He shot me a sharp look. Miss Francina, off on my left, shot me a sharper one.
“I might know something about it,” I allowed. “Let’s talk later, when we’re dry and not looking for killers on every corner.”
Aashini might of fallen asleep against my back. Or she might just be huddled up like a mouse in the faint warmth of the oilcloth. Miss Francina’s shirt was plastered to her body, transparent as a jellyfish. Even the horses was grumbling with the wet and cold, and half the time we was picking down the darkest alleys imaginable and they was practically feeling their footing out with their whiskers as they went. The lit streets wasn’t any better, seeing as I kept expecting Bantle’s bullies to jump out and confound us.
Me, my shivering was half on account of I couldn’t stop thinking of the shame and horror I’d felt after Peter Bantle broke down Madame’s door. I could see that reflected in the stricken look Marshal Reeves kept shooting me.
And I also couldn’t stop thinking about how sure Priya’d been that all sorts of people might vote for Bantle, whether he seemed like the right choice for the job or not.
I reined back beside the Marshal and reached out between horses — and way up, given the relative heights of Scout and Dusty — to put a hand on his arm. Wet wool rubbed my fingers, and his startled glance rubbed my face.
“I think maybe I got an idea what’s going on,” I said. “But let’s talk about it back at Madame’s.”
He nodded. I could tell that much by the bobbing of his hat against the lesser dark of the walls behind him. When I let Scout head forward again — she was pretty obviously the lead mare in this bunch, for all Dusty was a sight bigger — I caught the speculative look Tomoatooah was giving me under Dusty’s neck. Maybe he thought I had designs on his partner.
Maybe he was just wondering how much I knowed.
* * *
When we got to where Merry Lee was supposed to be waiting if things went cattywumpus, she was nowhere in sight. We rode up under an awning, though, glad for a bit of shelter from the constant drip drip of the rain. It didn’t have the decency to really belly up and piss down on us. I missed the thunderstorms back in Hay Camp something awful. Here in Rapid, it just rained. There weren’t no romance nor suspense to it.
We paused there, and it was quiet just long enough for Aashini to start to uncoil against my spine. I could feel her back there, all bones and elbows. Skinny enough to take a bath in a shotgun barrel. She straightened and poked her head up but didn’t otherwise move. All of the rest of us just started exchanging unsettled looks. We had no way of knowing, see, if Merry Lee had gotten clear, or if she had fallen off a rooftop, or been gobbled up by a hidebehind or a gumberoo, for that matter. (Though I didn’t rightly know if such critters of the lumberwoods ventured this far into town, not having grown up local. I’d heard the polar bears in Anchorage would walk right up to front doors, so people laid nail strips across their porches to prevent it. But our own native hodags back in Hay Camp are shy and won’t come out where people can see ’em.)
We was in among some of those premade cast-iron buildings, the ones they ship in on barges and can get up in three minutes with the big armatures if they’re being paid by the piece, not the hour. They sure is pretty, though, with their big fine windows and slender columns, and the painted iron on the front makes for a fine, elegant facade. All those curlicues and rosettes was casting funny shadows in the gaslight, though, and I was full of evil thoughts. I saw every flicker of motion as evidence of Bantle and his bullies, heard every shift of rain as stealthy footsteps.
And the damn rain just kept dripping down, dull and unpunctuated.
Unlike the rain, it turned out, Merry Lee had a fine sense of the dramatic. I was just getting antsy enough with the waiting that Scout started stamping and tail-swishing from catching my nervousness when Merry came spidering down a cast-iron drainpipe on one of those tall buildings just exactly like someone who hadn’t had a bullet dug out of her back three weeks previous.
“She’s gonna rupture herself,” Marshal Reeves muttered as Merry set her boots neatly in the mud and turned to face us.
“Good to see you all,” she said. Her cap of short hair was plastered down. As she came up by Scout, her eyelashes glittered with raindrops in the gaslight. “You got our friend away safe?”
The funniest thing is, by then I had to wake Aashini up to explain to her that we were handing her on to Merry Lee. She’d fallen asleep with her head on my shoulder, and as I turned in the rig and shook her gently I wondered how long it had been since she’d had an uninterrupted kip. I’m sorry to say it, but after everything, her blinking awake, bleary and terrified — and then sharply grateful when she saw my face and that of Merry Lee — that right there might of been what it took to crystallize my hate for Peter Bantle from something hot to something cold and despising. I felt mean and recognized that mean, because the only other time in life I felt that way was about the colt that killed Da.
Difference being, the colt was a colt and didn’t deserve a ration of loathing. But Peter Bantle was a man.
I handed Aashini down and slid after, Scout waiting patiently while we sorted ourselves — though she allowed herself a little ear flicking and a snort over the clumsiness of riders.
“This is Merry Lee,” I told Aashini when she’d gathered herself a little. The men — and Miss Francina, who was dressed to look like a man — stayed well back in what was most likely a wise decision. “She helped your sister Priyadarshini, and she’s like to help you. Will you go with her?”
Aashini looked back and forth between us. I didn’t doubt she understood me well, because whatever expressions crossed her face, confusion wasn’t one of ’em. She seemed to weigh what I said, and then she answered, “You give me a choice?”
“From now on,” I said, “you have choices. I can’t bring you home with me, though — Madame wouldn’t like it.”
She flinched when I said “Madame,” and I thought I knowed why. She pictured someone like Bantle. It didn’t seem like the time to argue with her, so I let it slide.
For a moment, she chewed her ragged thumbnail and considered. I’d given her my oilcloth, and along with Miss Francina’s coat it made her look like … not so much like a waif as a ragged old tree with a ripped-up tent draped over.
Then she nodded. “I’ll go with Merry Lee,” she said.
* * *
The Marshal and Tomoatooah — and Scout and Pongo — even got Miss Francina and me home in time for breakfast. For Connie’s breakfast, that is. Not for the house’s. Connie gets up earlier than everybody.
We drew up on the street above, opposite the upper-floor windows. When I swung my leg over the cantle and slid down Scout’s side, though, I nearly fell down. Sure, my legs ached — a year out of the saddle will do that to you. But more than that, my whole belly ached with loss. I hadn’t felt a grief like that since Da died, and I didn’t rightly know what to do with it. So I buried my face in the mare’s pied mane for a bit and I gave her a big hard papa hug.
So maybe I could stand to be around horses again. Or maybe this horse, anyway.
For her part, she craned around and knocked my hat back on its strings to whuffle my hair, so that was all right then. The rain ran down my back, but I was so soaked already, who cared?
In truth, I had to hang on to her neck for them other reasons, too. It had been a good long time since I’d sat a horse, and the insides of my thighs were telling me all about it. I’d never had a lot of sympathy for the saddle sore before now. But it sunk in just then that maybe I’d just never felt real saddle soreness, having about grown up on a horse and been hardened off at a young age.