wiping the last of her tears away. Crying would do her no good.

She could not see the future, but there were always hints, like scents in the wind that could send her down the right path to see that her husband’s killer was dead and buried.

She let her wedding ring dangle from the string. The weight of the ring guided the wool in a lazy swing. Nothing yet decided, no direction for her to follow. She concentrated on her question. Should she search north or south?

The wool continued to circle.

Wooden trinkets on the shelves around the room clicked and cooed, as wind from the window propped open on the back of a wooden rabbit swirled into the house, stirring and stroking the devices lovingly carved by Jeb. One little carving set with copper springs and wooden cogs was a pipe of sorts, fashioned in the shape of two squat miners standing in a wooden river. The wind slipped in through the pipe’s mouth hole, strong enough to push the miners up, giving out a birdlike warble as they rose and fell. That in turn shifted the cog, moving slots of the river slowly up and down, changing the tune like a slide whistle.

Mae glanced up at the toy. A much more delicate reed chime hung next to the whistle, yet the wind had not stirred the chime, choosing instead to make the miners dance.

Was that her direction? Miners? The Madder brothers mined the mountains to the north.

Should she go to the brothers and seek their help?

The wool across her fingertips shifted, and swung a new arc. North and south.

North. To the Madders.

She held her ring still against her heart for a breath or two. She had another question to ask. Would Mr. Hunt agree to her offer and come to her before nightfall?

She released the ring, and it settled into a counterclockwise spin. The answer was no.

Mae closed her eyes. She had hoped he would agree to her offer. Had hoped his hunting skills would make finding the killer quick.

She had seen the curse that lay coiled within him, but could not tell the exact nature of it unless he allowed her to use magic on him. He was a chained man, an angry man. But had refused to take the key she’d offered to put in his hand, and she did not know why.

Mae opened her eyes. She didn’t need the hunter. She would find her husband’s killer on her own and deal with him on her own. No matter how long that took.

The Madder brothers were said to be devisers, though no one in town had seen their contraptions. Likely they had weapons and tools suited for hunting.

She stood and dusted her skirt, then placed her ring back on her finger. A gust of wind, cold as winter’s heart, rushed into the room. She gasped as it bit through the homespun of her dress and flew into the hearth, toppling the bowl over and tearing the flame apart so quickly, it smothered out. So thoroughly was the wood snuffed, not even smoke rose up the flue.

Mae stared at the hearth and the overturned bowl. It was a dark sign, an omen of death, of Strange things.

Mae shut the window. So be it. She aimed to see Jeb’s murderer dead and buried. No matter how shadowed the path that would lead her down. She’d walk through death and more to make the killer pay.

She pulled her shawl off the hook, and tied her bonnet beneath her chin. Wooden clicks and clatter from wings and windmills and chimes hung about the house, stirred in the still air. If Jeb had carved words into those trinkets, they’d be whispering warnings to her.

“I mean to find his killer,” she said quietly to the small bits of wood and metal, to the memory of Jeb within them. “And there is nothing that will stand in my way.”

But all her anger wouldn’t kill a man. She’d need a weapon. The omen warned it might be more than a man she hunted. It might be the Strange.

Mae paused at the door, then turned back to her sewing basket. She took up the delicate double-moon tatting shuttle Jeb had given her on a chain as a courting gift. It was a good-luck token, carved by his hand and inlaid with thin silver vines and gold leaves. It was the most valuable thing she owned. She didn’t want to offer it up in trade to the Madders, but she would if she had to.

The knot of grief in her chest spread out and dug hard into her ribs. She took a deep breath and refused to cry a single tear more. Jeb was gone. His love, his warmth, ended. Now she had rage to keep her warm.

She folded the shuttle carefully within a bit of silk stitched at each corner with thread she’d spun in starlight, then soaked in rosemary. It wasn’t much, certainly not a weapon that could be used against the killer. But it was valuable. She hoped, if necessary, it would be a good item to trade for the Madder brothers’ help. If not, then she had coin in her bank safety box they might find fitting barter for a device that could kill a man or monster.

Her home was silent, not a click or whir from any corner. No longer filled with the sound of her spinning wheel and Jeb’s singing set to the tick of his carving knife over wood, or the hot iron and crimps as he bent metal. It was silent as the grave. Dead as her heart.

She pulled the anger and rage closer. If death was her only life now, she would embrace it. She strode out into the morning light, pulling the door hard behind her.

C
edar made good time over the flats past town, then around Powder Keg Bluff. The wind was at his back, and what clouds came up with dawn burned away as the day went on. He’d been by the brothers’ mine before, but not too close. The Madders made no secret of the trips and alarms they’d put in place to remind anyone who wandered their way of just how valuable they held their privacy. Rumors said they had gun-wielding matics that could take a man down at a hundred yards without a single finger touching a trigger.

Cedar didn’t know whether that was true, and hadn’t found a need strong enough to test the fate of a person arriving unannounced at the Madders’ mine.

Until now.

He pulled up a good half mile from the mine, swung down out of the saddle, and swigged a mouthful of water from his canteen before pulling his crystal-sighted Walker out of his saddle holster. He drew his goggles up from around his neck. The enhanced-distance lens might do him some good. He stayed on the ground, less of a target out here with scant tree cover, and pulled his goggles over his eyes, tipping the brim of his hat to angle a bit of shade over his vision. With a roll of his finger over the brass gear at the side of the goggles, he adjusted his vision to high magnification. He could also slip down a thin slice of ruby, which gave a man an edge on seeing in the night, or shutter the goggles with slit brass, which made sight in the glare of sun on snow more bearable.