LITMIR.BIZ

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dragged herself up, scratched and scuffed, caked in dust and spitting out grit. She’d taken too many mouthfuls of sand the last few months but she’d a dismal premonition that there’d be more. Her horse lay a few strides distant, one foamed-up flank heaving, forelegs black with blood. Neary’s arrow had snagged it in the shoulder, not deep enough to kill or even slow it right off, but deep enough to make it bleed at a good pace. With her hard riding, that had killed it just as dead as a shaft in the heart.

      There’d been a time Shy had got attached to horses. A time—despite reckoning herself hard with people and being mostly right—she’d been uncommon soft about animals. But that time was a long time gone. There wasn’t much soft on Shy these days, body or mind. So she left her mount to its final red-frothed breaths without the solace of her calming hand and ran for the town, tottering some at first, but quickly warming to the exercise. At running, she’d a heap of practice.

      “Town” was perhaps an overstatement. It was six buildings, and calling them buildings was being generous to two or three. All rough lumber and an entire stranger to straight angles, sun-baked, rain-peeled, and dust-blasted, huddled about a dirt square and a crumbling well.

      The biggest building had the look of a tavern or brothel or trading post or more likely all three amalgamated. A rickety sign still clung to the boards above the doorway but the name had been rubbed by the wind to just a few pale streaks in the grain. Nothing, nowhere, was all its proclamation now. Up the steps two by two, bare feet making the old boards wheeze, thoughts boiling away at how she’d play it when she got inside, what truths she’d season with what lies for the most likely recipe.

      There’s men chasing me! Gulping breath in the doorway and doing her best to look beyond desperate—no mighty effort of acting at that moment, or any occupying the last twelve months, indeed.

      Three of the bastards! Then—provided no one recognised her from all the bills for her arrest—They tried to rob me! A fact. No need to add that she’d robbed the money herself from the new bank in Hommenaw in the company of those three worthies plus another since caught and hung by the authorities.

      They killed my brother! They’re drunk on blood! Her brother was safe at home where she wished she was, and if her pursuers were drunk, it would likely be on cheap spirits as usual, but she’d shriek it with that little warble in her throat. Shy could do quite a warble when she needed one, she’d practiced it ’til it was something to hear. She pictured the patrons springing to their feet in their eagerness to aid a woman in distress. They shot my horse! She had to admit it didn’t seem overpowering likely that anyone hard-bitten enough to live out here would be getting into a sweat of chivalry, but maybe fate would deal her a winning hand for once.

      It had been known to happen.

      She blundered through the tavern’s door, opening her mouth to serve up the tale, and stopped cold.

      The place was empty.

      Not just no one there, but nothing there, and for damn sure no winning hand. Not a twig of furniture in the bare common room. A narrow stairway and a balcony running across the left-hand wall, doorways yawning empty upstairs. Chinks of light scattered where the rising sun was seeking out the many gaps in the splitting carpentry. Maybe just a lizard skittering away into the shadows—of which there was no shortage—and a bumper harvest of dust, greying every surface, drifted into every corner. Shy stood there a moment just blinking, then dashed back out along the rickety stoop and to the next building. When she shoved the door, it dropped right off its rusted hinges.

      This one hadn’t even a roof. Hadn’t even a floor. Just bare rafters with the careless, pinking sky above, and bare joists with a stretch of dirt below, every bit as desolate as the miles of dirt outside.

      She saw it now as she stepped back into the street with vision unhindered by hope. No glass in the windows, or wax paper, even. No rope by the crumbling well. No animals to be seen—aside from her own dead horse, that was, which only served to prove the point.

      It was a dried-out corpse of a town, long since dead.

      Shy stood in that forsaken place, up on the balls of her bare feet as though she was about to sprint off somewhere but lacked the destination, hugging herself with one arm while the fingers of the other hand fluttered and twitched at nothing, biting on her lip and sucking air fast and rasping through the little gap between her front teeth.

      Even by recent standards, it was a low moment. But if she’d learned anything the last few months, it was that things can always get lower. Looking back the way she’d come, Shy saw the dust rising. Three little grey trails in the shimmer off the grey land.

      “Oh, hell,” she whispered, and bit her lip harder. She pulled her eating knife from her belt and wiped the little splinter of metal on her dirty shirt, as though cleaning it might somehow settle the odds. Shy had been told she had a fertile imagination, but even so, it was hard to picture a more feeble weapon. She’d have laughed if she hadn’t been on the verge of weeping. She’d spent way too much time on the verge of weeping the last few months, now that she thought about it.

      How had it come to this?

      A question for some jilted girl rather than an outlaw with four thousand marks offered, but still a question she was never done asking. Some desperado! She’d grown expert on the desperate part but the rest remained a mystery. The sorry truth was that she knew full well how it came to this—the same way as always. One disaster following so hard on another that she just bounced between ’em, pinging about like a moth in a lantern. The second usual question followed hard on the first.

      What the fuck now?

      She sucked in her stomach—not that there was much to suck in these days—and dragged the bag out by the drawstrings, coins inside clicking together with that special sound only money makes. Two thousand marks in silver, give or take. You’d think that a bank would hold a lot more—they told depositors they always had fifty thousand on hand—but it turns out you can’t trust banks any more than bandits.

      She dug her hand in, dragged free a fistful of coins, and tossed the money across the street, leaving it gleaming in the dust. She did it like she did most things these days—hardly knowing why. Maybe she valued her life a lot higher’n two thousand marks, even if no one else did. Maybe she hoped they’d just take the silver and leave her be, though what she’d do once she was left be in this corpse town—no horse, no food, no weapon—she hadn’t thought out. Clearly she hadn’t fixed up a whole plan, or not one that would hold too much water, leastways. Leaky planning had always been a problem of hers.

      She sprinkled silver as if she was tossing seed on her mother’s farm, miles and years and a dozen violent deaths away. Whoever would’ve thought she’d miss the place? Miss the bone-poor house and the broke-down barn and the fences that always needed mending. The stubborn cow that never gave milk and the stubborn well that never gave water and the stubborn soil that only weeds would thrive in. Her stubborn little sister and brother too. Even big, scarred, softheaded Lamb. What Shy would’ve given now to hear her mother’s shrill voice curse her out again. She sniffed hard, her nose hurting, her eyes stinging, and wiped ’em on the back of her frayed cuff. No time for tearful reminiscences. She could see three dark spots of riders now beneath those three inevitable dust trails. She flung the empty bag away, ran back to the tavern, and—

      “Ah!” She hopped over the threshold, bare sole of her foot torn on a loose nail head. The world’s nothing but a mean bully, that’s a fact. Even when you’ve big misfortunes threatening to drop on your head, small ones still take every chance to prick your toes. How she wished she’d got the chance to grab her boots. Just to keep a shred of dignity. But she had what she had, and neither boots nor dignity were on the list, and a hundred big wishes weren’t worth one little fact—as Lamb used to boringly drone at her whenever she cursed him and her mother and her lot in life and swore she’d be gone in the morning.

      Shy remembered how she’d been then, and wished she had the chance now to punch her earlier self in the face. But she could punch herself in the face when she got out of this.

      She’d

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