I’m enchanted. I take off my cowboy hat and carefully dislodge several of the leaves into the crown. They fall with a sweet tinkle of sound.
“What is it?” Cal Griffin peers down at me from his horse, hazel eyes darting from me into the deeper woods. His hand is on the hilt of his sword.
I hold up one of the leaves. Steely sunlight sparks cold fire in the tracery of veins. “We may have to rename a couple of seasons,” I say. “How about spring, summer, shard, and bleak?”
Cal leans down from the horse and takes the leaf from my fingers. “Ouch. You’re not kidding. I’d hate to be standing under a tree when these things fall. If they fall.” He lays the leaf carefully on the palm of my hand. “Better get back in the wagon. Colleen might slow down or even stop for you if you apologize for scaring her like that.”
I carefully tuck the leaves into the pocket of my buckskin jacket and set the cowboy hat back in its rightful place. As always, my hair-too thick, too curly, and too long-puts up an admirable fight, but I cram the hat down until it submits peacefully.
“Scare Colleen,” I repeat. “Isn’t that an oxymoron?”
He smiles fleetingly and jerks a thumb toward the wagon, which has come to a stop down the road with Doc hovering near the tailgate. “Get.”
“Maybe it’s just a paradox,” I say, moving away from the trees. “Or an anomaly, or a mere flight of fancy.”
Cal clicks Sooner into a lope and leaves me to chug my way back to the wagon.
Colleen stays stopped to let me climb in. Then she gives me a chill glance, laces the reins through her fingers like she’s done it every day of her life, and clucks the team into motion. In this nippy weather they are rarin’ to go, as they say in the Wild West. They toss their heads, paw the ground, and pull at their bits. Colleen manages them effortlessly.
“You’re sure good at that horsey stuff,” I tell her, chipping at the brittle silence. “I guess it’s because you’re a native Corn-husker and all, huh?”
She gives me a cool green glance. “You think?”
I shrug. “Okay, I don’t know why you’re good at it. You just are. You’ve been around horses a lot, I’d guess.”
She repeats the glance, then puts her eyes back on the crusty tarmac ahead. One callused hand smoothes back her hair, which is almost as spiky as her annoyance. Scissors still work, but Colleen is careless of such niceties. I think she does her hair with her pet machete.
“Yeah. I got a horse when I was thirteen. Before Dad died. You never forget the feeling of the reins in your hands, the ripple of muscle between your knees, the smooth glide of a horse at a full gallop. To this day, whenever I get stressed out or pissed off …” A pointed glance. “.. I walk myself through bridling and saddling a horse just to chill. Well… and to prove to myself I remember how to do it.”
Her eyes go back to the road then, and she closes up tight as a clam. Conservation of intimacies, I guess. I play with my glass leaves, trying to shake music out of them.
After about five minutes of this Colleen speaks again. “You know what, Goldman? That’s damned annoying.”
I wrap the leaves in a handkerchief that’s made its way into my breast pocket and put them away. “You know what, Ms. Brooks? No one’s called me Goldman since my sophomore baseball coach. Well… and my probation officer.”
“Your what?”
Loose lips, the curse of an unquiet mind. “Oh, look,” I say. “A road sign.”
There is, indeed, a road sign. It proclaims that there is a town not far ahead. Grave Creek. Nice, ominous little name for a town.
“Eight miles,” says Cal, drawing his horse up close to the wagon. “If we hustle we might make it before the sun goes down.”
On a clear day we’d have some wiggle room, but the oppressive cloud cover puts us uncomfortably close to twilight. Since the Change, out after dark is not something you want to be. If the world is peculiar when the sun is up (and it is plenty peculiar), it is insanely scary when the sun goes down. Colleen nods and clucks her team into a brisk trot.
Barely half an hour later we hear a shout from Cal, who’s taken the vanguard. He lopes back to us through the gloamin’, waving an arm. Doc draws up along our right flank to see what all the hoo-ha is about. Pulling up, Cal points southwest.
The clouds have lifted at the horizon and a baleful red sun glares at us from beneath the edge. Against the bleed of crimson, a water tower stands in sharp silhouette. Firelight flickers atop the squashed sphere.
“Civilization ho,” I say.
“A lookout?” asks Doc, his eyes on the tower.
“Or a beacon,” Cal says. “Maybe it’s a friendly hello to wayward travelers.”
Wishful thinking. “You know, there were these pirates up Newfoundland way that used to set signal fires on the cliffs to beckon to merchant ships. After the ships piled up on the rocks, the pirates would go out in little boats and collect the booty. Survivors were offered a choice: join the jolly pirate band or die.”
“Judas Priest, Goldman!” says Colleen. “Do you have to be such a friggin’ fountain of helpful information?”
Doc Lysenko hides a smile in the twilight over his shoulder. “Ah, a child’s daydream. Didn’t you ever want to be a pirate, Colleen?”
Colleen’s face goes through the most amazing set of expressions: Doc has surprised a smile, but she aborts it and stretches it into a grimace, then inverts it into a scowl, then smoothes it into a look of prim disapproval. “What I want,” she says finally, “is to be somewhere other than out in the middle of nowhere when night falls.”
“Then we’d better get a move on.” Cal turns his horse and leads on toward the looming silhouette of the tower. Unaccountably, I shiver.
Our road descends into a shallow, triangular valley where the woods stand back from the edge of the grassland like spectators at the scene of an accident. The bottom of the triangle is a mile or two distant, and a second road runs north to south along it, merging with the one we’re on. As we make the descent, my eyes are on the place where the town should be. I can just make out more flickers of light sprinkled about the base of the water tower. I do hope they’re not pirates.
“We have company,” murmurs Doc from our starboard bow. He’s staring across the valley to the north-south road.
“Where?” asks Colleen, tensing.
“There.” Doc’s gesture is almost lost in the twilight.
A small group of people moves along the converging road toward Grave Creek, clearly visible against the dark woodland that hugs the road. They seem to be struggling with some sort of litter. Three of the people are very small. Children. Or munchkins, maybe. These days it could be either.
“I think they may have injured,” Doc says. “They could likely use our help.”
“Hold on, Doc,” Colleen warns him. “Let Cal scope it out first, okay?”
Cal is already doing that, I realize, moving down into the valley at a leisurely, nonthreatening trot.
“I’ll light the lanterns,” I say, and do, suspending them from hooks-one on each side of the driver’s box. Kerosene, no less. I just love modern conveniences.
Cal’s nearing the floor of the vale when yet another group of folks comes out of the woods to our north. This new bunch heads down across the meadow on a course that roughly parallels the north-south road. There is a flicker of fire as someone in the road troupe lights a torch. There is no answering flicker of light from the folks in the meadow. They just keep pressing through the tall, dry grasses.
The newcomers, I realize, are moving very smartly. Maybe this is because they aren’t hauling someone on a litter, or maybe because they’re in a bigger hurry. The new folks overtake the first party and swing wide as if to pass them by. Then they veer sharply onto an intercept course, and suddenly it’s as if I’m looking at them in a funhouse mirror. They become indistinct, fluid around the edges, a school of shadows flowing across the landscape as if pulled by currents.