REMMEN
I thought that if I wasn’t watching her, Anne might bite her nails. She stared at the door separating the sitting area from Otho’s surgery room and snapped her gaze away. It landed on Korfas, who was leaning against the wall with his own arms crossed.
He didn’t look nearly as concerned. “Damned Butchers causing problems. What was it this time? Brawling?”
“Butchers?” Anne asked. “Is that something they call themselves?” I could see the cogs in her mind clicking. It didn’t take a fancy education to know there could be emotional trauma involved there.
I hadn’t realized a therapist could smell blood in the water.
“They’re—”
“Troublemakers,” I cut Korfas off before he could intrigue her anymore with stories of the most broken of bulls. “They live out on that ranch you saw. They don’t play well with the rest of us. This isn’t the first injury Otho’s stitched up.”
“It looked like he had been gored by something.” Her gaze flicked to my horns. “Something sharper than horns.”
“Maybe it’s best if I take you home, Miss Anne,” Korfas offered.
“No,” I snapped. I didn’t know what came over me. Anne didn’t need to be here, she didn’t need to sit vigil for a man who would as soon slap her as talk. But if anyone was going to walk her home, it would be me, not Korfas.
The word came out sharper than the moment asked for, nothing like the calm mayor I tried to be.
What was that?
I didn’t like any of the answers, so I didn’t go looking.
Korfas looked at me. He didn’t say anything. But he had a way of not saying things, and what he wasn’t saying was that the mayor had just bared his teeth at a good man for offering a woman a walk home.
“I’ll ride out and take the report,” he said, letting me off the hook. “Ask around at the ranch.”
“They won’t tell you anything.”
“No.” He pushed off the wall. “But somebody has to ask.”
Better him than me. If I went out there tonight, with my blood up and the almost-taste of a kiss that never landed still in my mouth, I’d take the ranch apart looking for something to hit. Korfas would ask his quiet questions, get his quiet nothing, and come home. That was why the job was his.
He dipped his head at Anne on his way past, the complete picture of a gentlebull. “Miss Anne.”
Then the door shut behind him and it was the two of us and the closed surgery door. The smell of blood hadn’t washed off of her.
She was a mess. Mestyn’s blood and viscera were all down her arm, brown and stiff, and there was a smear of him at her collar where she’d pushed her hair back with her wrist. She’d scrubbed her hands twice at the basin and the red was still in the creases of them.
I wanted to clean the blood off her myself. I shoved that thought down rather than letting it bloom anymore.
“Sit down,” I said. “You’ve been on your feet since the ridge.”
“So have you.”
“I’m bigger. I last longer.”
She huffed something that was nearly a laugh, and I wanted more of it than I had any right to.
She sat. The bench Otho kept for men waiting on other men swallowed her whole.
Her boots didn’t reach the floor. She looked small on it and stubborn and wrecked, and I wanted to sit close enough that she could lean into me and stop holding herself up.
I sat at the far end instead. A good stretch of empty bench between us, and every inch of it needling at me.
“He wasn’t gored,” she said. Not a question.
“No.”
“Those were claws.” She turned her hands over in her lap like the answer was written there. “Four of them, dragged. And a bite out of his side. I’ve never seen something that could do that. Maybe a bear? Do you have something like bears here?”
“You don’t have to think about it tonight.”
“I really do. It’s the only thing keeping me off the rest of it.” She let her head fall back against the wall and shut her eyes. “So tell me about the Butchers instead. Nobody in that whole yard would look at me except the one who came to get us. What are they?”
The easy thing was to say troublemakers again and stop there. That was the answer I handed the brides so they could sleep. It kept the ranch a story that happened somewhere else.
But she wasn’t a bride. And she’d been on her knees in the grass with her hands inside one of them, and she hadn’t flinched once.
“When we got free,” I said, “we didn’t all want the same thing.
Most of us did. Most of us had spent years picturing exactly this.
A patch of dirt nobody owned. A door that locked from the inside.
” My throat caught on the word door. I ignored it.
“But some had been in the sand too long. By the end they were more animal than man, and they knew it. They fought with us anyway, because the only other choice was dying in the cage they were bred for. They came because I made room for them.” I shrugged.
“And then we got here, and there wasn’t any room.
Not in a town people were trying to live in. ”
“So they made a place of their own,” she said.
I let that go by. It was close enough to true, and the true version was worse.
“We stay off them; they stay off us. Every so often Otho patches one up and doesn’t ask how. It’s the best anyone’s come up with.”
“Are they dangerous?”
“We’re all dangerous, Anne.” Her name came out of me before I decided to say it, lower than the rest. “You’ve been smiling at a whole town of us all week. Every one of those men killed for a living once. The Butchers are just the ones who never pretended that it washed off.”
She didn’t get up. She didn’t even change her face. I’d just handed her the ugliest thing in my town, the thing I dressed up in a tidy word so nobody had to look at it, and she sat there in another man’s blood and took it like I’d passed her the salt.
“What about you?” she said.
“I already told you. All of us.”
“No.” She turned toward me, tucked a foot up under her. “The door, the patch of dirt. What was that like? Being one it didn’t finish off?”
Nobody had ever asked me that. Six years among men I’d bled next to, and not one of them had turned it around and pointed it at me. They’d all been there. There was nothing to say to a man who’d been in the next cage. She hadn’t been there. She got to ask.
“It finished me too,” I said. “Just quieter. I still wake up in the sand about once a week. I’ve got a good house and a real bed and I still lose part of most nights sure that all of this is the dream and the cage is the true part.”
I should have stopped there. I kept going.
“The difference is I had somewhere to put it. There was a town to run and nobody else stupid enough to take it, so I get up every day and build fences and settle fights, and it gave the thing in me a shape that wasn’t teeth.
The Butchers never got that. They got a ranch and each other and too many empty hours. ”
She didn’t jump in to fix it. She didn’t tell me it must have been hard or reach over or make one of those soft noises people make so you’ll know they’re moved.
And I wanted to keep going. I wanted to tell her about Zarcal, and the night that built this whole program, and the brother whose face I couldn’t hold onto in the dream anymore.
It was all crowded up behind my teeth. All she’d done to earn it was sit still and look at me like the listening cost her nothing.
I shut my mouth. I was the mayor. She was under contract. There was a man dying on the other side of that door. Whatever this was, it wasn’t mine to have.
“You’re good at this,” I said instead. It came out like I was accusing her of something.
“I’m very good at this.” She smiled, small and worn out. “Shame nobody in this town will let me do it where it counts.”
Time went by. Anne watched the door, then the floor, then nothing at all.
The fear finally drained out of her. Her chin dropped. Her breathing went slow. She tipped sideways, caught herself, tipped again, and that time she didn’t catch it, and her head came down against the wall at an angle that would wreck her neck by morning.
I watched her sleep longer than I should have.
Then the light under Otho’s door stopped moving and stayed stopped, and I understood he wasn’t coming out tonight. The worst was behind us. All that was left was the slow wait to see if Mestyn’s body would keep the work. Nothing either of us could do by sitting up.
I could have woken her. I meant to.
Instead I got an arm behind her shoulders and one under her knees and lifted her off the bench. She weighed nothing.
She came up against my chest with a small sound and turned her face into my throat, and one of her hands closed loose in the front of my coat, and I stood there in the middle of Otho’s waiting room holding her and could not make my legs do a single thing.
Outside the night was cold and clean and the street was empty and silver. I carried her up through the middle of my sleeping town. Nobody saw.
I told myself I was minding her neck. I minded everything. Every rut in the road I’d been meaning to fix for two years. I carried her like the whole settlement depended on her not waking up.
Outside her apartment I took the little stair one careful step at a time. Chelsea’s window was an arm’s length off, dark. Giles’s past it, dark. The sight of them put cold water on something in me that badly needed it.
Then Anne came awake against my chest.
She didn’t startle. That’s what got me. She came up slow and warm and burrowed an inch closer first before she remembered where she was, or who she was, or one single reason not to, her cheek against me and her breath going out in a long sigh I felt all the way down my front.
She woke up the rest of the way.
She went still instead of shoving out of my arms. I set her on her own feet before she had to decide anything worse, the two of us in the dark a foot from her coworkers’ doors.
She looked up. Blood dried at her collar, hair a wreck, and I wanted her past every rule I had.
“Thank you,” she said. “For getting me home.”
Then she went up on her toes, one hand flat on my chest for balance, and kissed my cheek.
She caught the corner of my jaw. Warm. Her fingers lingered, close enough that an inch in either direction and it stopped being my cheek. Neither of us moved that inch.
Her whole small weight was up on her toes and pressed into my hand. I did nothing. Anything I did next was the end of everything, so I did nothing, and stood there and held her weight and let it hurt.
She came down off her toes. She let herself in. The door shut soft, the bolt went over, and I heard her stop just inside it and stand there a second before her steps went away.
I stayed in the street too long. A grown male in a good coat, stalled at the bottom of a stair like he’d lost the way home.
Then I walked back to mine. I’d built that house with my own hands and been proud of it. I let myself in and stood in the middle of it.
Cold ash, and me, and nothing else. It was a good house. She’d never once been in it. And standing there in the dark I couldn’t work out why I’d ever thought that was fine.