Saviours of Oestend Oestend 2 (25 page)

Hands were suddenly scrambling around the ranch, rushing towards the easier of the chores that needed to be done. Maids were pushing past them into the house. Aren leaned against the wall, using his hand to hide his face, obviously trying to compose himself.

The maids were practically running to get through the kitchen and out of the way, and Dante realised why when Deacon came striding in behind them, looking just as pissed as he’d been in the courtyard.

“You and you and you,” Deacon said, pointing at Aren, Simon, and Frances, “in the dining room. You”—this time pointing at Cami—“go find Olsa and bring her there.”
He didn’t wait to see if his instructions were followed. He stalked down the hallway, scattering maids as he went, and Dante, Simon and Frances followed.
Deacon had to kick two more maids out of the dining room in order for them to use it. As soon as the door was closed and they were alone, he turned on Aren.
“Is there something about this situation that you find amusing, Aren?”
To Dante’s surprise, Aren didn’t flinch. Now that they were out of sight of the hands, he didn’t have to act as if he was scared of Deacon as they were. He dropped his ledger on the table and smiled at Deacon. “Well, yeah. A bit.”
“Holy Saints! If you can’t back me up, then why are you even here? You may as well go home!”
Aren ducked his head, although Dante thought it was more to hide his smile than because he was sorry.
“Yeah, Aren,” Frances said. “Just take care you don’t let your pecker flap any on the way.”
Aren burst out laughing, even harder than before. Dante wasn’t sure he saw the same humour in it they obviously did, but Aren’s laughter was contagious. He found himself smiling.
Deacon stared for a moment at Aren, who was doubled over laughing, and then at Frances, who was grinning ear to ear. Deacon was still so angry, and Dante knew he wanted to vent it more—to scream and yell and maybe punch somebody in the face—but there was Frances, with his great big smile, and Aren, who had tears running down his face…
“Oh fuck,” Deacon said. It was like a surrender, the way he said it. He put his hands on his head and leant back to look up at the ceiling, as if trying to find some balance, and a laugh came bubbling up through his anger. “Holy Saints, I did say that, didn’t I?”
“I think you scared them,” Simon said. His tone was serious, but his eyes gave him away as joking a bit, too.
“Scared me!” Frances said. “I won’t get mine out again for a week!”
Deacon laughed again. He glanced over at Aren, who was finally catching his breath. “Aren?”
Aren shook his head, wiping tears from his eyes. “I might need you to be a bit more clear on just what does or doesn’t qualify as ‘flapping.’”
Deacon snorted. And then he guffawed. And then he laughed, loud and hard. The sound seemed to fill the room, and it didn’t stop. Dante couldn’t remember ever seeing Deacon laugh like that, his hand on his stomach, leaning forward a bit, his shoulders shaking with it. It made Aren laugh again, too. Seeing them made Dante smile. In the past, watching Deacon and Aren together would have made him seethe with rage. But now, he found it didn’t bother him.
“Oh, holy hell,” Deacon finally sighed. He reached over to grab Aren’s wrist. He pulled him closer, and smiled down at him. “I promise the flapping pecker rule don’t apply to you.” He kissed Aren on the head and let him go, then turned to the rest of them who were sitting at the table.
“What about me?” Frances asked. “I’m kinda fond of mine.”
Deacon sighed dramatically. “I suppose the rest of you are exempt as well.” He sat down and folded his hands in front of him on the table as he looked around at them all. “So, now that you’ve all quit fearing for your peckers, somebody tell me what the blessed hell we’re going to do. ‘Cause there’s about twenty too many people on this Saints forsaken ranch, and I can’t take this shit another damn day.”
Cami and Olsa arrived a minute later. Cami didn’t seem to know if she should stay or go, so Dante reached out and took her hand, pulling her over to stand next to him.
“It’s about time you decided to do something,” Olsa said to Deacon.
“Are you gonna be annoying, or are you going to help?”
“Why would I help when you act like that?”
Simon and Frances shifted uncomfortably in their seats, but Dante was used to the way Deacon and Olsa bickered.
“Do you know what’s causing all the trouble?” Deacon asked her.
Olsa lowered herself with a groan into a chair. “I know.”
“Care to enlighten us?”
Olsa sat thinking for a moment, then she sighed and started to talk. “When the settlers crossed the ocean and found this land, it was full of wild things.” She picked up the salt bowl and dumped it out on the table, spreading the rough crystals across the table top with her hand. “There were wolves, like this.”
“You’re making a hell of a mess,” Deacon said.
“Disrespectful brat,” she scolded. “Hush and listen.”
“Fine. Wolves, all over the blessed table.”
“The settlers landed, and they started to build their towns and cities, and they drove the wolves west.” She put the flat of her hand on the left edge of the table and began to slowly slide it across the surface, clearing a path through the salt. “Wolves are territorial creatures, and now there were too many packs being pushed into the wild. Do you know what that leads to?”
It was Aren who answered. “Overcrowding,” he said.
“Smart boy.” She lifted her hand and indicated the pile of salt, forming a small ridge in the centre of the table.
“Overcrowding leads to overhunting,” Aren went on. “Which means eventually the food supply runs out.”
Olsa nodded. “Then the wolves begin to turn on each other.”
“Disease, too,” Cami said suddenly.
They all turned to look at her. A blush was creeping its way up her cheeks, and Dante knew this was something she’d learned at the university.
She didn’t back down though. “Lack of food means they’re weak, which almost always leads to disease.”
“Exactly.” Olsa sat back, looking with her blind eyes towards Deacon. “That’s what’s causing it.”
Deacon raised his eyebrows at her. “Wolves?”
“No, you blessed fool! Wraiths!”
The word seemed to echo in the small room. It was as if they’d all drawn a breath and were waiting to be told they could relax.
Olsa pointed to the empty spot on the table, where there was no salt. “This is the BarChi,” she said. “You’ve driven them off this land.”
Deacon was obviously sceptical, and Dante couldn’t blame him. Deacon leant back in his chair, eyeing the salt-covered table thoughtfully. “And how exactly do you think I did that?”
To Dante’s surprise, Olsa didn’t answer. She looked instead to Aren.
“The brand,” Aren said. “You claimed it.”
Dante had no idea what that meant, but Cami spoke up before he could ask.
“Animals and ecosystems sort themselves out eventually. Are you saying all we need to do is wait?”
Olsa shook her head. “That’s how nature works, but wraiths aren’t natural.”
“Wait a minute!” Deacon said. “Go back to this.” He pointed at the salt on the table, looking back and forth between Olsa and Aren. “You’re saying I’ve driven them off the BarChi, but that don’t make any sense! We’ve had plenty of men killed by wraiths here.”
“Yes,” Aren said. “But not since you claimed it. Think about it, Deacon. It wasn’t until I painted it, and then the night with the wraiths in our house. It wasn’t until you sang the marriage song, and then you went to Jeremiah and claimed the BarChi as your own.” He glanced apologetically at Dante. “You sent Dante away. That’s what did it.”
Deacon was thoughtful, but unconvinced. It was Simon who spoke next. “Aren, Frances told me once that when it’s just you and Deacon at your house, you don’t run the generator?”
Aren blushed, but he answered. “That’s true.”
“How’s it possible you can do that?”
Aren glanced at Deacon, obviously waiting to see if he’d answer himself, but Deacon didn’t oblige him. “Deacon is Ainuai.”
“Fine,” Simon said. “But you aren’t.”
Aren blushed even more. He glanced again at Deacon, but Deacon seemed to be lost in thought, unaware of Aren’s discomfort. “I have a mark.”
“The marks you both have?” Frances asked. “The brand with the A?”
Dante had never seen any such mark on either of them, and he wondered briefly how exactly Frances knew about them, but it seemed like an inopportune time to ask.
“Yes.” Aren unbuttoned the top of his shirt and pulled it aside to reveal a scar on his chest. Not the thick, mottled scar caused by a brand, but a thin, pale line made by a blade. Even so, the shape of the BarChi brand was easily discernible.
“Holy Saints,” Dante said with sudden realisation. “He’s right! When I first left the BarChi, I had two nights at the shack without the generator.” He didn’t bother to mention why. “Wraiths never came. And I rode through the night to get Cami from town and made it fine.”
Simon nodded. “That actually makes sense. The other night, Frances and I left Aren’s house after dark.” Dante noticed how Simon turned beet red as he said that. He turned to face Frances. “You stayed out for hours in the night, and you were fine.”
Frances nodded. “That’s true.”
Deacon looked back and forth between them all, disbelief written on his face. “You’re saying anybody with the brand is safe?”
They all looked around at each other as if expecting somebody else to give them a definitive answer.
“If that were the case, Brighton would be alive,” Deacon said.
“No,” Aren said. “He died before you claimed it.”
“Don’t you feel guilty about that, either,” Olsa said. “His sons and wife would still be dead. Even if you had claimed it before then, having the brand would have saved his life, but not his heart.”
“Well,” Cami said, “if all this is true, then it’s like the wards, right? Everybody just needs to put the BarChi brand on themselves or on their house, and they’ll be safe?”
Both Olsa and Deacon were already shaking their heads. “It don’t work that way,” Olsa said. “Because Deacon’s got to mean it. Every boy who comes through here and works this ranch, Deacon takes on as his own, for the time they’re here. He takes responsibility for each and every one of them. That brand proves they worked here, and if they worked here, he had them under his wing. It won’t work the same for men he has no responsibility for.”
Deacon sighed. He leant forward and rubbed his temples with his hands. “Fine,” he said. “Let’s say I believe you—that I somehow made this safe haven in the middle of the wraiths, and I pushed them off their land. You’re saying it’s them being pushed away and into each other that’s making all this trouble?”
Olsa nodded. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“If I caused it, then I got to fix it,” Deacon said. He turned to Olsa. “So what do we need to do?”
Olsa shrugged. “I told you the problem. I never said I knew the solution.”
Deacon groaned and put his head in his hands. “If you don’t, then who will?”
Dante looked around the room. Everybody else was watching Deacon or Olsa. Everybody else appeared lost, as if they were waiting for an answer. Everybody, except for Aren.
Aren was chewing his lip thoughtfully. His eyes were moving back and forth, but Dante recognised that his vision was focused inward. He was pondering something. Not only that, he seemed cautiously optimistic about it.
In the past, it might have irritated Dante, but not now. Aren had broken down Deacon’s walls. He’d known about Cami. He’d sent her to Brighton. He’d known about the brand. Somehow, Aren had a knack for finding answers.
“What is it, Aren?” Dante asked.
Aren blushed, obviously surprised to find them all suddenly staring at him. He started to shake his head, to say it was nothing, but Dante didn’t let him.
“I think you have an idea,” he said. “I’d like to hear it.”
“The horse’s ass is right,” Olsa said, and Dante found himself laughing at her reference to him. Somehow, it made him feel loved more than if she’d said his name. “I can’t see what you’re thinking,” she said to Aren, “but I can feel its power. I can feel the strength of your hope, and I don’t think it’s wrong.”
“Symbols have power,” he said to her.
“Blessed Saints!” Deacon swore. “Will one of you tell me what the hell you’re talking about?”
“Well,” Aren began cautiously, “Deacon’s claiming of the BarChi was sort of accidental, but I don’t see why it couldn’t be repeated.”
“What exactly does that mean?” Simon asked.
Aren opened his ledger. He flipped quickly to a blank page at the back of the book, then pulled a pencil out of his pocket and handed it to Deacon. “Draw the ward that lays the wraiths to rest.”
Deacon took the pencil, but he shook his head at Aren. “It don’t matter. You have to do it in the exact place they died. Like Olsa told you before, we’d have to walk the entire length of Oestend.”
Aren, who’d been standing up until then, pulled a chair up and sat down to meet Deacon’s eyes. “You claimed the BarChi with a painting,” he said.
Dante wasn’t really sure what that meant, but he could tell Deacon was pondering Aren’s words, wondering if it would work.
“We have the map Dante found,” Aren said. “I can use it as the canvas. I’ll paint the sign. You and Olsa can sing it.”
“It won’t work, boy,” Olsa said. “It’s a fine idea, but the magic’s not big enough. Not here. We’re too far from the ancestors.”
“Is there someplace closer, where the magic
is
big enough?” Aren asked.
Olsa pursed her lips and looked away, staring with her white eyes into the far corner of the room. It was Cami who broke the silence.
“What about the lay-en…” She stumbled on the unfamiliar words. “Lay-nah-ro—”
Olsa’s chair legs scraped harshly across the floor as she turned on Cami. “How do you know that word?”
“I don’t know.” Cami’s face was pale. She pulled the long sleeves of her sweater over her hands and hugged her stomach as she faced Olsa’s frightening gaze. “From the stories.”
“What stories?”
Cami glanced around the room as if for help, but nobody seemed to have any to give. “The stories,” she said again. “Hasn’t everybody heard them?”
Everybody was slowly shaking their heads. Everybody except Deacon.
“Olsa,” he said, his voice slow and stern. “What does she mean?”
“Nothing!”
Olsa had practically spat the word at him, but her anger seemed to intrigue him. He sat up straighter in his chair and leaned towards her. “Lai’i n’ahro,” he said.
“What does it mean?” Aren asked him.
Deacon kept his gaze on Olsa, but he answered. “It’s a twisted phrase. Kind of clever, the way the words overlap. It could mean ‘sky table’. It could also mean, ‘table for ancestors’.”
“It’s nothing,” Olsa said again.
“You expect me to believe that?”
Olsa turned away from Deacon without a word. Deacon looked to Cami for help. Cami looked back at Dante, her unease clearly visible on her face.
He squeezed her hand. “Tell us about the stories.”
She was still unsure, and she spoke to him directly rather than to the table at large. “When Paulus Redmond returned from his expedition, he told a story of the Ainuai. See, the second year of his expedition, there was a drought. Nothing grew. Animals were dropping dead all over the prairie. The Ainuai told Paulus that they were going to appeal to the ancestors to send them rain, but they said for a request so big, they had to go to the lay-ai—”