Dangerous Women. Part III

“Bastards,” Shy whispered, cursing the day she ever took up with them. But you have to take up with someone, don’t you? And you can only pick from what’s on offer.

Jeg stretched his back, took a long sniff and a comfortable spit, then drew his sword. That curved cavalry sword he was so proud of with the clever-arsed basketwork, which he said he’d won in a duel with a Union officer, but that Shy knew he’d stolen, along with the best part of everything else he’d ever owned. How she’d mocked him about that stupid sword. She wouldn’t have minded having it to hand now, though, and him with only her eating knife.

“Smoke!” bellowed Jeg, and Shy winced. She’d no idea who’d thought that name up for her. Some wag had lettered it on the bills for her arrest and now everyone used it. On account of her tendency to vanish like smoke, maybe. Though it could also have been on account of her tendencies to stink like it, stick in folks’ throats, and drift with the wind.

“Get out here, Smoke!” Jeg’s voice clapped off the dead fronts of the buildings, and Shy shrank a little further into the darkness. “Get out here and we won’t hurt you too bad when we find you!”

So much for taking the money and going. They wanted the price on her too. She pressed her tongue into the gap between her teeth and mouthed, “Cocksuckers.” There’s a certain kind of man, the more you give him, the more he’ll take.

“We’ll have to go and get her,” she heard Neary say in the stillness.

“Aye.”

“I told you we’d have to go and get her.”

“You must be pissing your pants with joy over the outcome, then, eh?”

“Said we’d have to get her.”

“So stop pointing it out and get it done.”

Dodd’s wheedling voice. “Look, the money’s here, we could just scrape this up and get off, there ain’t no need to—”

“Did you and I really spring from between the same set o’ legs?” sneered Jeg at his brother. “You are the stupidest bastard.”

“Stupidest,” said Neary.

“You think I’m leaving four thousand marks for the crows?” said Jeg. “You scrape that up, Dodd, we’ll break the mare.”

“Where do you reckon she is?” asked Neary.

“I thought you was the big tracker?”

“Out in the wild, but we ain’t in the wild.”

Jeg cocked an eyebrow at the empty shacks. “You’d call this the highest extent of civilisation, would you?”

They looked at each other a moment, dust blowing up around their legs, then settling again.

“She’s here somewhere,” said Neary.

“You think? Good thing I got the self-described sharpest eyes west of the mountains with me, so I don’t miss her dead horse ten fucking strides away. Yes, she’s here somewhere.”

“Where do you reckon?” asked Neary.

“Where would you be?”

Neary looked about the buildings and Shy jerked out of the way as his narrowed eyes darted over the tavern.

“In that one, I reckon, but I ain’t her.”

“Course you ain’t fucking her. You know how I can tell? You got bigger tits and less sense. If you was her, I wouldn’t have to fucking look for her now, would I?”

Another silence, another dusty gust. “Guess not,” said Neary.

Jeg took his tall hat off, scrubbed at his sweaty hair with his fingernails, and jammed it back on at an angle. “You look in there, I’ll try the one next to it, but don’t kill the bitch, eh? That’ll half the reward.”

Shy eased back into the shadows, feeling the sweat tickling under her shirt. To be caught in this worthless arsehole of a place. By these worthless bastards. In bare feet. She didn’t deserve this. All she’d wanted was to be somebody worth speaking of. To not be nothing, forgotten on the day of her death. Now she saw that there’s a sharp balance between too little excitement and a huge helping too much. But like most of her lame-legged epiphanies, it had dawned a year too late.

She sucked air through the little gap between her teeth as she heard Neary creaking across the boards in the common room, maybe just the metal rattle of that big axe. She was shivering all over. Felt so weak of a sudden she could hardly hold the knife up, let alone imagine swinging it. Maybe it was time to give up. Toss the knife out the door and say, “I’m coming out! I’ll be no trouble! You win!” Smile and nod and thank ’em for their betrayal and their kind consideration when they kicked the shit out of her or horsewhipped her or broke her legs and whatever else amused them on the way to her hanging.

She’d seen her share of those and never relished the spectacle. Standing there tied while they read your name and your crime, hoping for some last reprieve that wouldn’t come while the noose was drawn tight, sobbing for mercy or hurling your curses and neither making the slightest hair of difference. Kicking at nothing, tongue stuck out while you shat yourself for the amusement of scum no better’n you. She pictured Jeg and Neary, up front in the grinning crowd as they watched her do the thief’s dance at rope’s end. Probably arrayed in even more ridiculous clothes secured with the reward money.

“Fuck them,” she mouthed at the darkness, lips curling back in a snarl as she heard Neary’s foot on the bottom step.

She had a hell of a contrary streak, did Shy. From when she was a tot, when someone told her how things would be, she immediately started thinking on how she’d make ’em otherwise. Her mother had always called her mule stubborn, and blamed it on her Ghost blood. “That’s your damn Ghost blood,” as though being quarter savage had been Shy’s own choice rather than on account of her mother picking out a half-Ghost wanderer to lie with who turned out—no crashing surprise—to be a no-good drunk.

Shy would be fighting. No doubt she’d be losing, but she’d be fighting. She’d make those bastards kill her and at least rob ’em of half the reward. Might not expect such thoughts as those to steady your hand, but they did hers. The little knife still shook, but now from how hard she was gripping it.

For a man who proclaimed himself the great tracker, Neary had some trouble keeping quiet. She heard the breath in his nose as he paused at the top of the steps, close enough to touch if it hadn’t been for the plank wall between them.

A board groaned as he shifted his weight and Shy’s whole body tensed, every hair twitching up. Then she saw him—not darting through the doorway at her, axe in his fist and murder in his eyes, but creeping off down the balcony after the bait of bloody footsteps, drawn bow pointed exactly the wrong way.

When she was given a gift, Shy had always believed in grabbing it with both hands rather than thinking on how to say thank you. She dashed at Neary’s back, teeth bared and a low growl ripping at her throat. His head whipped around, the whites of his eyes showing and the bow following after, the head of the arrow glinting with such light as found that abandoned place.

She ducked low and caught him around the legs, shoulder driving hard into his thigh and making him grunt, her hand finding her wrist and clamping tight under Neary’s arse, her nose suddenly full of the horse-and-sour sweat stink of him. The bowstring went, but Shy was already straightening, snarling, screaming, bursting up, and—big man though he was—she hoisted Neary right over the rail as neat as she used to hoist a sack of grain on her mother’s farm.

He hung in the air a moment, mouth and eyes wide with shock, then he plummeted with a breathy whoop and crashed through the boards down below.

Shy blinked, hardly able to believe it. Her scalp was burning and she touched a finger to it, half expecting to feel the arrow stuck right in her brains, but she turned and saw it was in the wall behind her, a considerably happier outcome from her standpoint. Blood, though, sticky in her hair, tickling at her forehead. Maybe the lath of the bow scratched her. Get that bow, she’d have a chance. She made a step towards the stairs, then stopped dead. Jeg was in the doorway, his sword a long, black curve against the sun-glare of the street.

“Smoke!” he roared, and she was off down the balcony like a rabbit, following her own trail of bloody footprints to nowhere, hearing Jeg’s heavy boots clomping towards the stairs. She hit the door at the end full tilt with her shoulder and burst into the light, out onto another balcony behind the building. Up onto the low rail with one bare foot—better to just go with her contrary streak and hope it somehow carried her through than to pause for thought—and she jumped. Flung herself writhing at a ramshackle balcony on the building across the narrow lane, as if flapping her hands and feet like she was having a fit might carry her further.

She caught the rail, wood smashing her in the ribs, slipped down, groaning, clawing for a grip, fought desperately to drag herself up and over, felt something give—

And with a groan of tortured wood the whole weather-blasted thing tore from the side of the building.

Again Shy was given a flailing instant aloft to consider the situation. Again not good, at a brief assay. She was just starting to wail when her old enemy the ground caught up with her—as the ground always will—folded up her left leg, spun her over, then smashed her in the side and drove her wind right out.

Shy coughed, then moaned, then spat more grit. That she had been right about her earlier sandy mouth not being her last was scant comfort. She saw Jeg standing on the balcony where she’d jumped. He pushed his hat back and gave a chuckle, then ducked back inside.

She still had a piece of the rail in her fist, well rotted through. A little like her hopes. She tossed it away as she rolled over, waiting again for that sick pain that told her she was done. Again it didn’t come. She could move. She worked her feet around and guessed that she could stand. But she thought that she might leave that for now. Chances were she’d only get to do it one more time.

She floundered clear of the tangle of broken wood against the wall, her shadow stretching out towards the doorway, groaning with pain as she heard Jeg’s heavy footsteps inside. She started wriggling back on her arse and her elbows, dragging one leg after, the little knife blade hidden up behind her wrist, her other fist clutching at the dirt.

“Where are you off to?” Jeg ducked under the low lintel and into the lane. He was a big man, but he looked a giant right then. Half a head taller than Shy, even if she’d been standing, and probably not much short of twice her weight, even if she’d eaten that day. He strutted over, tongue wedged into his lower lip so it bulged out, heavy sword loose in his hand, relishing his big moment.

“Pulled a neat trick on Neary, eh?” He pushed the brim of his hat up a little to show the tan mark across his forehead. “You’re stronger’n you look. That boy’s so dumb he could’ve fallen without the help, though. You’ll be pulling no tricks on me.”