Cold Copper

Chapter Twenty-nine

Cedar knew the sheriff wasn’t intending to negotiate with them. Half the people in the room, including the Madder brothers, had fought their way out from behind his city’s bars. He was most likely hoping they’d walk out, hands up, so he could shoot them in cold blood and not have to worry about stringing the gallows.

Alun held the back door open for Rose. “Now’s the time to decide. Wagon’s rolling.”

Rose grabbed her coat and rushed across the room. She must want to say good-bye to Mae and Mr. Hunt. She must want to say good-bye to Hink. But the entire kitchen was in a jumble of people hurrying up to either run for the back door or take a stand.

“What about Father Kyne?” Mae asked as she snatched up a cloth tied around a bundle of herbs for her spell casting.

“We’ll stay with him.” Miss Dupuis walked into the kitchen with her rifle and sidearm. “We’ll protect him.”

“I’ll stay with you, Miss Dupuis,” Mr. Wicks said. “See if I can talk some sense into the men out there. Either with words or bullets. Whichever seems to get more results.”

“Go,” Hink said as he stood. He wavered a bit and planted his palm on the table to keep himself steady. “Get the children. Get the Holder. Get whatever it is we need so we can get the hell out of here. We’ll be fine.” Then he added a little more gently, “I’ll be fine, Rose. Go.”

Cedar wondered if she heard the good-bye in his tone.

Cedar strode to the door and put his hand on Rose’s shoulder. She pressed her lips together, then let out a breath. And with that look of determination she often wore, she turned and ran after Alun Madder, who was already on the slowly rolling wagon, his hand held down for her to catch. As soon as Rose was safely up in the wagon, Bryn Madder snapped the reins and set the horses to galloping. Straight at three mounted lawmen who stepped out from behind the barn to stop them.

Cedar knew what the Madders were doing. They were causing a distraction so he, Mae, and Wil could reach the barn, the horses, and hurry out to the river.

Mae had her gun drawn and so did Cedar as they made a run for the barn. The sheriff had been stretching the truth a bit. The church wasn’t completely surrounded, and there were no other men around the barn.

The horses inside the barn were saddled. He didn’t know who had taken the time to see to it, other than maybe Miss Dupuis and Mr. Wicks. Whoever it was, he silently thanked them. There was an ax hanging on the wall, and he took that before swinging up into the saddle. Mae was already astride her horse.

Then they rode as quickly and quietly as they could out of the barn and across the field through spindly trees and shadows, Wil leading a winding path to the river.

Cedar was breathing hard. Everything was more difficult with the tie between him and Father Kyne. He felt Father Kyne’s pain, felt the draining weariness of his wounds as if they were his own. And the aches and pains he’d been enduring since he came to town felt even worse. Wil felt Kyne’s pain too, but seemed to tolerate it much better than he did.

Cedar could bear this pain for a few hours, maybe for a day or two if he could spend them in a sickbed, but if Kyne didn’t begin to mend or heal in that time, Mae would have to break the spell. Cedar felt a need to repay the debt of Kyne carrying their curse, but both of them, or all three of them, dying wouldn’t do the world a bit of good.

They urged the horses into a slow lope, following Wil as he carved a path through trees and brush toward the river.

The crack of gunfire broke across the cloud-heavy sky. Then return fire rolled out.

“The church,” Mae said.

Cedar nodded. Leaving Hink, Miss Dupuis, and Wicks back to guard Father Kyne was really no more than a gunfight waiting to happen. They’d be wise to surrender. As far as he knew, the three of them weren’t on the mayor’s hanging list.

Even though he wasn’t a praying man, he found himself wishing there was more he could do, more any of them could do, to turn that fight in their favor.

The gunshots were constant, then became more sporadic, but did not cease.

Wil, panting, stopped short of the river, which lay on the other side of a thin line of trees. He lifted his head and looked up at Cedar.

“Is this the place?” Mae asked.

Cedar dismounted, throwing the horse’s reins over a low branch and drawing the shotgun out of the saddle holster.

“River’s just that way,” he said. “It rushes between two rocks, but is iced full over.”

“And you are sure the Holder is beneath it?”

“I am sure. And there’s more. When we came out this way last night, following that Strange, it stood on top of the ice, pointed at the river, and said one word: ‘help.’”

Mae frowned. “So you think it wants the Holder too?”

“I don’t know what it wants. I don’t know what help a Strange thinks I’d be willing to offer. But it wasn’t the call of the Holder that brought me to the river. We followed the Strange, and as soon as we were near the river, we could hear the voices of children.”

Mae had dismounted and was in the middle of tying her horse to a bush. She looked up at Cedar, startled.

“Children? But Wil said he saw them sleeping in the old mine shaft.”

“Strange like to play with a man’s mind. Show him roads off the edges of cliffs, show him lights down the bottom of ravines, or promise him his heart’s desire and deliver nothing but smoke.”

“So you don’t think the children are really here? You think the Strange somehow made you imagine their voices?”

“I don’t know. It makes the most sense.”

“Do you hear them now?”

Cedar pushed the pain away and listened with ears sharper than any man’s. Wind scrubbed through sticks, birds and beasts in the forest searched for food, the city clattered and clamored behind them, while far-off trains whistled and airship fans rose and fell. Plenty of noise in the silence of the day.

But no children crying. No voices calling out. No sorrow.

“I don’t hear them,” he said. “I don’t even hear the Holder. But I know it’s here.”

“Then let’s go get it.” Mae settled her satchel across her shoulders. It was filled with herbs and other small tokens to help focus her spell craft.

She had also made sure to holster a gun at her hips, and when she looked up at Cedar, he reached out and brushed the hair away from her cheek.

“Be careful,” he said.

“I will be. Is the binding too much?”

“It’s bearable.” It wasn’t a lie. Yet. “Do you think it’s helping him?”

“More than I expected,” she said. “I’m not practiced enough with what bindings and vows can do. I’ve spent too many years without using spells, and now that I am free of the coven…” Her words drifted off. Cedar knew that in some ways she regretted leaving the sisters. The coven had been her home, her sanctuary for most of her younger life. If Jeb Lindson hadn’t wandered through their fields and led her heart all the way to the wedding aisle, Mae would likely still be living her life with the women in Kansas.

“. . .now that I am free of the coven’s restrictions and rules,” she continued, “I am finding magic useful for so many things.”

“I would have never survived the blizzard before we came into town without your warmth,” he said. When she tipped a smile at him for how exactly that sounded, he smiled back. “Also,” he clarified, “without your spells that bound warmth to my bones.”

“I’m just happy we…” She shook her head. “I’m just happy. And it’s been a while since I could say that.”

Cedar nodded. He felt the same.

But time was slipping away. He walked down the rough path to the river, Wil sliding, like a shadow, beside him.

The wind went dead, though there was nothing to block it. Wil growled softly and stopped well before they left the edge of the trees.

Cedar felt it too.

“Witchcraft,” Mae said. She stood at Cedar’s left.

“A spell?” he asked. “Can you tell what kind?”

He shouldn’t be surprised to find spell work in the area, though he was certain this spell had not been in place just last night.

“I’m not sure. It’s powerful. Whoever cast it is very practiced in the arts.”

She pressed her fingers on his sleeve as he took a step forward. “Why? Why would someone cast a spell over this section of this river?”

“Is it made for repelling people from this road? From this river?”

“Yes, and more than that. Can you feel the…well, it’s sort of a deeper rooting that runs beneath the road too. That line of stones?” She pointed at the row of small stones carefully set front to back in a straight line blocking the way to the river. “If we walk over those stones, or disturb them in any way, we’ll let whoever cast this know that their spell has been disturbed.”

“We need to reach the river.” Cedar rolled possibilities through his mind. “Unless you can draw the Holder up from the bottom?”

“With a spell?” Mae shook her head. “I could call it to itself, bind it to its own if it were broken, but to just call it free—I do not have that power.”

“You could bind it to me,” Cedar said. “And we could break it.”

“No.”

He had been studying the icy water, but at her tone, looked down at her.

“I bound one piece of the Holder to Rose, and she is forever changed because of it. If I bound a weapon of such Strangework to you…” She pressed her lips together and shook her head again.

“Then we’ll have to go in after it.”

“Diving in that river will kill you.”

“Not if you cast a spell of warmth around me.”

Wil walked up and gently put his mouth around Cedar’s wrist.

“Warmth around us. Wil and I will dive for it.”

“Wil doesn’t even have thumbs,” Mae said.

“But he senses the Holder differently than I do. If I can’t find it in that dark, he’ll be able to lead me to it.”

Another round of gunfire echoed in the distance.

“Mae,” he said. “We are all running out of time.”

She closed her eyes. “Yes. I’ll do it. Give me a moment.” She dug in her satchel and tucked several small items into her palm. He knew that whenever she could she’d been gathering tokens that represented the elements of earth, air, water, and fire—things like unstruck matches, stones, and an odd assortment of cotton threads, buckles, bones, and buttons.

“I’ll need you both to hold very still. I am going to ask the warmth to wrap you as one.”

Wil leaned a little closer to Cedar and Cedar knelt down so he was of the same general size as the wolf.

Mae cast the spell, and just as it had when they were forging through the blizzard, it settled around him like a heavy, hot blanket. It wasn’t exactly comfortable, but since he was about to dive into an ice-covered river, he was happy for the weight of the spell and its protective heat.

They just might survive this dive.

“You’ll need to do it quickly,” Mae said. “One dive and right back up. The spell won’t last long for both of you.”

Cedar stood, and took half a step, leaning over Mae. He wrapped his arm around her, pulling her full against his body.

The spell surrounding him felt of her, smelled of her perfume. It even tasted of her.

It made him want her.

She reached up and kissed him. He had intended it to be a gentle kiss, but she was fierce, clinging to him, knowing, as he knew, what a very slim chance it was that he and Wil would survive this.

Wil growled.

Children’s voices rose around them, sighing, crying, sobbing. And behind that sound was the eerie ring of the Holder. Calling. Calling Cedar and Wil down to their deaths, just as it had called the children.

Mae pulled back, and so did he.

“I need to…” Cedar started.

“Yes,” Mae licked her lips to catch the last of the taste of him on her tongue. “You should.”

“I’m coming back,” he said.

“I know.” And then she gave him a look of faith that he’d never known before. She believed he’d find the Holder. With her spell, with Wil.

He wasn’t about to disappoint her.

Cedar shrugged out of his coat and hat, and carried them, along with his shotgun and the ax, over to the river. He left all his clothes and his boots on, but even in just his shirtsleeves, winter could not touch him through Mae’s spell. He glanced up and down river, then crossed over the line of stones.

There was no sound, no shadow movement in the forest, no gunmen. It appeared as if there was no warning attached to the stones, as Mae had worried there would be.

It could be another trick. Stones stacked in a line by the Strange to make a man think there was magic there.

To keep him and Wil from the Holder.

Cedar bent, loosened the laces on his boots, then left them beside the river, his coat and hat and gun all stacked with them. He held the ax loosely in his hand.

Wil’s ears were up as he searched the ice covering the river. They’d need to go in directly above the Holder, dive straight down, catch it up, and pull back onto the bank fast.

A man couldn’t live long in that water. Not more than a handful of minutes. But there would be enough time to dive to the bottom if the river wasn’t too deep. There would be enough time to find the Holder.

Cedar walked upriver just a bit, toward the rush of water pushing between the huge stones on either bank. The heat of Mae’s spell was beginning to make him sweat, as was the tie of pain with Father Kyne.

Wil paused, then took a step onto the ice. Cedar tipped his head, listening for the children’s cries, but more than that, listening for the music from the Holder.

He stepped out on the river in his stockinged feet, following Wil.

His brother took just a few steps downriver and then stopped closer to the far side of the river than the side Mae waited upon.

Cedar agreed. The Holder was here, beneath his feet, calling. Calling for their death.

And when he looked down, between the bare ice spread out under a dusting of snow, he could see the children, trapped beneath the ice like shadowy ghosts, pounding and clawing at the ice above them.

Screaming to live. Begging to be free.