“You talk as though you have an army out there.” She poked her head out farther and made a great show of searching the darkness. “But if you had an army, you would have taken me by this time. I’m sorry, Geoffrey, but it seems as if we’re more even than you’d like me to believe.”
“You are insane, woman!”
She gnawed at her lips.
He edged a step closer, and the firelight was reflected like a ribbon of flame on the curve of his high black boots. “You have my sympathies, madam. And you have exactly half an hour to talk with your people. Whoever of them wishes to retire into the forest, will be given immunity. The others—” And he shrugged.
“There’s only one of us who would accept that offer,” she said, “and it’s too late for that. His name is Simon, and his body is carrion now.”
Hawkins did not react at all.
Cass gave him credit, and much more of her hatred. “I think we’re finished, Captain,” she said.
Without a word, he saluted her briskly, put his heel to his mount, and rode back into the darkness. She stayed at the door for several seconds more, watching the ghostlike after image of his departure fade to gray, then to black, until all she could hear was the sound of the dapple’s hooves. Then they too were still, and nothing moved.
A finger hooked into her belt and pulled her gently backward. Reluctantly, she returned inside and closed and bolted the door. Judah, his face gleaming with perspiration, shook his head at what he still thought was her foolhardiness—then grinned broadly.
“Don’ s’pose you gonna tell the others what he said?”
“Do I have to?”
“Ain’t no one goin’ anywheres, Missus.”
She smiled and rested a hand on his arm. “I didn’t think so, Judah. But you just don’t know how grateful I am to hear that, anyway.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
W
ar at Riverrun.
It seemed hours before the boy’s words had sunk in, hours more before Eric was able to react to them. He turned immediately to Jennings who could only spread wide his hands in ignorance. Eric scowled, then scrambled into the chestnut’s saddle and dug in his heels. His first thought was to ride immediately to Cassandra, but before he had ridden halfway through town he knew that his presence alone would not help to insure her safety. Yanking on the reins, then, he nearly spilled the horse and himself as he turned it about and rode for the sheriff’s office.
Garvey was standing outside, his hat off, his jacket and waistcoat unbuttoned. There were several men standing around him, and they scattered like leaves before a tempest when Eric rode directly at them.
“You heard?” Garvey said. His lips were quivering, and his face was drenched in perspiration.
“I heard, and I want to know what you’re going to do about it.”
The man made a weak gesture back toward his office. “Ain’t got but a few deputies. Ain’t gonna do much good askin’ them to fight against odds like that. Best thing we can do is wait a while and see—”
Eric was on the ground before he could finish; he shook off several hands reaching to detain him, grabbed the sheriff’s shirt, and yanked him close. “You bastard,” he said, just loud enough for the others to hear. Garvey grabbed for his wrists, but he was not strong enough to break the grip. “You bastard, I want to know what you’re going to do about it!”
“Ain’t none of our affair,” one of the men said, and several others agreed with him as yet another group, seeing the disturbance, strolled toward them, puzzled and ready to be angry.
“Listen to me, Garvey,” Eric said while the others pressed close around them, “there are people dying out at Riverrun because you haven’t had the courage to enforce what you call the law around here. You let one insane man come in here and take you over as if you were nothing more than a baby afraid of the dark, and you haven’t the guts to turn on the light.”
Without waiting for a reply, he released the sheriff with such a wrench that the man stumbled backward, into the arms of Proctor Johnson.
The one-legged man held the sheriff for a moment, then pushed him away like an unclean rag. “Mr. Martingale,” he said, “you got a problem?”
Eric looked around him, at faces strange and familiar, hostile and indifferent He wanted to speak to all of them as he had spoken to Garvey, cast them all aside, and forget them as quickly as he could. But as immediately that he had the impulse, he rejected it. He dared not do otherwise. This was not for himself; he had survived crises far worse than this and had come out, if not whole, at least alive. Cass, however, was far more important, and no matter whatever else he had been in his life he was not the kind of man who would desert a woman like that.
“Yes,” he said, “you know damned well I have a problem. And I haven’t got the time to give a speech about it.”
“Now see here, Martingale,” Garvey said, recovering some of his bluster, “we don’t need people like you comin’ ’round here stirrin’ up trouble.”
“Shut up, Garve,” Johnson said.
“Now you wait here just one little minute, Mr. Know-it-all Johnson. I got a right to protect this here town, and that does not include playing judge and jury when it ain’t called for. And I’ll thank you to have a little respect for this here badge, if you don’t mind.”
“That’s exactly what I have for it, Garve,” Johnson said, “little respect,” and pointedly turned his back on him. “Martingale, what’s all this nonsense about a war out to Riverrun?”
Eric took a deep breath, looked around him, and launched into a short and concise explanation of what he was positive the boy Henry had meant. And before he had finished, two other men chimed in with rumors they had heard about shooting out in that direction. There was a loud muttering, then, and an awkward shuffling of feet as Eric waited for someone to say something else. And when no one did, he took hold of the chestnut’s reins and launched himself into the saddle.
“Gentlemen,” he said coldly, “if you think Hawkins is going to stop with Riverrun, you’re sadly mistaken.”
“Could you use a gimp?” Johnson said.
“If the gimp can shoot, I don’t care if he’s blind.”
He waited no more than five minutes in the center of the street. He had no idea how many others besides Johnson would join him, though he kept insisting to himself that two, at least, were far better than one. Jennings’s horse, sensing the tension that flowed through its rider, reared once and pawed at the air. A buckboard startled it into an abortive run. It snorted, shook its nearly white mane, rattled the bit like tin bells in winter. Two horsemen joined him, and pedestrians on the sidewalks began to slow and stare. A third, a fourth, and now there was a crowd. One of the riders leaned over and whispered into the ear of a grizzled old dockworker, who scowled and shook his head angrily, turned immediately to his neighbor, and began to spread the word. A fifth, and the sixth was Johnson. The one-legged merchant waved Eric on, indicating that they would be following soon enough.
Garvey came running into the street and grabbed hold of Eric’s stirrup. “You can’t—”
Eric’s boot caught him full in the mouth, and he stumbled back several paces, bouncing off other horses, his hand clamped to his face as blood ran between his fingers. Someone cheered weakly. A horse protested. Eric wasted no more time—he bolted the chestnut through the crowd and raced into the wind on the road to Riverrun.
If one man has touched you, Cass, he swore as he rode; just one man …
C
ass heard the thunder just as the shooting began again. She looked around the kitchen hopefully, trying with her expression to tell the others that rain would be their salvation if it would only come soon. But Rachael, who had taken a position by the left-hand window, only looked worried; and Judah, after emptying his pistol through the shutters into the night, only stared at her with a slowly growing fear, his eyes darting toward the front hall constantly until Cass realized that it wasn’t thunder she heard. It was horses.
“My God,” she whispered, and closed her eyes briefly.
It took only a few seconds for her to grasp the fact that the firing outside had suddenly intensified without many more bullets slamming into the walls, splintering the shutters, cracking into the floor. She scuttled across the floor, staying low, so that she could see the front. Beyond the open doorway there were figures in the yard, many more riders than she thought Hawkins had at his command Several of them carried torches, and as one group swept by in a blur she was positive she recognized the burly form of Henshaw the blacksmith. She rose and grinned, and was turning to tell Judah when suddenly two horsemen drove through the barricade. Abraham screamed as he was tossed aside. Without thinking, Cass raced to the front with Judah right behind her. She fired at the monstrous shadows, missed, and was about to fire again when one horse’s shoulder struck her hard and she was slammed into the wall, her head striking the frame of the living room door. There were lights, burning, and in that fire that did not char she saw Gerald Forrester struggling with Judah. Her legs would not obey her, her right arm dangled uselessly at her side, and she could do nothing but cry out as the black man and the white man tangled together on the floor beneath the hooves of the two horses who were panicking now that they could not find room to run. She ducked to one side, and struck out with her good hand when the first rider skidded his mount next to her to pin her to the wall. The dress sword was cold against her arm. She tried to bat it away, and failed. Hawkins slid his left hand around her waist and yanked her off her feet. She screamed, twisted, felt a stabbing in her shoulder as Geoffrey used his hook to steady her, and urged his mount into the living room where, after only a second’s hesitation, it plunged through the tall French windows and onto the porch.
Glass embedded itself in her flesh, the horse’s flanks pummeled her, and she was forced for the moment to grab onto Hawkins to keep her legs from being drawn under the animal.
Hawkins’s laugh was insane as he veered the dapple around the side of the porch.
W
hile the others fanned out of the lane to either side of him and either rode on toward the back or left their mounts to plunge into the brush, Eric reared the chestnut to a shuddering halt and searched frantically about for signs that Cass and the others were all right and still fighting. It was then that he saw two riders leap up the steps and through some sort of barrier erected across the shattered front doors. Instantly, he spurred Jennings’s horse onward, but he had gone less than ten paces before it stumbled and screamed, and he dove to one side to keep from being crushed beneath its awesome weight. He lay stunned for a moment, then shook his head quickly and scrambled to his feet to get out of the way of his own men. He jumped onto the porch, drawing his revolver, and ducked inside just as one rider raced into the living room and the other rose from the near corner, a body at his feet.
Eric recognized Judah despite the blood on his face, looked up into the face of the man who had killed him.
The shouting, the firing, the screaming outside seemed to fade in stages until there was nothing left of the world but himself and Gerald Forrester.
Forrester smiled. “I trust you enjoyed your voyage, sir.”
Eric grunted, feinted a dive to one side then lunged at the man’s feet when the derringer spat death directly over his head. They went down hard to the floor, rolled into the front room and separated. They rose, closed again, and Eric’s fists sank into Forrester’s stomach, chest, the sides of his head. The gunman took hold of Eric’s sleeve and pulled him off balance, down to his knees, where the side of a boot glanced off his jaw. He fell, but had the presence of mind to keep rolling to avoid a heel aimed for his eyes. He scrambled to rest for a moment on his knees, his fingers lightly, brushing the floor. He saw Forrester casting around beside him, then straightening with a long dagger of glass clutched in one hand. Eric swayed to his feat. They circled each other warily, Forrester jabbing at the air to keep a distance between them while he waited for an opening to thrust his weapon through. Eric felt the blood on his jaw begin to run, felt a burning in his lungs, and he knew that he had to do something, and do it soon, or the gunman would have the final advantage. He stumbled backward, then, as though he had grown dizzy. Forrester, with a hiss of triumph, lunged after him, and Eric grabbed the wrist that struck toward him, turned it sharply and closed, hard.
Forrester’s eyes opened wide in shock.
Eric shoved him away, and he fell, the glint of the glass dagger protruding from his stomach like a cold flame trapped in ice.
Forrester squirmed on his back, his hands convulsing around the shard, without the strength to pull it out. Then, with sweat pouring from his forehead, he looked to Eric. “For God’s sake, man!”
Eric left him to die alone, running through the shattered windows to search for a mount that would take him to Cassandra.
B
y the time they had broken from the path into the fields, Cass’s shirt had nearly been flailed from her back. Yet she felt no pain, only a desperation that burned her as she struggled to break free. She was like an animal with no thought but escape, no desire but to draw a tormentor’s blood. And as soon as she realized they were free of the trees, she lifted herself as best she could and sank her teeth into Geoffrey’s hand. He shrieked and whirled to strike at her with his hook, and in that moment’s loss of balance she wrenched herself around and dropped to the ground. She lay there sobbing while Hawkins wheeled his horse about and rode up beside her.
“Get up,” he said harshly.
She only lifted herself to a sitting position and shook her head wearily.
“Damn it, woman, do as I say!”
She shook her head again.
Hawkins leaned down toward her from the saddle. “Woman, I have given you an order. You have exactly ten seconds to obey me! You are finished, done; don’t you understand that? It’s over, Miss Bowsmith. It’s all over.”
A horseman was riding up fast, she was sure of it, but she dared not look over her shoulder. Instead, she struggled to her feet, brushed a hand through her hair, and glared at him defiantly.