Issue #237 • Oct. 24, 2017

“The Influence of the Iron Range,” by Marissa Lingen

“Forgive Us Our Trespasses,” by Bennett North

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

http://Beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRON RANGE

by Marissa Lingen

         I can feel the rails stretching out before me as if they come from inside my own skull, the two lines of iron seeming to extend from under my ears out to the horizon. I feel them behind me as if I left a trail. The train I ride on is part of the forged iron in the land, part of the work I do to keep this great country free.

         The train is draped with white bunting sewn with red and blue ribbons. One of the junior staffers has painted “Arthur Edward Bagley for President” on a banner and hung it out the window. We have word at the last minute that the station is on the opposite side of the train, and all the bright young men have to jump to rearrange the banner so that it is clearly visible, tied down and fluttering just a little in the breeze, when we pull into town.

         I just know that in 1888, the American voters will do the right thing and elect Senator Arthur Edward Bagley for our next president. But that’s not my job, though I am a proud staffer on the Bagley campaign. My job is darker, more vital.

         “Excuse me, ma’am,” says one of the staffer boys, his copper soles clattering up the aisle. I pull my tidy little buttoned boots aside. He bobs a quick nod to me. I am important.

         I am the safeguard of American democracy on this train.

         The steam engine shrieks to a halt. I can feel the wheels settle against the rails. I shake the worst of the dust from my skirts, a plain, serviceable blue serge. My hat is pinned firmly in place. The American people like to see their candidates served by sensible, sober men and women. Men and women who keep their freedoms safe.

         The Faery-Free Election Commission stands between you and the debacle of 1876. America will never have to fear again. Because of us.

         Because of me.

         Bobby Stamford, the Senator’s round-faced young aide, runs to find me. “They’re ready for you, Miss Viola.”

         I have a black bag like any doctor, but the malady I cure is that of the body politic. The sickness is uncanny influence. When the Senator speaks, it will be within a ring of cold iron and rowan stalks, and the American people will feel sure—they will know—that they are seeing and hearing his true self, not some glamour, not some Rutherford B. Hayes dream of America but its verified reality.

         I follow Bobby down the train stairs. The air is crisp in northern Minnesota in April, and I hold my pelisse about me. This territory reminds me of home despite the hills and trees that are so different from the flat prairies where I grew up. I am supposed to think of all America as my home, but most of it feels very distant from where my brothers farm in North Dakota; I cannot smell the clay soil of Oklahoma, the salty sea air of the Florida coastline, in the same way as I do the middle of the country.

         Also I know better where to find the proper plants in this kind of soil, what the iron will do with the air and the land. I know my place here. I know best how to protect them.

         The town bandstand has medallions of iron recently emblazoned to it; in the last twelve years since the Hayes election, all respectable towns have added them to the places where politicians might speak. But those are only enough for the local offices. The mayor, the city council. Any redcap or jenny-greenteeth might slip into one of those positions, were the local election commissioners unwary; might find a way around the medallions.

         The presidency of the United States needs more protection than replacing a bronze seal on a podium with an iron one.

         I walk the circle of the park. They have planted a ring of box elders around the perimeter of the park, which is good. Elder is one of the trees that protects against evil. It does not grow readily here, but it is trying to force its roots down in the iron-rich rocky soil, and those minerals themselves will help me in my tasks. There is a thorn hedge, but it has gaps. I walk the entire perimeter anyway, pacing out the area for all who will hear the Senator speak. Then I open my bag.

         I am careful. I am meticulous. And because of these things, we are safe today: I notice that someone has adulterated my iron shavings. When I drop a handful before the magnet, most fall straight to the ground: no iron at all but dark dirt. No protection against faery influence.

         Bobby, the Senator’s aide, has long since grown bored with my preparations after dozens, hundreds of campaign stops. He is not even watching. Until he hears my breath suck in through my teeth. He looks as I test the rest of the iron shavings, pouring them from the deerskin bag my brother made for me, soft and falsely reassuring against my hands. Worthless.

         “What’s that, then?”

         “Someone’s been at my iron. Does this town have a blacksmith?”

         “What town doesn’t?” he says. Plenty don’t, but the Senator doesn’t make stops in towns that small, so I don’t explain it to him. “You want his help?”

         “I want his iron. You don’t have to bring the man himself, if he’ll fill this for you.”

         I hand him my empty drawstring bag, limp without its worthless cargo. I will have to check all the rest of my supplies.

         “Miss Viola, who would do this?” Bobby asks.

         I look at him over my pince-nez. “You know who, or at least who they were serving. And you know better than to speak their names further. Go on after the blacksmith.”

         He nods, more a bow, newly impressed by my worth to the campaign, to the country.

         I already know my own worth. And I already know the threat.

         There are a few who would have sprinkled the perimeter of the park with holy water, blessed by some mumbling priest. I know my catechism, and I know the hexes of my grandmothers. I have no need of intervention from Rome to keep the hand of the faery from me.

         I turn my pelisse wrong-side out for extra surety, and my hat back-side front. It is thus that the blacksmith and young Bobby the aide find me, kneeling in a pile of dead crumbling leaves.

         “This is holly,” I tell him without greeting.

         “From Christmas,” says the blacksmith, a far lankier man than I expect for his profession, all chin and nose.

         “You don’t see it crumble like this, not a thick leaf like holly, not without help.”

         He shrugs. I was raised on a farm, but I have come to expect polite treatment, a civil word.

         “If you have no intention of helping me protect the campaign site, you may leave your iron shavings and go,” I tell him. “That’s all I asked the boy to bring anyway.”

         “Wanted to say,” says the blacksmith, and then such a long pause that I am reminded of my brothers. “This happened the last fella too. The iron shavings. I know my civic duty well as the next man. Just—” He lays a finger aside his nose.

         I hate that gesture. It’s supposed to look knowing. It always looks stupid.

         I hate even more that the adulterated iron and the destroyed holly point to an attack on the entire system, not just one man.

         “Thank you,” I tell him stiffly. “If there’s anything the Senator’s campaign can do for you—”

         “I know my civic duty,” he repeats, and he lopes off toward the general store, where he will no doubt tell every Tom, Dick, and Harry what has transpired.

         No doubt he will comment on my backward hat as well.

         No matter. It is a badge of honor. My honor, and the party’s.

         After the Hayes scandal, the Unionist party needed the integrity of machine politics. The taint of magic politics was strong upon the Unionists. They nearly disbanded. People like me, our ridiculous tricks to fool the Good Neighbors and all, had given the American people the faith they needed to assure themselves that the horrible ‘76 election was as much a curse upon the party as from it. The faeries had chosen the centennial of the country to make their move; we would have the centennial of the Constitution to restore its honor.

         Then, of course, the Constitutionalists had to have us too. We are indispensable.

         I test the iron filings the blacksmith gave me. They cling to my magnet like young lovers whose mamma left the parlor for lemonade. They scent the air so that my mouth tastes as though I have bit my tongue. Good. Good.

         Bobby whispers, “Miss Viola, do you think this town is cursed?”

         “Of course not,” I snap, and then modulate my tone; he is little more than a boy. “Of course not,” I repeat, “but we must be extra-careful. If there is faery work afoot against both candidates here, who knows what their game will be? I think you must run and tell the Senator that something has happened.”

         “But you will be—”

         “Alone here, yes.” I take my Bowie knife out of my black bag, the little curve of its tip comforting even in its sheath. “This is cold steel, Bobby. I am a practitioner of the arts of the light. Go find the Senator.” He is gone almost before I have finished speaking.

         The Bowie knife is at my belt and iron filings are in my hand when the hot lemon wind blows across my face and the faery appears.

         She stays a few feet away, outside my perimeter, of course—in that much, at least, my world is sure. She is not as beautiful as the sun or the moon or a stand of snowy birch trees coming up out of a granite hill. She is beautiful but barely more beautiful than every mayor’s daughter who stands on the dais next to her father and smiles while we introduce the Senator. Her hair is a tangle of dark curls that could do well with a brush, her face narrow and foxy and flushed. I don’t know what the shapeless dress she is wearing is meant to be , but I suspect it is Burne-Jones’s fault.

         I put one hand on my hip. “Well? Need I recite the charm, or will you go of your own volition?”

         “But I have just arrived,” she says in a pleading voice that is not like bells or the wind in the trees. It is a voice. It is just a voice.

         I begin to think the stories are exaggerated, except that I am not so susceptible to pleading when it comes from human throats. I keep my hand on my knife. “Watch my preparations, then, and know that you are not wanted.”

         “I think you were raised to be more hospitable to a neighbor in need than that, Viola Sandmeier,” she says.

         I am on guard instantly, but she does not use my middle name. Perhaps she has not gleaned it—it is only in the church registry, never used except in a few of the most important spells my mother laid upon me. Or perhaps she is trying to set me at ease.

         I am not at ease.

         “In need, is it? What do you need, good neighbor?” I sneer.

         “What we all need,” she says. “To be heard.”

         “I hear you, but I will not be swayed by you.”

         She smiles. Even, white teeth, no terrifying sharp points. Also no perfect pearls. Just a dazzling smile. “Surely you have no fear of that,” she says. “Surely I can speak and not sway you—or at least not unfairly, not unduly. Your actions affect my people. Surely we deserve a voice. Is that not what democracy is for?”

         An illusion arises before me, a mirage: my brothers, walking into the big whitewashed farmhouse from the barn. The grass under their feet is still brown, and I can see little puffs of their breath, but they are not swaddled in mufflers. I dispel the illusion to glare at the faery.

         She nods as though I asked a civil question. “You’re seeing the present moment, yes.” And then the illusion is back, threat or promise or... their voices come to me from far away. “It just made good sense, Tom,” Hans says. “He changed my mind, that’s all.”

         “You be careful how you set your face against the Pedersens, Hans Sandmeier,” Tom replies. “They own too much of the town.”

         They are making the point about influence for her—who influences whom, what is too much—but she makes mine for me: she is using spells to turn me. And I should push the mirage aside again. But one more glimpse of my family...

         Resolutely I make it go away in a shower of sparks, like an unwisely poked fire. I don’t want to get into a duel of spells with this faery—who knows what power she holds?—and I should be about my work. But she has my back up. She has shown me that she knows who my brothers are, where they are.

         Two can play at that game.

         Unlike the faery, I do not seek to show the present but the past. I have shown these images before. They are all true: the President-Elect gaping foolishly at a faery emissary. Venezuelan gold concerns. Disowned noblemen asking for sanctuary in the US. All of it shimmering with magic, all of it false.

         I throw it in her face, and I go back to drawing a thin line with the iron filings. It makes her flinch. It hurts her, I can see that. She hangs her head, her curls tumbling around her face in a way that I am sure a lady ought not to do outside a very personal setting.

         “That is the shame of our people,” she says. “We were desperate to be allowed in. But we are not all like that. We could have some voice—if we promised to make arguments only—”

         “Oh, if you promised,” I say scornfully. I complete the runes in iron. A party that can make the rest of the electorate believe that it is harmless, or wondrous, or a Venezuelan gold consortium, or a three-headed duck—there can be no question of allowing it. No.

         She follows me. I do not peer into her face to see if she pales, if she goes white around the lips. I have work to do.

         “During the Civil War,” she begins.

         I hold up a hand, scattering iron shavings with it as my palm spreads. She jumps back, quivering.

         “During the war,” she tries again.

         “Stop.”

         “Your father—”

         “You know nothing about my father.”

         “I know that he believed in a fair voice for all. He came here because of it. He fought because of it, when you and your brothers were—”

         I unsheathe the Bowie knife and hold it up over the line of iron filings. “If you go on, I will stab you. If not, I will merely banish you as I should have banished you long since. Get thee from me, heathen creature, and leave this election fair and free, faery-free. In peace.”

         Whatever she sees in my eyes, she believes in it. She does not stay to say another word of my father. She vanishes in another hot, citrusy wind.

         My father was a ‘48er in Germany, an immigrant, a man who believed in freedom, the rights of man.

         My father was a Union soldier, an abolitionist, a man who believed passionately in the slave as his brother.

         My father used his magic, the gifts and knowledge he passed down to me, for the good of his new country, alongside witches and conjurers of all the races of the Union.

         My father was gone, the shell of him still living on my brother Amos’s farm outside Minot.

         And for this faery, this—good neighbor, this abomination—to present herself as my father’s voice, the representative of his views of freedom—I cannot. I will not.

         Another argument, perhaps she might have had me. Due influence, undue influence—it was a question worth pursuing.

         But then she brought up my father.

         It was the sort of mistake another human might make, of course. She had not ensorcelled me. She had spoken to me manipulatively, as another human would. She had tugged on my heartstrings, not wrapped me in faery dust.

         But she could not wrap me in faery dust, not with the protections I have. Doubtless that explains it. Otherwise her treachery would already have manifested itself.

         I finish the circle and check it to make sure my distraction has not marred my work. Then I step up to the podium, raise my palms to the sky, and begin my song.

         I am just finishing as the crowds begin to arrive.

         This is, of course, good political theater. It is the sort of thing they like to see, the Faery-Free Election Commission Officer rebuffing the forces of magic and keeping them all safe.

         I wish there was some way to know how far away the faery has gone. Not far enough.

         I stand on the edge of the dais for the Senator’s speech: not as close as the smiling mayor’s daughter, closer than the Pinkertons who have to be one step down from the platform proper. I try to spot the subtle differences in his speech from the previous night, but I am too preoccupied with the faery.

         The bodyguards and I do not get along. The bodyguards and I have the same job, but we see it differently, and we each consider the other’s role the minor part. I do want the Senator kept safe from all physical harm—of course I do—but we have lost presidents to the assassin’s bullet before and it did not shake the Republic. A candidate—even so promising a candidate as Senator Bagley—can be replaced. But where else in the world shines the light of free men as in the United States? France has let that light flicker and die many times. England? England is so entangled in their dealings with the Welsh court that who knows what they have left for the voices of the free, unencumbered by magic. And so on. A candidate is important. But elections, free elections, are everything.

         This is not, of course, how the bodyguards see it. They see only the moment, the crowd around them, who has a gun and who does not.

         But the Iron Range, for all the growth of the country into the territories, is still the West. Most men have a gun. No few of the women, either. Any assassin would be met not only by the bodyguards but by the indignant folk of the county. So even with the iron in the hills making them feel secure against the faery threat, I think that my portion is the greater.

         This town is large enough, with its wealth of taconite mines, to have a hotel to put the Senator up for the night. He could sleep on the train, but the voters like to see him staying in their hotels. We escort him in a group, myself at the head with a specially made iron lantern carved with stars. When we have seen him safely to the welcoming arms of the landlord, some of our party stays with him, filling the hotel.

         I am assigned part of the bodyguard detail at night. I am not allowed to choose them myself. I am exhausted and wish I was alone. I have to take Benjamin and Jabez because that is who is on the roster. Jabez wanders off to the tavern, though it is forbidden when he is on the job, and no one can tell him no. It is only Benjamin, loud and covered in badges for the Senator’s previous campaigns, who is with me when the faery reappears.

         I have not had time to examine the room for sources of cold iron, hexes, or blessings. I feel blind. My glance yields nothing, and my supplies are all encased in the bag. By the time I can perform a full banishing, the faery can be in the next room, on the train, or with the Senator.

         Benjamin swears and tries to get between me and the faery, fumbling for his weapon.

         “Stop that, fool,” I say. “This is my job, not yours. I banished you,” I add, directly to the faery.

         “You would have banished me. I left of my own volition,” she corrects. Benjamin’s coat is on right-side out, his hat front-to-back. I wonder what he sees. “I must beg of you, my people need a voice! In the old countries we had pacts with the king, marriages to the land. Who is to protect us here?”

         “You—you need no protection,” Benjamin quavers, so unsteadily that I wonder if he too has been taking the drink. “You are an apparition sent by the devil, and we will have none of it.”

         “Let me handle this,” I insist.

         “We got off on the wrong foot earlier,” says the faery.

         “The sinister foot always,” I say.

         “Get thee behind me, Satan,” says Benjamin. I expect him to have a gun, harmless against her unless he has specially prepared bullets. He is a bodyguard. But when he reaches for his belt, it is a Bowie knife he has hanging there, just like mine.

         And this faery has no weapon to counter him. Nor is she gathering a spell to her. He raises the knife, and she waits.

         If she were fighting him, I could let it happen, let this man I dislike strike this creature I despise. Let her die in slow agony of iron poisoning, if he didn’t strike true enough that she would bleed out first. But this, no. This is not what I am for. I twist around him. He tries to shove me behind again. “Don’t worry, Miss,” he grates. “We can talk it through with the Senator later, that you couldn’t keep this one off. Perhaps you can be an assistant at this work, perhaps he needs a larger team now that he’s running for—” He grunts with the effort of trying to push me away, for I am more solid than he expects, more determined.

         The faery is watching us both with a curious expression on her face. “What is this after all, Miss Viola?”

         “No blood of any color need be spilled here,” I cry out, desperately. “You can go away, you can go somewhere else. Go home, wherever it is you are from.”

         “This is my home. I am an American.”

         I do not want to hear that.

         “Make it go, then,” says Benjamin. “If you don’t want me to smash it like a dung beetle, make it go, use your skills, do what they keep you around for, if you can. Banish it like you said you could. Unless you can’t, or unless you won’t.”

         I am hanging on his arm like a girl at the fair. He shakes me off, and I see that this will not go as I want it to. This will not end with civilized words, a debate. I will not have the time to cast the banishing spells.

         He has threatened the faery’s life. But me, he has threatened my livelihood. And I do not think he even knows it.

         I stop clinging to Benjamin. I shove him so that he staggers back. I draw my knife and brandish it at both of them. “Now both of you,” I say. “Neither of you is behaving as you ought, you do see that? You need only behave and all can yet be well. You do see that,” I repeat, pleading now.

         My pleas sound even less like silver bells in the moonlight than the faery’s, and no one is listening to me. My words fall like slag to the ground. Benjamin rushes. The faery bites her lip. He pushes me aside, and his knife slices through the serge of my dress, grazing my arm. It hurts like a spell gone wrong. It hurts like failure. I am not allergic to iron, and he is going to hurt the faery worse than this, far worse.

         I stagger back to my feet as he gets to the faery.

         I stab him.

         I hit an artery. I could not have done this if I tried, and I was not trying. I hoped only to stop him. The iron of his blood fills the air, even in these iron-rich hills. It spurts too fast, too much. He scrabbles for me, and I stab again just to get him away. I can taste his blood. I can taste him.

         I have never killed a man before.

         I can taste his death on the air.

         The faery is looking at me like I am a strange and unexpected creature, a leopard in these hills, an elephant. I know myself for nothing like that.

         “Please stop looking at me,” I say.

         She looks politely away, for only a moment. “We have a problem,” she says, gaze averted. She is staring at Benjamin. No. She is staring at Benjamin’s body.

         “I have a problem,” I say. “You have nothing. You should go away. Please go away. Why don’t you go away? I should banish you, and then I can deal with this problem. I will fetch—I will fetch—”

         There is no one I can fetch. Bobby? Jabez? The town constabulary? Least of all them; it would bring scandal to the campaign, to my profession, so no, no. I must handle her, and this, myself.

         “If I worked a spell to remove him...,” she says coaxingly.

         “Where would you take him? How would we explain his absence?”

         The body is there between us, solid, human, immobile. I fancy I can smell each layer of skin and fat and muscle and bone. Each organ decaying, I can smell it. I know I cannot. It is impossible, he is nearly the person he was before my knife went in. He is nearly the man who guarded me and the Senator and let me do my job and did not make trouble, as she makes trouble.

         Why must they all make so much trouble? Why couldn’t he just let me do my job? I like my job.

         I do not hear the door when it opens, but the faery’s mouth makes a perfect circle, a faery circle. It is a great miracle that toadstools do not spring up on her face. I turn to see what she is looking at.

         The Senator is white Beneath his muttonchops. The Senator trembles Beneath his greatcoat. The Senator, too, can smell the blood of his bodyguard. And the Senator, too, knows my visitor for a faery.

         The Senator says, “What is going on, Viola?”

         I want to burst into tears. An ordinary woman would burst into tears. Instead I bite my lip until it bleeds, and wait.

         But he doesn’t fill in the silence for me. He is not inclined to make this damned and damning scene easier for me. He just waits. So I have to say it: “Benjamin was—he attacked.”

         “He attacked you?”

         I should say yes. Yes is the right answer. Yes gets us out of all of this. “He attacked this faery.”

         The Senator waits some more.

         “She was only talking. I am—I am the professional here, I swear to you by the skills I use on your behalf. She was only talking, and he attacked.”

         “You know what she is.”

         “I know what I am.”

         The pause is now thoughtful. Thinking. “And he attacked.”

         “I tried to stop him.”

         He sighs. “Well, what’s done is done.”

         “You’re not going to....”

         “I can’t lose you from the campaign,” he says, “and I can’t have the scandal.”

         If he had put them in the opposite order, he would have lost me anyway. As it is, I let out my breath. “Well then.”

         And the faery says, “I won’t tell you I’m from Venezuela, Senator.”

         He turns on her with a glare of iron. She doesn’t flinch. “Don’t mistake me, Mistress Periwinkle or whatever you are,” says the Senator. “I am helping my valuable campaign assistant. You are another matter. We will deal with you after... after this.”

         The faery makes a little curtsy, her skirts a waterfall of white and blue froth. Every town miss would sigh for those skirts. It is my job to keep them from sighing.

         Why can’t I just do my job?

         “I beg your pardon, Senator,” I say, “but it is she and I who must deal with... this.”

         He looks as though he is about to object. The Senator is used to being the person in charge. The Senator is used to thinking of violence as an unfit topic for ladies. But I ended this violence, and the faery... is what she is.

         He draws back a little, frowning, to let us determine what we can do.

         “I will turn myself in if I must,” I say. “The main thing is to avoid scandal upon the candidate, who honestly did have nothing to do with this. But if you will help me, we can do a spell to bury him. That would minimize the risk of disposing of the body, compared to standing outside digging a grave where we might be discovered.”

         The faery cocks her head and looks at me. “Or we could just ask the land to take him in.”

         I am still. “Show me.”

         She reaches for my wrist again. This time I let her. The Senator watches us alertly but does not interfere. My land sense, which tells me about the rails, the iron in the hills, suddenly feels expanded. I reach for her other wrist, hesitantly, and the two of us take a few steps so that we are joining hands over Benjamin’s body.

         She shows me how to reach out, how to ask.

         And the land takes him in.

         It listens very quickly to the two of us, together.

         The wooden floorboards are between us and the dirt, but with the faery holding my wrist, the flooring no longer matters. The dirt comes for us, up through the cracks, chilly and dank-smelling. The senator has lost all of the dignity of his office and is cowering in the corner. The dirt piles higher, pressing my dress to my legs, covering the body.

         It very nearly takes me too, or I nearly sink in, because it feels so right, the tang of the rocks and dirt in my mouth, the thrum of human activity starting strong and then a faint buzz. I can now see where the lines of iron are surrounded by humans, horses, dogs, faeries. I can feel them first separately and then together, as a pattern. The land knows me. It would take me. Someday it will.

         Her fingers pinch hard and pull me back to myself. I glare at her, snatching my hands away.

         But the land never reacts that strongly to me alone. And from the look on her face, it doesn’t react that strongly to her alone either. Together we are something more. The land knows it, even if we don’t.

         Even if we don’t want to know it.

         The last few clods of dirt recede between the cracks in the floor as though they had never been. The room still has a chilly, earthy smell. The body is gone from the floor, and the Senator is mopping at his brow with his handkerchief.

         “We will—we will tell anyone who asks that he disappeared,” says the Senator. “That you never saw him after he brought you here.”

         I nod. I feel surprisingly calm about all this. “My conscience is clear in this matter. I am not employed to permit murder,” I say. This I can cling to. I have found something I can say that sounds better than “he was threatening my job, the only job I know,” and the Senator, surprisingly, nods.

         “Even of foreign parties. Indeed you are not.”

         The faery snorts. “Foreign parties. Good sir. I was born in this country and have lived here since before the time of your great-grandmother. I might not be Nanabozho or the nayad of Gitchee-Gumee, but do me the courtesy of not calling me a foreign party. If you must classify me as an enemy, at least I am one of those domestic.”

         The bushy eyebrows recognizable in every editorial cartoon across the land shoot up. And the Senator nods, a palpable hit. He is becoming himself again, the debater, the negotiator. “Very well, my domestic enemy. What would you here? Are you suborning my magical protection?”

         The faery pouts. “Not successfully, good sir. Not at all successfully. I have pled the case for freedom for my people—votes, sir, votes for my people. And I have found a tin ear, perhaps a lead one.”

         “An iron ear,” I said quietly. “Her silvered words fell upon an ear of iron. For indeed, I am too used to hearing reasons why Americans cannot vote. It ought to outrage me, but I have grown accustomed to it.”

         Both of them gasp.

         “I am no longer moved,” I continue, “by the plight of those of my land who lack suffrage. It is commonplace to me.”

         “Viola!” cries the Senator.

         “Sir.”

         The faery’s bosom barely trembles. Were she human I might wonder at her self-control. But she has come with a job to do, as I have a job. She showed me how to feel the living things on the land, not just the elements; she knows how to feel their tides shift, and she changes how I see the world Beneath my feet. How I see my country, Beneath my feet. I have killed for her. Now I am speaking for her, though it is like a branding iron pressed to my tongue to do so.

         “I cannot go against the principles of my party and myself—”

         I close my eyes. I want to reach for my bag, to make him see. To hang a cantrip about his eyes, to shake the scales from them. I could not assemble the best spell from what I have here. But I could make it work. I can see it so clearly.

         And the faery is beside me. Her hand is like an iron band upon my wrist. “A principle that cannot be questioned is no principle but a dogma, sir,” she says. And the faery, to my shame, takes the time to talk to the Senator. To convince him, where I would have set the argument into magic.

         She takes the time to be what I am supposed to be. And I am what I supposed her.

         I listen to her words of faery freedom. I must continue with the Faery-Free Election Commission, but I will address my colleagues within it whenever I encounter them—and the hedgewitches and village simple makers along the roads. The blacksmiths. Those who forge the ways, those who keep the ways.

         The Senator, he will have to find a way within the party to figure out timing. But if he is slow, we will be his conscience. This faery and I. If he cannot do it, we will. Because she is right. Influence and undue influence are not the same thing, and it’s not just any man who should have a vote, but any woman.

         Any jenny-greenteeth. Any redcap.

         Any American.

         By iron and rowan, they’ll have a free voice for Senator Arthur Edward Bagley, or I’ll know the reason why.

Copyright © 2017 Marissa Lingen

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Marissa Lingen lives in the Minneapolis area with two large men and one small dog. Her work has appeared in Tor.com, Lightspeed, Apex, and multiple times previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among others.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES

by Bennett North

         There’s a thick yellow stink in the town of Zaretan when I arrive, like stomach bile and fetid water. This is a town that eats its shoe leather, I can tell. A town that depended too much on the earth to keep them fed, and now that the rains have stopped and the crops have died, there’s nothing left for them. The first clue is the smell; the second is the absence of rats. The third clue is the shopkeeper sitting on the front steps of the general store like a polished brown collection of bones.

         I have felt eyes watching me since I crested the ridge and saw the town below. You get that feeling the further out west you go, the feeling that they’d eat the pages out of your Bible just to have something to chew.

         The shopkeeper stirs when I approach but only enough to shift his head. Still, I keep a few feet away, out of grabbing range. He’s taking advantage of the July sunlight, warming himself like a cat. I bet there aren’t any of those running around here, either.

         “We’re closed, boy,” he says, although the last word is uncertain. His voice is raspy. He rubs grit out of his eyes and straightens his shoulders a bit. There’s white around his mouth, dried spit. The only watering hole I’d seen on my way into town had been dry and cracked, like the riverbed in this city’s namesake. In the Bible, the river by Zaretan dried so the Hebrews could cross. Here, God has no chosen people.

         “I’m looking for a man,” I say, my thumb hooked in my belt loop. My dungarees have gotten mighty loose in these past few months and I’m running out of belt to punch holes in. “His name is Orlando Frontera.”

         The shopkeeper just stares up at me. I unhook my thumb from my pants and dig in my pack. One-handed, I take out my waterskin, and toss it to him. He catches it, fumbling to unscrew the cap, and drains the whole thing before hugging the skin to his chest like it’s going to magically fill itself.

         “The Fronteras live out at their farm,” he says.

         “He’s married?”

         “And with a kid. Why, are you his...?” He trails off, eyeing me, obviously unable to come up with a plausible end to that sentence.

         “Tell me how to get there,” I say. I want that waterskin back, but I don’t really want to get that close to him. I should have thought of that before I gave it to him.

         His eyes run over me, obviously trying to see what else he can get out of me in payment for the information. My boots have seen better days, though the shoe leather has been sacrificed to the hard ground, not my soup pot. My satchel sags, almost entirely empty except for the meager bit of money I got from selling my saddle and the remains of my horse. There’s a cook pot and a Bible in there too, though half the Bible has gone to starting fires. An old revolver hangs in a holster at my side.

         “How much is it worth to you?” the shopkeeper asks, and his eyes fix on the tarnished silver cross around my neck.

         “Not that much,” I say, following his gaze down. “I can find their farm myself if it comes down to it.”

         “Lotta farm land out there,” he says.

         “You’re not the only person in this town I can talk to.”

         His eyes roll up to me, and he’s so dehydrated I can almost hear them scrape in their sockets. I don’t begrudge him the water he took. “You keeping that gun to use it on Frontera?”

         “Keep the waterskin.” I turn away from him.

         Contrary to my statement, there’s no one else in sight. Most of the buildings on the street are shuttered. The bank is closed, and even the horse troughs are dry. There’s a chapel down at the end of the street, and its front doors are open. The graveyard next to the building has a whole row of fresh graves, and a man is patiently digging a new one. The mound of dirt next to him is barely knee-high, and from the way he’s going it’ll take a week to get the usual six feet down.

         “Pardon,” I say as I approach, digging in my satchel. He—no, she. It’s a woman in trousers and a flour sack shirt, her hair cut short, her wrists as thin around as the handle of the shovel. She squints at me.

         “Yeah?” she says. Her gaze wanders over me like ants on sugar.

         “The Frontera farm,” I say. “Can you point me toward it?” I remove my hand from my satchel and hold out the last of my money—forty cents.

         She doesn’t reach out to take it. “What am I going to do with that? Nothing to buy around here.” She turns back to the shovel and skims up another handful of dirt. Her arms shake with the effort.

         “It’s all I’ve got,” I say.

         “They’re that way.” She jerks her chin north. “‘Bout six miles. Just follow the trail. You’ll know it by the gate.”

         “Thank you,” I say gravely. There aren’t many people out here who’ll do a favor and expect nothing in return.

         “You don’t want to go out there,” she says, leaning on the shovel to rest. “Frontera’s not right in the head. He’ll kill you soon as talk to you.”

         “I know,” I say, and move on.

* * *

         Sunset falls slow on the plains, like a long gulp of ale, clear and golden. The sun lingers on the horizon for a long, meandering hour before the grass swallows it and the light leaks away.

         It’s past dark when I reach the cow gate. A pack of coyotes is yipping in the distance There’s no cattle here, no farm dogs, no horses. No chickens scratching in the dirt. Just silence and a farmhouse with a light on downstairs.

         I duck the gate and give the farmhouse a wide berth. There won’t be any guard dogs, but I’m not going to take any chances. The curtains aren’t drawn, so I can see a shape standing by the fireplace. It smells like a cook fire, though not with clean wood; it reeks of burning paint and creosote.

         Around the back of the house, by the kitchen door, there’s a fresh coyote pelt hanging from the laundry line. A bucket underneath is set to catch the still-dripping blood. That explains the cook fire, anyway. I stop next to the bucket, bend down and dip my finger. Taste it. Think of black pudding.

         The kitchen door is hanging open. I move to the wall beside it and slide down until I’m sitting on the ground right next to the doorframe. I take my revolver out of its holster and rest it on my knees. I wait.

* * *

         I remember my mother cooking when I was little. It was a few years into the drought—not this drought, but the one before it; they come every few years out here—and food was scarce. My father was a rancher, but the cattle were starting to starve out in the fields, left with nothing but dry, dusty stalks to chew. When he slaughtered them, my mother would use every bit of the animal, from its brain to its tail. I remember her cracking beef bones for the pot so she could simmer a stock overnight. She’d simmer it down to a thick paste, then dry the paste into plugs so she could turn them into broth later, when we really needed them.

         The meat went first. My father slaughtered all his cattle rather than see them starve to bones in the fields. We ate what we could and salted what we couldn’t, but even our stores ran dry after a while. Soon we were down to just hominy and sorghum, and then that went too.

         The night the bandits rode into town, I understood for the first time what hunger was. People were starving to death. In some towns out west, they’d rip you from your horse if you were stupid enough to ride one out there. You’d see the dead piled like kindling on the side of the road and no one strong enough to bury them. So people started migrating back east, and with those migrants came the bandits.

         My father got his rifle when he heard the horses coming up the path and told us to barricade ourselves in the bedroom.

         I don’t remember what happened after that. The last thing I remember of my parents is my mother grabbing the shotgun off the bedroom wall, the one my father’s father gave us. Lit by the candles, a small, golden woman, her skirts swirling as she spins and heads for the door after my father. In my memory, that movement is one perfect, fluid motion, though I know she must have stopped to get more shells from the dresser. I know she must have looked at me or said something. But in my memory, it’s silent.

* * *

         I jerk my head up from my half-doze when a shadow appears in the kitchen doorway and a man comes down the steps so close that the breeze of his passing stirs my hair. He’s focused on the body of the coyote, which has ceased dripping. He doesn’t see me.

         Inside the house, I can hear the sound of dishes being washed. Ahead of me, the man stands with his hands on his hips, looking past the coyote pelt to the plains beyond. If the fields once held crops, they hold nothing but empty stalks now.

         The man is thin, but not as thin as the storekeeper. He has wiry wrists and his clothes hang slack on him. When he turns his head to the side, I see his face in profile, the cheeks hollow. I rest my thumb on the hammer of my revolver.

         “Da-da.” A toddler comes to the kitchen doorway just a foot away from me. It should be plump with baby fat, but it’s not. Its head bobs on a too-thin neck. I freeze. Frontera takes up the bucket of blood. When he turns back toward the house, he stops, his eyes settling on me in the shadows.

         “Who’s there?” he asks, his hand going to his hip for a gun that’s not there. The toddler, unaware, clambers down the steps and to his father.

         I keep my revolver on my knees but say nothing, my thumb paralyzed on the hammer. His eyes go from the gun to my empty sleeve and then to my face. I don’t know what he reads there. After a pause, he takes a cautious step forward, the bucket of blood sloshing.

         “Did you take some of my blood?” He smiles, and when he does, I remember those sharp yellow teeth. My hand is gripped so tightly around the gun that I don’t think I could pry my fingers free if I wanted to. My eyes flick to the toddler.

         “That’s okay,” he says when I don’t respond. He stoops and picks up the toddler in one arm. “I’m a generous man. Keep it.” He chuckles and walks past me, back into the house. He shuts the door behind himself.

* * *

         The sisters in the convent believed in discipline, God, and the ravages of sin. I was only six when they took me under their wing, a full year before God instills moral responsibility in His children. So what had happened to me, to us, was not because of my own sin but that of my father.

         Kneeling there in the chapel, one shirtsleeve empty and pinned up to my shoulder, I couldn’t imagine what my father had done to bring that down on our heads. I felt, somehow, that the bandits were also responsible, but the sisters told me that they were instruments of God’s wrath. God moves in mysterious ways, and if we hadn’t deserved what happened, it wouldn’t have occurred. The bandits would be punished for their crimes too, if not in this life then in the next.

         The convent sat on a vein of silver, and the sisters worked that mine with as much fervor as they said their prayers. Those initiates who weren’t down in the mines chipping away at the ore or at the furnace separating the silver from the lead were up on the walls of the convent with shotguns, keeping an eye out for claim jumpers. The sisters took their vows of poverty seriously. The only luxury they spared us was a tiny silver cross each, to remind us of our connection to God and, perhaps, as insurance against future destitution. All other money went to feeding and housing the poor. The sisters could eke a loaf of bread out of a handful of grain and then split that among the forty of us. With that, and the deep well that they had on the property, we survived.

         At mass, I would whisper, “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us” and listen to the susurration of the nuns, hissing like wind through a broken window.

* * *

         When I was thirteen, the sheriff came knocking at the door late, after dark, while on duty on the wall. Two of the sisters lifted the bar and pulled open the heavy wooden door, and the sheriff and his deputy hustled in, a man strung between them.

         “Evening, sisters,” said the sheriff as they dropped the man into the dust of the courtyard. “We’ve got another one for you.”

         I leaned over the side to get a good view. Sister Constance came out to the courtyard, as put-together as if she hadn’t been woken up moments before. She nodded to the sheriff.

         “Tell me his crimes,” she said. I could see her turning a coin over and over in her hand, like a worry stone.

         “He stole three goats from the Robinson place, and killed their shepherd to get them.”

         “It weren’t me,” the man insisted through what sounded like a bloody mouth. “I swear, it weren’t me.”

         The sheriff glanced casually down at him and planted a foot in the middle of the man’s back, keeping him there. “Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t,” he said. “So you see why we brought him here.”

         Sister Constance swept her skirts aside and knelt on the ground next to the man. She opened her palm to show the coin—struck from pure silver from the mine. Even from up on the wall, I could see its gleam in the moonlight.

         “Do you see this?” Sister Constance asked quietly. The sheriff let up on the man enough for the man to get to his knees.

         “Yeah?” said the man, looking uncertainly from the coin to the other sisters standing around, watching.

         “God has blessed this convent with the ability to root out sin where we find it,” the sister said. She turned the coin over in her hand while the man stared dumbly. “If you killed that man and stole those sheep, this coin will tell me.”

         The man stared at the coin, then spat on the ground. “They caught the wrong man,” he said.

         Unperturbed, Sister Constance put the coin in her mouth, waited a serene moment, and then daintily spit it back into her palm. Wiping the coin dry on the edge of her skirt, she said, “As you can see, it’s quite harmless to those who are free from mortal sin.”

         “I’m not putting no devil-coin in my mouth,” the man said, crawling backward in the dirt.

         Sister Constance raised her eyes to the sheriff and deputy, who bent down to restrain the man. When he was firmly in hand, the sister held up the coin. “You have an opportunity to repent your sin. But if you decline, you won’t get a second chance.”

         “You’re a goddamn witch,” said the man. He strained against the sheriff’s hands. “I did nothing wrong.”

         Sister Constance nodded once, looking disappointed. The deputy pried the man’s mouth open, and Sister Constance dropped the coin inside.

         For a long moment, nothing happened. The man spat the coin out into the dust, then looked up at Sister Constance with a nasty grin. The whole courtyard waited in a frozen silence.

         Then the man’s grin faded and he let out a low keening noise. Smoke began to trickle out of his nostrils. The man spasmed, kicking his legs. A hot white light blossomed under his shirt, and then the fabric began to burn away, and I could see the silhouette of his ribcage over the fire inside. My stomach twisted but I kept watching, caught between horror and morbid fascination. This man had done whatever he was accused of and worse, and he was burning for it.

         The sheriff and deputy let go and backed away. The man was beyond struggling at this point. He screamed, thrashing on the ground, as thick black smoke gushed from his mouth. It smelled like overcooked bacon. His shirt was aflame and the flesh underneath was black.

         The silence in the courtyard remained over the next several minutes as the fire burned furiously. When the fire finally subsided, the sheriff nodded to Sister Constance. “For your trouble,” he said, and held out a jingling pouch. She took it graciously. The deputy and the sheriff lifted the man’s corpse and carried it back out the gate to the waiting cart.

* * *

         After I leave Frontera’s farm, I return to the camp I made last night up the ridge. I have no waterskin, nor any food. I can’t eat the forty cents I have left. I can’t even boil the leather of my satchel to give myself something to chew on, because I have no water to boil.

         My prayers are automatic, the movements worn into my fingers as I sift through the beads on my rosary. With each Hail Mary and Lord’s Prayer, I can feel my shoulders tense. I haven’t had confession since I left the convent. Haven’t taken communion. I say my prayers, but when my mouth shapes the words, they come out tarnished. There’s nothing holy in this path on which I’ve set myself.

         I remember his teeth.

         It’s like a crackle of lightning in my brain, a flash of light and then nothing. I close my eyes and try to hold on to the memory, even though I don’t think I want it.

* * *

         When I turned fourteen, the sisters taught me how to cast bullets, one of the few jobs I could do one-handed. Once they’d extracted the silver from the lead, I’d melt the lead into a quivering puddle and then pour it into the mold, making bullets for the sisters on the wall. What didn’t go to the sisters on the wall went to traders who stopped by, and there was always a market for it.

         It was another sister’s job to strike the silver coins. Most of the silver was made into bars and packed in a safe, but a small portion was set aside for these coins, made with a cross on the front and a dove on the back. Those, Sister Constance kept somewhere secret. As far as I could tell, whatever holy power they possessed was not in the silver itself but in whatever process the sisters used to refine the metal. They didn’t do it to all the metal; certainly not the stuff they were going to sell. It was only the silver used for their holy work that held God’s fire inside. I was not old enough, or perhaps pure enough, to be let in on the secret.

         Whatever it was, it would eat a sinner from the inside out. Eating their sin.

* * *

         Two years later, three men were brought to the convent, seriously injured. One of them was gut-shot and died before they even put him in a cot. Of the other two, one had been shot in the chest, and the other was entirely missing his right leg.

         “The Warner farm was taken over last week by bandits,” he raved while the sisters restrained him with leather straps so he wouldn’t struggle when they cauterized his stump. “We went up there, but they saw us coming—” He choked when a sister pushed a leather strap into his mouth for him to bite down on. His eyes rolled wildly and then he screamed as Sister Charity set the hot metal against his leg.

         Later, when he had been sewn up and was resting in a cot, buzzed on whiskey, he tugged at the dangling sleeve of my missing arm.

         “They et ‘em,” he said. “Both folks and the oldest son. Et ‘em right up. Just the bones left. We got the three-year-old out. Then they got the upper hand on us and tied me to a tree—” He groaned, one hand grasping for the stump where his leg had been. “Cooked it right in front of me,” he whispered. “Not because they needed it but because they wanted me to watch. I only got away when my partners showed up.” He looked toward the other bed in the room, but the second man had died just a few minutes before. I saw his face crumple.

         Just a day after the third man succumbed to gangrene, I snuck into Sister Constance’s room and searched it furiously while everyone else was at the funeral mass. I should have been too, but I’d begged off with a headache.

         The coins were in a leather pouch kept under a floorboard under her bed, only obvious because of the lack of dust. I took out six coins, tied the bag shut again, and retreated to the refinery.

         Silver is as good as lead for bullets; just more expensive. I cast six bullets in the refinery, praying I wasn’t destroying their power, sitting in the heat while the sounds of mass came from across the convent. When they were done, I tipped them, still hot, into a handkerchief and tied that up.

         The possessions of the dead men were being kept in the surgery, since no one had come to claim them. I found the revolver there. In my room, I packed that in my satchel with a few necessities, and before mass was even over, I headed out.

         When I left the convent, there were six bullets in my gun. Five for the bandits, and one for good luck.

* * *

         There’s something about the dry dusty heat that makes my heart beat in my ears and my stomach start to squeeze itself in at the corners, getting tighter. It’s the feeling of a bad storm coming. There are clouds bulking up on the horizon, but I know that it’s not going to rain. It doesn’t rain here anymore.

         I spend the morning tracking for rabbits. They must be out here if there are still coyotes around, I know, but they’re keeping themselves well hidden. It takes me until noon to trap two in my snare, and by that point I’m convinced I’ve emptied the whole plains of their rabbit population.

         You can starve to death on rabbits. They don’t have enough fat on them to keep a person going, especially not the ones out here, where there’s no vegetation left under the sun and all living things are just skin and bone. It’s not just rabbits—any too-lean meat will do it. You can eat all the meat you want until your belly is distended, but without fat, you’re always hungry.

         This time of drought and famine isn’t a time to be picky with food, but I can’t abide with eating meat. It’s not as much the taste as the smell. I’m not fussy, but that smell of cooking flesh is just wrong to me.

         But these coneys are the only living thing out here that I’ve found, though the fact that they’re here means that there must be vegetation somewhere. I’m too hungry to search, and I don’t think chewing on dry brambles will help me, anyway. I bind up my nose with my handkerchief and breathe through my mouth while I roast them over the fire, keeping my eyes averted from the blackening flesh. The smoke hazes my eyes, leaving them dripping, and I apply myself to pinning the skins to the ground with whittled sticks so I can scrape them one-handed. I’m so distracted I nearly burn the rabbits to a char, but I rescue them in time.

         By mid-day, the clouds in the west have gone glittering white at the leading edge. I keep an eye on them as I walk to the Frontera farm. It looks like snow, but that’s impossible.

         I check the bullets in my gun as I walk. There are two left. The other four have gone to each of the other four bandits who were there the night my parents died. I’m no crack shot—I make sure to only pull the trigger when I’m certain that I’ll hit my mark. I don’t care if I have to shoot a man in the back or while he’s sleeping. I shot one who was already dead. All I care about is planting the seed of the sin eater and watching it blossom.

         There’s only one bandit left. Frontera retired before the others to raise a family, but that won’t spare him. He who eats of my flesh and drinks of my blood remains in me, and I in him. I can’t rest until I’ve consigned him to God.

         One bandit, and two bullets. At first, that extra bullet was a safeguard in case things went awry. But now that I’m coming close to the end of my self-appointed mission, it’s becoming more and more likely that it’ll end up spare.

         By the time I’m a mile from the farm, the clouds are a lot closer. I can see their approach over the plains, the dark haze that’s coming with it. It’s not windy, though, and it doesn’t smell like rain; maybe I wouldn’t recognize it if it did.

         Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I put that bullet in my mouth like Sister Constance did with the coin. Would I burn? Murder is a mortal sin, but these men were more than murderers. They were stains on the soul of the world. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t have burned like they did, lit up like Catherine wheels. If they weren’t meant to die, God wouldn’t have let me kill them.

         That doesn’t make it forgivable, what I did.

         Some nights that sixth bullet weighs extra heavy.

         And then, all at once, it starts to rain. The drops hit the dirt around me with a hefty weight, spewing up dust—but wait.

         That’s not rain.

         Locusts spatter to the ground with the ferocity of hailstones. Something hits me in the chest and I clamp my hand over it. A tiny brown grasshopper lays there, stunned. Another hits me in the shoulder, and then in the thigh. And then the storm really starts.

         I make it another hundred feet before I’m wading in a river of locusts. Wriggling bodies squirm up my trouser legs and frantically batter against my shins to escape. I yank my handkerchief down over my face to protect my eyes from the sharp, flickering wings. The noise of them is like a tea kettle left on the stove, an unending shriek. The air is choking with the dry, grassy smell of insect. They twitch in the collar of my shirt, their wings sticking to my sweaty neck. One buzzes into my ear and when I swat at it, I crush two more into my hair.

         It’s dark out now, no hint of the sun in the sky. The farmhouse is barely visible, the air hazy with wings Inside the house, a light has come on to chase off the sudden dark. I stagger up the steps and onto the covered porch, but the locusts are banging onto the railing, onto the steps, ricocheting off the porch like bacon grease spattering out of a pan.

         I lean against the clapboard wall, picking locusts out of my shirt. Inside the house, I hear footsteps thump across the floor. I don’t think anyone knows I’m here yet. They can’t hear me through the noise.

         The front door creaks open. A woman comes out. I keep myself flattened against the wall, staying still. She stares out at the yard, her back to me, and then turns toward the door. “They’re locusts, Orl. They’re going to eat the corn.”

         “There’s no corn left to eat,” says a man’s voice from inside. It’s so close to me that I tense, the skin on my neck twitching.

         “The soybeans, though—” She sweeps into the house, grabbing her skirts and shaking out a couple stray locusts. She leaves the door open. “We have to cover them. I’m getting quilts. You help me.”

         “You’re not going out until it’s over,” Frontera says. From the sound of his voice, he has turned to watch her as she heads off to find quilts.

         She doesn’t respond. There is a pause and the door creaks slightly, as if someone is holding the handle. I breathe out slowly, my hand resting on my gun.

         “You were outside my house last night,” Frontera says. His voice, again, is very close.

         I hold my breath and study the open yet still empty doorway. I’m pressed against the wall, so I can’t understand how he knows I’m out there. Then I see the trail of crushed locusts left by my boots from my flight up the stairs.

         I jerk the gun out of the holster and nearly squeeze out a shot by accident in my panic before Frontera comes through the doorway and hammers me in the face with his fist, breaking my nose and sending me reeling back to the floor.

         I crash down hard on my ass, dropping the revolver. The pain is explosive, but worse than that is the horror at knowing that I have ruined my plan with my own stupidity. Why couldn’t I have just shot him last night, when his back was turned? Frontera stands in over me, haloed in locusts.

         We both go for my gun at the same time, but I’m bleeding and half-blind with pain. He gets it first.

         “Who the hell are you?” he asks, stepping back.

         I spit blood onto the floor, my only response. He grins.

         “I’m going to give the locusts something to eat besides my soybeans,” he says, and aims the gun at my belly. I’m already cringing away, anticipating the shot. Will I go up in a firestorm, like all the bandits have? I hope the fire sparked by my sins consumes his house before he knows what’s happening.

         Frontera pulls the trigger.

* * *

         Once when I was very young, I grabbed a cook pot on the fire. I burned my hands so badly that they bubbled up, hot and white and painful.

         Being shot in the belly feels like that. It feels like everything below my collarbone and above my waist is bubbling up, boiling into scar tissue and blisters.

         Somewhere distant, I hear a woman’s voice say, “Orlando?” and Frontera answers, “Go back inside.”

         I’m burning. My lungs are choking up with smoke. I can taste my own insides, the taste of burning meat and hair. This is what I knew was always going to happen, but not yet. Not now. Not while Frontera is standing there, unpunished.

         After a moment, I open my eyes. It still hurts, worse than anything I’ve ever felt before, but I’m not actively burning. By this point, I should feel myself turning to ash. I’m almost disappointed, thinking that if this was all the bandits felt when they died, it wasn’t worth it.

         But I’m not dying.

         Very slowly, I raise my hand and press it against my belly. It comes away bloody but not burnt. Wherever the bullet buried itself, it didn’t lodge anywhere too bad, but that shouldn’t matter—I should be dead. I should burn in Hell for what I did.

         Frontera is standing over me. He flips open the cylinder and frowns when he sees there’s only one bullet left. “You were cutting it close, weren’t you, girl?”

         I should be burning. I should be lit up like that murderer in the convent courtyard. I was His weapon, yes, but that doesn’t mean I escape His judgment. Is this God’s forgiveness? Or His absence?

         Frontera pulls the shell out and studies the bullet. “Is this silver?”

         I take in a breath, testing my lungs. It feels like I’m breathing through a wool blanket, but I can still get air in. My nose is dripping and my eyes are wet. “Bite—” I cough. “Bite it and see.”

         He holds the bullet between thumb and forefinger. “Where did a wretch like you get a bullet like this? This could be worth a mint.”

         I paw at my wound, trying to hold back the bleeding. His eyes follow the movement, and then he eases himself down to the floor next to me. Gripping my shoulder, he rocks me up onto my side and feels around on my back.

         “No exit wound,” he says. “It’s still in there.”

         He lets me flop back down to my back. Locusts crunch underneath me. I’m close enough to the edge of the porch that there are locusts falling off the railing onto my face. I’ve lost my hat somewhere.

         “Who’s that?” Frontera’s wife is in the doorway again. I can see her eyes go wide when she sees the blood, and her gaze cuts uneasily toward Frontera.

         “I told you to get inside, woman.” Frontera rocks back on his heels. “Get me the tongs. I need to do some surgery.” He winks at me.

         “He’s just a child,” she says, gripping the sides of her skirt in tight fists.

         “Get me the tongs.” Frontera twists around, and whatever she sees on his face makes her retreat back into the house.

         Frontera pokes at the empty sleeve of my shirt. “Did I do this, child?” he says. “That why you’re here?” He shows me his smile, those familiar teeth. “I heard about some of my old pals disappearing. Someone shooting them and burning the corpses. Thought it might be someone out for revenge. Didn’t realize you were just a pup.”

         “You killed my parents,” I whispered.

         “Times are hard.” He sucks on his teeth and looks out at the locusts. “They’re getting harder. Might be you’ll help my family and I survive a little longer.” He pinches the rabbit-lean flesh on my good arm. “You’re a little wiry but you’ll do.”

         The wife has reappeared in the doorway, holding a metal pair of tongs. She’s watching us in silence. She has the look of the grave digger in town, steadily digging that hole not because she wanted to but because it was something that needed to be done. I would wonder what Frontera has done to her to convince her to obey so readily, except I understand desperation.

         “You’ve killed so many people,” I say to him, louder so she can hear it.

         Frontera chuckles. “Delia knows,” he says, holding out a hand. She gives him the tongs. “She knows what I had to do to survive. Go get my coffee, Dee.”

         Delia disappears again. With one hand, Frontera yanks my shirt open at the front, popping buttons and exposing the cloth binding my chest. His other hand holds the tongs, ready to fish in my wound to find the silver bullet, but before he can do that, he pauses. His fingers go to the cross around my neck, now visible against my skin.

         “More silver,” he says in wonder. “Where are you getting all this? Why haven’t you sold it yet?”

         I wish I’d hid it better. He doesn’t deserve it. I don’t answer and just watch Delia come back out, holding a tin cup of coffee in her hands. Her eyes are locked on the wound in my belly. She sets the cup down next to Frontera and steps back but doesn’t go back inside.

         Frontera tugs on the cross, breaking the delicate chain. He shoves it into his pocket and uses a fistful of my shirt to mop the blood away from the wound. “Can’t be that deep,” he mutters to himself, digging the tongs into the wound.

         I scream, jerking. He frowns and plants one hand on my shoulder, pinning my one arm down while he digs in my belly with the tongs. It’s worse than being shot, worse even than having my arm cut off.

         “Quit that caterwauling,” he says, drawing back slightly. The tongs are bloody but he doesn’t have the bullet yet.

         “Stop,” I beg him. “Please. Or kill me first.”

         He grins down at me and squeezes my shoulder. “I don’t want to waste another bullet,” he says. He digs the tongs in again.

         Everything goes white behind my eyes. I grab blindly at his leg, the only thing within reach that I can grab. My fingers tangle with the chain of the cross and suddenly I know why God spared me. Frontera doesn’t notice when I pull it free.

         He digs deeper, frowning. “I’m no surgeon,” he mumbles distractedly.

         I squeeze my eyes shut against the bouncing locusts and flail out with my arm. I almost knock his coffee cup over fumbling at it before I manage to rein my arm in. I press my empty palm over the wound, feeling the pulse of blood.

         “You want I should stitch her up when you’re done?” asks Delia quietly.

         Frontera looks down at me and abandons the tongs for a second, sitting back on his heels. “Save your thread.” He picks up his coffee. “I’ll toss her out to the locusts when I’m done.” He frowns at the blood on his cup, then shrugs and tosses back the coffee in one gulp. Delia looks down at me with dark, worried eyes.

         Frontera coughs and brings a hand up to his mouth. He pulls a thin silver chain out from between his lips, a puzzled look on his face. The chain swings free, the cross on the end.

         “Why did you—” he starts to say, and smoke curls out of his nostrils.

         The light kindles in his belly, visible through his shirt. He grabs at his stomach with both hands, looking surprised. “What— did you put— in that coffee?” He aims the question at me, every word squeezed with pain. Before I can answer, he drops to his knees, and I see the line of angry red flowing up his neck.

         He starts screaming after that. I’ve heard this scream before. It’s the scream of being devoured while you’re still alive. He grabs for Delia’s skirts, the only thing within his reach, but she recoils. His fingers close on air

         From inside the house, the toddler wails and comes running out the door, swishing past Delia. She snatches him up at the last second, keeping him from running to his burning daddy. I see a glimpse of his face, wretched, horrified, before Delia presses him to her chest and turns away. She steps into the house and shuts the door, leaving me to watch Frontera burn.

* * *

         I wake on top of a thin quilt on a hard wooden floor with a tickling blanket of locusts crawling in an open window and over my body. The bullet burns in my belly, a smoldering ember that gets worse as I swat them off me and roll over, levering myself up on my hand and knees on the floor of the parlor. My wound has been sewn shut with small, neat stitches. My stomach rumbles, not satisfied with just a bullet to gnaw on.

         The house is empty and silent but for the locusts. I stagger out of the parlor and make it only as far as the kitchen before I have to sit down again in the carpet of dead locusts and catch my breath. The locusts are bunched up against the kitchen wall, migrating south, trying to climb out the windows and under my shirt. Under their whine, I strain to hear the sound of Delia’s voice or of the toddler crying, but there’s nothing.

         I crawl to the back door and open it, letting out a wave of locusts. I sit on the back steps, hunched over the burning knot in my belly and tasting the faint, ever-present hint of smoke at the back of my throat. Delia may have tended to me out of guilt or Christian duty, but it might as well have been malice, because she has left me here with my life ahead of me and no vengeance to guide my steps. What do you do when you’ve done what I’ve done and there’s no one left to hold you accountable? When do I get what’s coming to me?

         The wind whistles through the shorn fields. All the crops are gone, eaten down to the stubs, except for the prairie grass that proved unpalatable. The soybeans are gone. Delia’s quilts are gone, too. The sheep have been shorn of wool by a thousand starving locusts. The sides of the barns have been stripped of paint, and the wooden handles of shovels are chewed to splinters. It looks empty out there, but then, I was devoured and left for dead once, too.

         My stomach rumbles again. I take a deep breath and rise slowly from the steps, returning into the empty hollow of the kitchen. My revolver and the sixth silver bullet are nowhere to be seen. I hope Delia has taken them with her. She’s welcome to take whatever path she wants with them. The vengeance for the loss of her family is in her hands now, or her son’s if he wants it. I won’t begrudge them that.

         The cold storage furnishes me a crock of rendered coyote fat. I work automatically, stoking the fire in the stove and setting the pan over the heat. The locusts pop as they fry, and I find myself picking them out of the pan with my bare fingers and shoving them in my mouth until the gnawing hunger is sated. They’re hot and crunchy, rich with a sustenance I haven’t had in a long time.

         They can’t touch the burning in my belly. That taste of smoke is going to be with me for good, I suspect, but for the moment I work to fill my belly, and that’s enough.

Copyright © 2017 Bennett North

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Bennett North lives south of Boston, where she works in IT at a local university and avoids jogging. She has previously had work published in Fantasy & Science Fiction and has a story forthcoming from Persistent Visions.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

COVER ART

“Riverhome,” by Veli Nyström

Veli Nyström is an illustrator and concept artist mostly in the games industry. He currently works as a freelancer and resides in Tampere, Finland. View more of his art online at www.artstation.com/vablo and velinystrom.com.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1076

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Compilation Copyright © 2017 Firkin Press

This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.