Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The prairie soon began to deepen into the Sagescrub Valley, a relatively gentle fissure that ran up into the mountains to the west around a small but fierce glacial stream. Feris had only heard of about seven families homesteading up there, and Jinny Witchazel was perhaps the best-known of the lot. Gifted in the Art, she had a reputation as a healer and winder of clever cantrips.

Her homestead was just off the main road, a small cabin built to strongly resist the worst winter could offer. Its barn was integral to the structure, with a second story build high enough that, if necessary, the inhabitants could escape from them and snowshoe to safety.

“I think something’s wrong,” Feris said. She pointed to the field, where ensorcelled farm implements lay amid unharvested grains. They were weakly twitching, as if the complex enchantments needed to weave them into independent action were unfinished or unraveling.

“She must be an impressive mage of the Art if she can coax a harvest out of the inanimate,” said Eggebrecht. “Even the rebels tended to use thralls for that kind of labor.”

“And today you can just buy a horse-drawn harvester and get it done with no magic at all,” said Feris. She took the lead, tying the horses to a fence post and walking slowly toward the homestead with her hands up. “Jinny?” She said. “Jinny Witchazel? It’s Feris Skulljelly, from Smokewood. We’re here to talk to you.”

Nobody answered. Dr. Eggebrecht stepped forward. “Hello, miss? I’m Dr. Dana K. Eggebrecht, a researcher and scientist of some reknown, and I have a few questions for you about the edor!”

Still nothing. “Maybe we should try the door,” said Feris. Before Eggebrecht could intervene, she walked up and pushed. It swung open, and she trotted it, with Eggebrecht dashing after her.

The interior was a bit flavorful in its odors thanks to sharing a wall with the barn, but it was crammed with things useful for the Art, herbs and dried mixtures, with tanned and canned animal bits in equal measure. Embers were still smoldering in the fireplace, and a kettle of what smelled like coffee was heating in a magical blue flame on a nearby tabletop.

“Seems like we just missed her,” said Eggebrecht.

“I don’t think so,” Feris said. “She’s still here. There’s no way that, even with the Art, she could have gone far.”

“How do you know that?” Eggebrecht said.

“Like this!” Feris threw back a rug to reveal a root cellar; grasping the iron ring in its trapdoor, she pulled.

The light revealed Jinny Witchazel, on her back in the darkness, with a repeating rifle aimed upward and a cast-iron plate from a potbellied stove hanging around her neck and over her torso like a piece of armor.

“Hiya, Jinny,” Feris said. “Remember me?”

“What do you want?” Jinny shouted. Her voice was louder than it might have seemed, and Eggebrecht suspected that she was using the Art to amplify it a bit. He also noted that the azure runes that regular Art users tended to brand themselves with–to avoid having to constantly reapply them–were visible and luminous on her hands.

“Well, for one, we want to know why you’re hiding in a root cellar with a repeater,” Feris said.

“We also want you to know we don’t mean any harm and are just here to ask some questions,” Eggebrecht added hastily. “We can pay for your information.”

Jinny’s eyes flashed red, but it seemed that whatever cantrip she had used put her at ease. “Sorry about that, love,” she said to Feris. “You know I never was very good at reading you.”

“My life is a closed book, after all,” Feris said.

Jinny struggled for a moment and then got up, slinging her repeater over one shoulder as she slowly climbed the ladder up. Eggebrecht quickly saw another reason why she might have been hiding: she was heavily pregnant, her wiry frame looking fit to pop at any moment, and the makeshift armor she was wearing appeared to have been chosen specifically to protect her unborn child from gunfire.

“You’re…with child,” he said.

“Yes, thank you for that observation, love,” Jinny said, kicking the cellar door shut behind her. “I wasn’t sure if there was a baby in there or if I’d just gone fat, but with your say-so I think I’m more confident.”

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

Feris’s usual omnipresent smile disappeared for a moment. “People like things that fit neatly,” she said. “The edor make people around here, and even back east, awfully mad because they don’t fit. Most don’t look like orcs, most don’t look like elves, some can even pass for humans. They’re a living mirror, reflecting the fact back at folks that a lot of their feelings are wrong.

Eggebrecht, fascinated, tapped his chin.

“Ask an elf or an orc why they are the best of the sapient races, and they’ll babble at you for an hour. But if the edor can do things just as well or better than any orc, any elf, that means those people are wrong. They’re not better. And if they’re not better, that means nobody’s better. That gets the humans, dwarves, and halflings in a twist. Even the other half-and-halves don’t stick up for the edor, because they are too busy living with being mirrors themselves.”

“How do the settlers in the wilds react to seeing an edor?” Eggebrecht asked, curious. “I know that the half-breeds elsewhere certainly get an askance look, as if the unfortunate circumstances of their birth are any of their own doing.”

Feris shrugged. “They’re been killed on sight. And boy, does that make the wild folk mad. Mad enough that it’s not a good idea to run into them. Ever.”

“I am beginning to think,” Eggebrecht said, “that I made the right call, bringing you along, Miss Clutterbucker.”

“Wheel,” Feris said, suddenly all smiles again. “The name’s Miss Wheel.”

Eggebrecht immediately began reconsidering his statement a moment prior. “You introduced yourself as Feris Clutterbucker to the sheriff,” he said, confused.

“Exactly,” Feris said airily. “And I’m introducing myself to you as Ms. Wheel. I trust you can keep that straight, Dr. Eggebrecht.”

“As you wish,” Eggebrecht said with a long face. “Come on, I have a few more government dollars we can spend for supplies before we head north.”

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

“You know about the edor?” the dwarf said.

“I’ve heard people using that word in a way that suggest they’re not all that welcome,” Eggebracht said.

“Well, as you know there are plenty of bands of wild folk, and they’re not really united on much,” the dwarf said. “But the orcish wildfolk and the elvish wildfolk, up in the forests and the highlands and the mountains…they were more united than most on account of the edor. They’d set their chiefs up to marry, and from that would come edor, half orc and half elf. They’d be the ones in charge.”

“Interesting,” said Eggebrecht. “Go on.”

“And they were also the only ones the dragon would speak to.”

Eggebrecht pulled out a second dollar, so the first wouldn’t get lonely. “Why?” he said.

“A lot of people–myself included–think that the various sorts of folk are various for a reason,” the dwarf said. “But the edor…well, they’re a handsome folk. They’ve got all the smarts of elves and all the toughness of orcs. I think the dragon just like them because there were so few and it meant he had less people to talk to. Two edor won’t even make any little edor, after all.”

“What did they talk about?”

“He’d judge important matters and, if someone was naughty enough, burn them to ash. Everything paid for, of course, and a regular tribute on top of it besides. A big enough tribute, and Highclaw might just decide to go to war for one batch of wildfolk.”

The ethnologist nodded. “If these edor were in so well with the dragon, why didn’t he come to their aid against the settlers? The wild folk haven’t done well in that area.”

The dwarf nodded. “When the settlers first came, the edor went to Highclaw and asked that the he go to war for them. And old Highclaw, he demanded a tribute so huge that the edor couldn’t possibly pay it. He wanted a river of gold that they just didn’t have. So he did nothing.”

Eggebrecht nodded. “And for their inability to pay…they eventually had their power shattered and were driven to the periphery. The best homesteads and all the mines that had once belonged to the wild folk aren’t theirs any longer.”

“And it might not have made any difference,” the dwarf said. “The settlers weren’t on good terms with Highclaw, seeing as the dragon’s took a shine to eating their livestock right out of their pastures. And, of course, it didn’t take long for them to get word of the dragon’s massive hoard.”

“I heard Highclaw was eventually brought to battle in an ambush, forced from the air by cannon fire,” said Eggebrecht. “And that even with his dying breath, the dragon refused to divulge the location of his hoard, which died with him.”

“That’s right,” the dwarf said, eyeing the dollars and licking his lips. “You’ve probably heard of his bones, a ways outside of Smokewood. What do you think of all that?”

“I think…it might be interesting if there’s an edor around who spoke with the dragon while it was still alive,” said Eggebrecht. “What do you say, Feris?”

“Oh!” The young woman had been listening, rapt, to the old-timer, sitting cross-legged with her head between her fists. Eggebrecht’s comment startled her out of her attention. “Uh, I think that’ a good idea. Yeah, we should…we should totally talk to someone who’s talked to a dragon.”

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

“When that mob came, calling for old Peyton Grosh to hang before the law had its say, your daddy went out to meet them. Talked at them through the old steel door they had, the kind they keep against dynamite and your explodier magicks. He said to them what he said to me, that he’d see me hung when the force of the law was behind it and not a moment sooner. He said that he’d shoot every one of them dead before he’d see me lynched.”

“And you made him make that choice,” Cobb said. “You left him to die and saved yourself.”

The orc suddenly looked very tired. “I did,” he said. “But maybe not in the way you think, Mr. Tyler.”

“What?” Cobb said. “What do you mean?”

“When your pa told the mob that, they weren’t much pleased with it, as you might have guessed. They started to ram down those doors to take me and hang me, sheriff or no sheriff. Do you know what your daddy did then?”

Cobb shook his head.

“He came over to me, as that mob was blasting that door with everything they had, from repeaters to exploding cantrips. He told me that he’d be damned if even a murderer like me was taken illegally in his town. And he opened up that cell for me, gave me my gear back, and sent me out the back. Sheriff Tyler gave me, a murderer, a loaded pistol to keep myself from harm in what was to come. And then he looked those men in the eyes and died fighting them.”

Peyton Grosh was completely serious, his features stone-cut and sober, as he spoke. If it were a lie, it was a damn good one, and the tear winding its way down the outlaw’s rugged cheek was the best crocodile tear Cobb had ever seen.

“Old Peyton Grosh, he’s a wretch,” the orc continued. “Good for nothing but laying a beating on folks, being wily enough not to get squashed most of the time, and robbing people too dumb or rich to deserve otherwise. Nobody’s ever given a damn about me beyond what I was able to beat or lie out of them. And then your pa…he was willing to die for me. For me, who never did nothing to deserve it. Now I know it was the law and what was right he had in his mind, not old Peyton Grosh, but…” he trailed away uncertainly.

“And here I come to turn you in for a fat reward,” Cobb said. “For stealing horses in Smokewood. That’s what you did to honor my dad, go right back to your old ways.”

“Like I said,” Peyton said with a sad drawl. “He died for me, who never did nothing to deserve it. I tried to live a good life afterwards. I tried to be straight with the law. Hell, it’s why I came to Smokewood. But all I’ve been able to do is keep myself from killing anybody, and you saw back at the rocks that I was ready to piss on even that if it meant saving my own skin.”

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

“Well,” Peyton said when they arrived at the way station, “this is a hell of a mess, isn’t it?”

The house and barn were both ablaze, as was part of the surrounding prairie. Only glowing timbers were left of the barn, and skeletons inside were all that was left of the horses that Cobb had hoped for. “They didn’t even steal them,” he said.

“Of course not. This wasn’t about stealing anything, Mr. Tyler. It was about revenge.”

They found Alabaster, the station master, dead in his own front yard. He was still clutching a double-barreled shotgun with one loaded chamber, but he’d been cut down by a hail of bullets before he could empty it. His head had been severed and was on a pike out front, a grim sort of memorial.

“Killed him with cartridges,” Peyton said with a low whistle. “Bullets are hard to come by for wild folk most of the time. You know they had their hearts in it.”

There was no sign of the stablemucker, no bones or anything else. Cobb half-heartedly called her name, but there was no answer. “Must’ve got away, or got herself taken,” he said.

“Girl was a slippery one, I’ll give her that,” Peyton agreed.

The only other thing they found was the remains of two wild folk. An orc and an an elf each, to judge by what was left of them. Not that there was much of that, mind: one of them had been nearly sawn in half by some kind of massive jagged blade, while the other had been immolated in a fire so fierce that the dirt around her body was glassed.

“They never are afraid to use their magicks,” Peyton said. “Looks like they were rather free with them.”

Nothing of value remained at the way station; even the windpump had been wrecked. More sipping from muddy streams was in the cards, as it was an impressive walk to Smokewood. Both Cobb and Peyton were quiet for some time as the ruins sank below the hills.

“Have to admit,” Peyton said. “I was more right than I knew when I asked about how many people had died for your revenge.”

“Shut your mouth,” Cobb said, albeit weakly.

“You can only threaten to shoot old Peyton Grosh so many times before it stops being much of anything to lose sleep over,” said the orc. “And compared to what them wild folk did to old Alabaster, well, maybe that’d be a mercy.”

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

“What…who…is she?”

Peyton shrugged. “Never seen an edor before, huh? Well, take a good look. You’ll not see one so up close again, I’ll wager.”

“An edor?” Cobb felt like he’d heard the word before, but his brain was scrambled from the sudden shock of wakefulness, the sudden double report of guns followed by a still-warm body laid out before them.

“Yeah,” Peyton said. “The elves and the orcs living around here got it in their heads that they needed leaders with the best of both of them. So they’d shack up and make them some miscegenated bastards. Edor. You don’t see many anymore, since they’re sterile as a mule and the settlers have whittled down the wild folks’ numbers a good bit.”

“A half elf, half orc,” Cobb said. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

“They’re outcasts,” Peyton spat. “That’s what it is. No orc or elf from back east will give them the time of day. You did them a favor in putting them out of their misery. But this isn’t going to go well for you and me, with a dead edor on our hands.”

“We’ll get by,” said Cobb, re-asserting himself now that the shock had passed. “Pack up.”

Peyton looked down at the deceased. “Just gonna leave them here, are you? Old Peyton Grosh thinks they could do with a decent burial.”

“Well, old Peyton Grosh is like as not to share a grave with them if he doesn’t get moving,” Cobb said.

The orc gestured at the body. “She might’ve been trying to help for all you know. Where I come from, only enemies get left to the buzzards, and you’ve got no idea if she was one.”

Cobb paused over this. “I can’t bury her, I don’t have the time,” he said. “And you’ll forgive me if I don’t want to set you loose to do it. But I’ll say a few words over her.”

He knelt down, taking care to keep an eye on his prisoner, and whispered to the body. Then, rising, he cocked his head. “Let’s go. I’m as right with her as I’m gonna be, I think.”

“Goodbye, missy,” Peyton said. “Old Peyton Grosh sure is sorry you got mixed up in all of this.”

With a prisoner in front of him and the need to be vigilant, the rocky hill seemed to recede a good deal more slowly than it had come up. The big orc was understandably in no hurry, and Cobb could only issue so many death threats before they became hollow.

In time, they saw a great column of black smoke rising behind them. Cobb looked at it with some alarm. “Looks like they set the whole prairie on fire.”

“They might have,” Peyton said. “Edor are awfully respected among the wild old folk that are left.”

“You think it’s a funeral?” Cobb said, mildly curious.

“No, old Peyton Grosh thinks it’s a signal,” the orc said. “A beacon to anyone that’s around to let them know something bad’s happened. And maybe to get out on their horses and run them down for good measure.”

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

Missy lowered the brim of her hat to block out the sun. “Mr. Muntz,” she said. “There is a warrant for your arrest and you are openly bearing magical mischief on the streets of Smokewood in violation of a local ordinance. This is your last chance to turn yourself in peacefully.”

“No,” Muntz said. “This is your last chance to escape with your life, little thrall.” The flames around him raged still more violently, and a current of pure heat bore him a full foot off the ground, with puddles of freshly minted glass beneath. Muntz fired off a stream of molten matter at a hitching post in front of the jail, violently combusting it, apparently in the hopes of making Missy flinch.

She stood her ground.

“Prepare yourself,” Muntz said. “The Art is about to make an example of you.”

He drew his arms back, white-hot energy already building up about his fingertips, enough to char anything in its path to greasy ash.

Missy abruptly cast back her duster. There, strapped beneath either arm, were two pocket revolvers, halfling-sized, in quick-draw holsters. She ripped one out, leveled it, and fanned five .44 slugs into Muntz before he could finish his cantrip or even react.

The pyromancer, shocked, let his arms go limp. The energy he’d saved up mostly dissipated, but the sudden loss in focus caused him to pitch violently to the left. As the magical heat melted away from his body, he slumped onto a watering trough next to a tied up horse. The horse, perturbed at its drink suddenly being heated turned and gave Muntz a mighty kick, driving him through a plate glass window and reducing his chest to a nightmare of red mash.

Missy watched the scene unfold impassively, and then opened up her smoking sixgun for reloading. “Violence is useless, Mr. Muntz, because it doesn’t gain you anything. Are you any smarter for being shot down? Are you a better person? Have you learned anything?” She punctuated each remark by working the ejector and kicking out a spent shell.

Muntz lay where he had fallen, gasping and gurgling as his own blood filled up what was left of his lungs, not even able to summon the ghost of a flame.

“No,” Missy said. “All that you’ve learned is that the day of the mage being able to do as he pleases with the Art is over, since the most lowly of little lady thralls can put you down with a twenty dollar shooter.” Her gun empty, she holstered it and drew the other, aiming it at Muntz point-blank.

“I just hope that someone else might learn from your example,” she added. “Violence is useless, and it ain’t the law. Unless, of course, you’re a lawbreaker being met with reasonable force after proving yourself to be a danger.”

The pyromancer choked his last without the need for a coup; Missy spun her gun and put it away.

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

Missy asked around town, and soon found that Muntz had checked himself into the Royal Oscoda Hotel by buying a room from an existing tenant. The man had been paid a single dollar for the privilege, and had smelt of burned flesh when he did so. With a room secured, the pyromancer had holed up in the cigar lounge, according to the bellhop.

“Oh, look who it is,” Muntz said, seeing Missy enter. “Hello, little lady! You come to see your betters working miracles with the Art?” With an expensive cigar in his mouth, Muntz was making a series of lit matches dance in a figure-eight pattern about his hands. The other cigar lounge patrons watched with amusement, but the presence of a bellhop with a fire bucket was enough to tell Missy there had been more than a few accidents in the short time he’d been there.”

“You’ve had a busy day, Mr. Muntz,” said Missy. “In addition to a fight requiring the intervention of a deputy sheriff, I have people willing to swear in a court of law that you attacked one of Miss Scarlet’s girls. I’ll bet I can find another who’ll say you scorched him up good for his hotel room, and the Royal Oscoda certainly has a claim for malicious pyromancy.”

“You have an orc who doesn’t know his place, several liars, and a business that, if anything, is improved by scorching away the homliness,” Muntz laughed. “Hardly anything to worry your little head over.”

“Nevertheless, I am, as a duly sworn deputy, compelled to demand that you surrender yourself to the Smokewood jail for flagrantly violating your sworn oath,” Missy said firmly. “There to await trial or bail, whichever comes first.”

The locals in the smoking room moved away at this. The out-of-towners leaned in for a further listen.

“What if I decline, little missy?” Muntz said. “Time was, people without the Art couldn’t even make such a bold claim.”

“Times have changed, Mr. Muntz, and now the law is the law regardless of what sort of magic courses through those veins,” Missy said. “If you decline, you will be compelled.”

“Compelled!” Muntz roared. “By what?”

Missy reached into her duster and produced a piece of paper. “By the law,” she said. “This is a signed warrant for your arrest. Of course, things being as they are, I’m prepared to accept trying you in absentia if you were to disappear.”

Muntz flicked his hands, spraying lit matched all around the room. The bellboy and several other patrons scrambled to clean up the dozen small fires he’d lit with that action. “This town sure is full of people who don’t know what’s best for them,” he said. “Tell you what, little missy. I’m calling you out.” Speaking louder, while rising from his setee, Muntz continued: “That’s right. I’ll come to your silly little jail at sundown, to see it burned to the ground.”

“I always say that violence is useless,” Missy said.

“WE’LL SEE ABOUT THAT!” Muntz howled. “Sundown. And if you’re not there, I’m going to come looking for you.”

The locals looked to Missy, their faces apprehensive. “Am I to take that,” she said, “as a refusal of a lawful court order?”

“Take it as whatever you like,” Muntz said. In a flash, he had torn a hole in the Royal Oscoda’s exterior wall, filling the room with cinders and smoke. Riding a wave of heat down to street level, he laughed as he walked away, leaving glassy footsteps burned into the soil.”

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

At four feet six inches, Missy was utterly miniscule compared to the two combatants, but she put herself in between them all the same. “What seems to be the problem, boys?”

The orc jabbed a finger at Muntz. “He needs to learn how to hold his tongue,” he said.

“Or what, thrall? Or what?” Muntz said. “I could burn you to ash right now with a snap of my fingers, and there’s nothing you could do about it!”

“Now, I don’t know about all that, since any old orc on the street could take that neck of yours and snap it,” the orc said. “Watch all your bluster dribble out your mouth in a death rattle.”

“Like I always say, violence is useless,” Missy said. “Mr. Muntz, I believe you put your mark on a piece of paper that forbid you from pyromancy and other magical mischief in our city limits.”

“Would it really be pyromancy if I burned a thrall to ashes? Would it really be mischief? Way I see it, I’m doing you a favor and ought to be celebrated as such. Time was, folks without the Art who couldn’t understand their place got themselves ensorcelled for their trouble.”

“It would be, yes,” Missy said. “We ain’t in the business of celebrating people here who break the law.”

She turned to the orc. “You, sir, oughtn’t let this fellow get under your skin. He’s all bluster, and if you take his bait, you’ve just made him stronger.”

“Well, seems to me that he’d stop being stronger after someone broke him over their knee,” the orc said.

“Don’t do that,” Missy said. “That ain’t the law either, and as I always say-”

“Violence is useless,” Muntz said, finishing her sentence in a smarmy tone of voice. “Let me ask you something then, little missy. If violence is useless, what have you got to keep me from burning you to a cinder? Time was, you’d be a thrall too, since halflings never have a lick of the Art in ’em.”

“The law,” Missy said. “That’s what I’ve got. Violence never solved anything, never taught a man a lesson. Violence is putting down a mad dog when all he really needs is some training.”

Muntz held up his hands, and a sphere of pure molten fury was suspended above each. “Say I decide to torch this place down, purify it of all its reprobates and miscegenates and thralls, taking it as a given that the fittest people with a spark of the Art can save themselves? Who’ll stop me?”

“The law,” Missy said. “And that’s an awful lot of five-dollar words for someone who supposedly can’t read.

Muntz looked about the Lucky Maggot, saw all the eyes on him, and smirked. He snuffed out the flames in his palms. “Wouldn’t be worth it anyway,” he said. “A spark of the Art would be a waste. When Dad calls up his troops again, when everything’s set right, we’ll be back to make this place right.”

“Good,” Missy said. “Let me know when that happens, so I can give the General a proper welcome.”

Muntz spat on the floor and sauntered out, singeing the doors as he smacked into them.

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

The local watering hole, the Lucky Maggot was back to back with Miss Scarlet’s Boudoir and they shared an upstairs. People who were easily scandalized tended to keep to the bottom-most floor of the Lucky Maggot and convinced themselves that the Bourdoir was in fact a “hotel and gentleman’s club” as its sign indicated. The Lucky Maggot, by contrast, had as its sign a worm curled into the shape of a horseshoe with a beer in one hand and a clover in the other.

The place was booming, with a huge amount of noise from the treasure hunters and people who’d been stranded by the train. As the deputy sheriff, though, and a representative of one of the best customers the Lucky Maggot had ever had in Sheriff Dallas, Missy always had a table reserved. She and Vyrim got a small bottle of cheap stuff at the bar and walked over to fill their glasses.

“Looks like that electricologist actually hired Feris,” Missy said, nodding at a nearby table.

Dr. Eggebrecht was there, one table over with a pile of open books, lecturing Feris on something or other as the young woman listened raptly, head proped up by her palms. “Now, the thing to keep in mind about dragons like Highclaw is that dragons are creatures of pure magic, and therefore the lizardine form they are famous for is almost wholly a matter of convenience…”

“I’ve never seen her that engaged in anything,” Missy added. “Good for him.”

“But what about you, Missy?” Vyrim said. “You still trying to carry the weight of this wretched town on your back?”

“If my back’ll bear it,” Missy said. “Now more than ever, someone’s gotta keep things together.”

“That’s the sheriff’s job,” Vyrim said. “You’re doing twice the work for half the pay.”

“He gets to do as he pleases and so do I, but what needs to get done needs to get done.” Missy punctuated her remark with a stiff belt of her drink. “These treasure hunter’s’ll eat us alive otherwise.”

“What a thing that is,” Vyrim said, kicking back his own drink. “Do you think it’s real?”

“I know that De Blij stumbled in here with a piece of dragon-gold and a wild story of a hoard,” said Missy. “And I know Highclaw was real because what’s left of him is a regular tourist attraction these days, with people somehow thinking that his carcass holds the secret to the whole damn thing. Other than that…is it all right to say that I really don’t care?”

“Don’t care?” Vyrim said. “Seems that you care a great deal.”

“I care about Smokewood not going up in smoke, since I’ve planted my stake here for good and all,” Missy said. “That’s it.”

“Have you ever thought about just…walking away from it all?” Vyrim said with a sad little smile. “We could go back up to the Old Mission, just for a few days, like we did way back when. Get lost for a bit.”

Missy looked at his outstretched hand and turned away. “I can’t do that,” she said. “There are too many people counting on me. And you know what’ll happen if the rumors start back up again. You could lose your job, I could lose mine, angry letters about racial purity in the paper, and suddenly there’s no good conductors left on the Eastern and Wilds and no good deputy sheriffs left in Smokewood.”

“It’s not right,” Vyrim said.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s right or wrong,” Missy said. “It’s the law.”

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!