The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (50 page)

His eyebrows rose and he tossed up a hand. “It may not have turned out that way, but he thought he was doing the right thing at the time. So it goes—as Ed himself was wont to say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

He raised his brow, filling his forehead with worry-lines. “He regretted it until his last breath. Many times in the night he would come to me with apologies and kick himself until I reassured him that the future may yet bring you back to us. And now you know why he drank so much. He could not live with himself for having to give you up.”

Suddenly, everything came into focus, and Ed’s rampant alcoholism in my childhood made perfect sense. Now I knew why my parents had separated. Ed was simply unbearable to live with anymore. He was racked with guilt for having to relinquish his friends’ children to the adoption system.

It hit me just how intimately kind Hel Grammatica must have been, and how long it had taken him, to track them down.

No—in the end, it wasn’t necessary. Ed’s death had brought us together. I realized that Noreen’s car failure hadn’t been an accident.
That
had been Hel’s doing. Had it also been the Silen that had intentionally scared me into asking Sawyer to investigate Ed’s house? Did he know I would call my new friend for backup?

Or did Hel talk me into doing it himself without my knowledge? I smiled to myself. The manipulative little shit.

“Your second point,” said Normand, “I’ve already answered it, and I imagine you’ve already surmised the gist of it. From what Ed told me, the orphanages on Earth do not easily restore custody of children to their original guardians. He was unable to retrieve you after having to give you up.”

Noreen sat back down on the throne. I had to admit, she looked very regal sitting on it.

“Enough wailing and gnashing,” said the King, a warm, commanding presence returning to his bronzy voice. I could see where the loyalty of the Kingsmen came from—the man filled the room with himself just by speaking. Back home, they called orators like Normand ‘phonebook actors’. “You are home, and that’s what is important. We will confer on any further injuries and injustices later; right now you all look as if you’ve spent the last week lying in a ditch being worked over by buzzards. Get out of here and get some rest.”

_______

This late in the day, we had the dark bath-house to ourselves. There was no coffee to be served, but the water was still hot enough to raise goosebumps. We slid into the soap-milky water and relaxed. The uptown Ostlyn bath was set into the side of the hill so there were no windows, but a soaped skylight overhead dropped dim light onto the fog and created a heavenly glow. It looked like the set of an Indiana Jones movie.

We rested quietly, letting the heat soak in. I didn’t even know what to say even if I’d felt like being talkative.

Noreen broke the quiet solitude. “I still can’t wrap my mind around it.”

“It’s going to take a while to get used to, I imagine,” said Walter. He was sitting on the end of a wooden chaise lounge smoking a cigarette, a towel around his waist. He stubbed it out into a little metal cymbal dish and stepped into the bath with us. “I’m still coming to terms with the fact that I now have a brother I never knew. What I’ve learned today explains so much.”

“Same here,” said Sawyer. “I’ve never had a brother before.”

“I would be honored to have you by my side as a Kingsman one day, yeah?”

“Seriously?” asked Sawyer. “Wait—this means my last name is actually Rollins, isn’t it?”

“I expect so.”

“Sawyer Rollins,” he said. “I like it.”

“Do you know anything about gunplay? Were you a soldier in your world like Ross?”

“No. I don’t own a gun, I’ve never even fired one. Never could afford it. Hell, the road trip to attend Ed’s funeral broke me. If I hadn’t ended up here, I’d be freezing my ass off in my apartment living on Ramen noodles.”

“I’ll tell you what,” said Walter. “We’ll see if Normand’s got anything Ross can use and you can have my other pistol. Two of a kind, us! The Rollins brothers!”

“I see how it is!” I said, smirking. “Somebody new comes along and you forget all about me!”

“You jest, but King Normand’s got quite the armory. You’re getting the better end of the deal, savvy. You forget who runs the gun show around here.”

Noreen dunked her head underwater to wet her hair and started lathering it up. I took this as a cue to shave my beard, getting out of the water. I got a bucket from a stack leaning against the wall and dipped some of the water out of the bath, and started scraping my face and head with the straight razor Normand had lent us.

I grievously wounded myself with it several times, but managed to get most of the hair off without outright killing myself.

The tan I’d gotten and the weight I’d lost after the whirlwind ambush had been undone by the reparation of the narrative, after I’d been washed into the Vur Ukasha. I wasn’t bothered. I was home. I’d have plenty of time to get healthy again.

“We’ve been faffing about long enough,” said Walter, getting out of the water and drying off. “When you’re done here, meet me at Weatherhead, on the portico. It’s time we started preparing. This Rhetor character knows we’re topside and now he understands that after Ross rewrote reality, that we might be a force to be reckoned with.

“We don’t want to be standing around with our puds in our hands when the immortal and his brainwashed lackeys show up looking for a fight. The warriors of Destin do not expire easily. I want to make sure that when he gets here, all he finds are warriors.”

_______

When we caught up with Walter, he was arguing with a man. I assume it was a man, at any rate, because the closer we got to him the bigger he seemed. He wasn’t even as tall as his son, but Chiral Clayton was twice as big on the horizontal and looked like a bearded tree stump. The man was a brick shithouse. I could tell his sons got their looks from their mother and I’d never even seen the woman.

“I’m tellin you, boy—the lad’s gone. Eddie Brig couldn’t get him back,” he was saying when we walked up. “And who might you be?”

“I’m Ed’s son, Ross.”

“These are the ones I was telling you about,” said Walter.

Clayton looked like a craggier, meaner, balder, older Teddy Roosevelt. He was clad in a leather vest, corduroy trousers, and a collared shirt with the sleeves rolled up Marine-style. He looked very much like the quintessential Rough Rider.

He stepped toward us and tugged down his spectacles, inspecting me in the early evening sun over the rims of the lenses. Then he looked at Sawyer, and would have turned away if Noreen hadn’t caught his eye. He took his glasses off and put them in his vest pocket, took her shoulders in his bear-paw hands and squinted down his nose at her.

“I’ll be hung out to dry,” he said. He looked at Sawyer again, then me. “—and folded up neat. It is you. It
is
you!”

He guffawed laughter and hugged the girl hard enough to make her grunt. She wriggled her nose at the old man’s briny aura. He was obviously more given to spending his coin at the tavern than the bath-house.

He reached over and took all three of us up in an embrace, clapping Sawyer on the back. He held his long-lost son at arms’ length and smiled. “Dear me, dear me, dear me,” he said. “Boy, it’s an amazin thing. I scarce understand it, but I’m glad to see you all back where you belong. By the Wolf, you’ve got Rollins blood, you do. I see it in ye. I see Normand in the girl, too. She’s got his spark in her eyes.”

Sawyer returned the smile half-heartedly. I could tell he was still spooked by the revelation.

“How did you get back from Zam?” asked Clayton.

“It was the Silen’s doing,” I said. “It might—”

Clayton resumed talking. He seemed not to have heard me. “Well, no matter how you got here, I’m happy to have you back.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Sawyer.

“What’s this
sir
shit? Call me Father, or Pa, or Da, or something.”

“Okay.”

The moment seemed to hesitate in the air. I got a weird vibe from the old man, who glanced at Sawyer out of the corner of his eye and pretended to notice something on his lapel and brush it off. He said at Walter, “So what’s going on? I’m gettin that feelin again, like you got somethin on the edge of your tongue.”

Walter stared back at him wordlessly for several long seconds and then said, “We are in dire circumstances. Ross was about to tell you about it before you interrupted him.”

“Oh,” said Clayton. “I thought he was done talkin. Shoot, boy, out with it. Give us what you got.”

“The Silen is dead,” I said. “By my brother’s hand, the same man that murdered my father. He is under the control of another Silen, an evil being called the Rhetor who looks to kill a hell of a lot more people. We came here to warn Normand and yourself in case he comes here to kill you, and to look for help dealing with the Sileni.”

“Not that it is of any concern to you,” said Walter. “We have business to attend—”

“Not that—” Clayton sputtered, getting flustered. “—any concern—I’ll scrape your hide, boy. Who are
you
talking to? I ain’t your kennel-boys down to the lake.”

“This conversation is over,” said Walter. He walked away with a swirl of longcoat. “Please follow me, friends.”

Kennel-boys?
I sighed, glanced at Sawyer, and at Clayton, whose face was beginning to resemble an heirloom tomato. We siphoned away onto Walter, who was crossing the portico to a smaller door tucked into the shadows in the corner. He opened it. A stairway led down into darkness.

“Where are
you
going in such a hurry?” snarled Clayton.

Walter said nothing. I could tell he was the kind of man that got quieter as he got angrier. Sawyer said, “We need to get ready.”

“Get ready, he says,” said Clayton. “I’ll come spectate. If you boys are spoilin for a fight with somebody, you best have an audience that knows what it looks like when a man knows how to handle a gun.”

The stairwell led down into a long hallway with a polished floor pitted with marks and cracks, and ended in an iron grille that resembled a jail cell door, which Walter unlocked with a key. The armory was a vault at the bottom of the stairs and the end of a long stone hallway.

We walked into a large room that was wall-to-wall shelving, illuminated from above by a series of skylights. Rows of simple six-shooters lined the shelves, inset in velveted brackets. Entire racks of them were missing, presumably issued to the lesser armored gunslingers that served as the Ainean militia under the Kingsmen.

Upright racks held shotguns and rifles, short repeaters and long-barreled breech-loaders with soda-bottle scopes. In a corner was a pile of fearsome-looking heater shields, made of banded steel. Each one had leather loops on the backside of them for ammo, and a pistol holster.

Clayton stood by the entrance as Walter handed us pistols and gave us each a box of loose cartridges. “I’ll meet you out there,” he said, as we were leaving. “I’ll just be a few minutes.”

“Suit yourself,” said the Deon, holstering a pair of sixguns.

Home on the Range

I
T WAS A LONG WALK OUT
to the range, an open pasture out in the countryside. On the way, I had the opportunity to ask Walter about the ‘kennel-boys’ Clayton had mentioned. “Do you guys keep working dogs for the—”

“No,” he said, cutting me off. “It’s nothing you should be concerned with. It is a matter between my father and I.”

“All...right.”

We passed through shadowed lanes between hedgerows and down dirt roads, through neighborhoods of splintery farmhouses and under the shade of towering crabapple trees. We emerged from a narrow break in a wall of honeysuckle thicket onto a long trail that wound alongside several dozen freshly-tilled acres.

A man was leading a team of mules down the field, pulling a plow in the distance; as he recognized us, he took off his hat and swatted at us with it. We all took off our own hats and waved back.

The range was on the other side of a large graveyard. We came out on top of a tall hill studded with worn gravestones. The trail trickled in terraced zigzags down through the graves to a fence overgrown by brambles and kudzu. Lush green trees stood sentinel over the barrier. I tried to read the stones as we walked through them, but they were all in weather-scoured Ainean.