Chapter 4 #2
Harlan did not find that funny. Grace did, quietly, on the inside, where he couldn't see it and get more annoyed.
"You people said you didn't want a government," Harlan said.
"We don't."
"But you're the mayor."
"I'm not."
"People come to you for decisions."
Grace shrugged. "Mostly about potatoes."
"I served eighteen years wearing a badge," Harlan said.
"Ran for it, kept it, answered to a county full of people who voted on whether I stayed or went.
You've got people calling you Madam Mayor because a fella with a sense of humor started it as a joke, and it stuck because nobody's bothered to stop it. "
"Sounds about right."
"That's not how authority's supposed to work."
"Never said it was authority," Grace said. "It's a joke that won't die. There's a difference."
"Is there?"
"You tell me. Last I checked, I can't fire anybody, can't fine anybody, can't lock anybody up. I just answer questions people ask me because I happen to be standing there when they ask."
Harlan looked like a man biting down on something he badly wanted to say and couldn't quite justify saying to a woman who'd ridden thirty minutes to see him for free.
"I didn't ride over here to talk about potatoes," Grace said, and the air between them changed.
"There's a group moving around out there," Grace said. "Armed. Eight, maybe ten of them, last anybody counted."
Harlan's posture shifted the moment the words landed, the sheriff in him waking up under the limp and the gray hair. "How do you know?"
"Someone ran into them."
"Who?"
"Doesn't matter."
"Matters if you're asking me to believe it."
"I'm not asking you for anything," Grace said. "I'm giving you a warning. What you do with it is yours."
Harlan studied her a long moment, weighing that, and something in his face settled — not trust exactly, but a decision that trust wasn't required for this conversation to matter.
"Tell me what you've got."
Grace told him what Rebecca had told her, the parts that mattered and none of the parts that didn't. A group, armed, well-fed enough that they weren't desperate people making one bad choice.
They'd come across a couple traveling, killed the husband, and the wife ran.
She didn't see them again after that first day, but she heard them until the second night.
"How long ago?" Harlan asked.
"A couple weeks now."
"Where?"
"East of here. Not close, far as anybody can tell."
"Names? Anybody hear a name for this bunch?"
"Nothing that'll hold up as fact. Somebody called them Ravagers. Might not mean anything beyond that."
Harlan turned that over, arms crossed, weight shifted off the bad leg the way he'd learned to stand since the shooting. No sign they were headed toward Harlan's land. No sign they were headed toward the Hollow either. Just a warning, honestly given, with the holes left where they were.
"Where's the woman?" Harlan asked.
"Safe."
"At your place?"
Grace looked at him and didn't answer.
"She's at your place," Harlan said.
"I didn't say that."
"Didn't have to."
Grace waited a beat without confirming it, which was its own answer and both of them knew it.
"What does she do?" Harlan asked.
"Survives, apparently," Grace said, and watched that close the door on the question as neatly as she'd hoped it would.
Harlan stopped pushing after that, which was the closest thing to respect Grace had ever gotten out of him.
He asked the questions a man who used to wear a badge would ask — how many, weapons if she knew what, mounted or on foot, which direction, how long ago, whether they'd used any names, whether they'd moved like people who knew what they were doing or like people making it up as they went.
Grace answered what she had and didn't invent the rest. "Organized enough to worry me. That's all I can tell you."
Harlan nodded slowly, already thinking past her, thinking through a problem the way a man does when problems used to come with a badge attached to solving them. "I'll double the outer watch. Send word to the families working the far fields to stay closer in for a while."
"How thin are you stretched already?" Grace asked. "With a hundred and thirty-some people, you can't have that many spare hands for extra watches."
"Thinner than I'd like. Same as you, I'd guess." He didn't elaborate past that, and Grace didn't push. Some things a man like Harlan would only say so much of, even to somebody he'd grudgingly come to trust.
"Good."
"You warn anybody else?"
"Not yet."
"You should."
"Planning on it."
"Cal?" Harlan asked.
Grace looked at him. "Yeah."
"Tell him I said the same thing. People need to stop wandering around alone out here."
Grace waited a beat before answering. "You know I rode here alone."
"I noticed."
"You've been waiting to say that."
"Since you rode through the gate," Harlan said, and there was something almost like a smile trying to happen under all that gray stubble before he decided against it.
As Grace turned to leave, Harlan said her name.
She turned back.
"Thanks for coming," he said, plain and without any performance in it, which was rarer from him than anything else that had happened that morning.
Grace nodded. "You'd have done the same."
"Don't know about that."
"You would have."
Someone near the gate called after her as she mounted up. "Safe ride, Madam Mayor."
Grace glanced back in time to see Harlan's face darken all over again.
"Stop calling her that," Harlan snapped at whoever it was.
That did it. Grace laughed, right there in the saddle, harder than the joke probably deserved.
"It isn't funny," Harlan said.
"Little bit," Grace said, and rode out through the gate while he was still working up an argument against it.
The Hollow hadn't fallen apart in her absence.
Grace noticed that the moment she rode back through the barricade — Luke standing easy near the gate with Danny's replacement already settled into the watch, Russ's mules working a fresh strip of the north field, Walter crossing toward the barn with that same steady, unhurried purpose he always carried.
She swung down and led the gelding toward the barn, passing the porch where Rebecca sat with a bandage roll in her lap and Matthew beside her, patient under the wrapping of a scraped elbow that had clearly happened sometime in the last two hours.
"What happened here?"
"Fence climbing," Rebecca said. "He'll live."
"Told you not to climb that fence," Grace said to Matthew.
"I forgot."
"You forget every time."
Matthew grinned, unrepentant, and hopped down off the porch to go find Ben, and Rebecca watched him go with the faint, tired satisfaction of someone who'd handled something small and simple after weeks of handling things that hadn't been.
Nobody had been standing around waiting for Grace to come home and tell them what to do.
They'd simply kept doing what needed doing, the same way they always had, and Grace felt something settle in her chest at that — not disappointment, nothing close to it.
Something more like the quiet satisfaction of watching something you built hold its shape without your hand on it.
Ben came jogging over before she'd even finished tying off the gelding.
"Grace, Russ wants you."
"There it is," she said, and went to find him.
Russ was out by the equipment shed, standing over a spread of old iron with his hands on his hips like a man doing math he didn't like the answer to.
"What am I looking at?" Grace asked.
"Everything we've got, and it isn't enough.
" He nudged the walking plow with his boot.
"One of these. One cultivator, and the tine's cracked on it — I can maybe nurse it through this season, maybe not.
" He crouched and ran a thumb along the crack, testing how much give was left in the metal.
"Weld's not going to hold past a few more passes.
When it goes, we're down to no cultivator at all until somebody figures out how to fix it or find another. "
He stood and gestured at the field beyond the fence, where the mules stood idle in their harness while a couple of Hollow men waited on something to hitch them to.
"We've got the mules and the manpower to work twice the acreage we did last year," Russ said. "But we've got animals standing around while we're waiting on iron. One team can turn ground. The other's just eating grain and getting fat while it waits its turn."
Grace understood immediately. "Cal."
Russ nodded. "His place has a second plow, a cultivator that isn't cracked, maybe a seed drill if I remember right from the fall.
More than we can use standing still and less than we need if we're serious about next winter.
" He rubbed the back of his neck. "Man's got the equipment sitting mostly idle himself, unless his own people have picked up enough ground to need it all.
I don't know that yet. That's half of why I want to go look, not just ask. "
"And they need to hear about the Ravagers," Grace said.
Russ looked at her. "You're going to ride those miles to warn everybody now?"
"Apparently."
"Madam Mayor."
Grace gave him the look.
"Sorry," Russ said, and wasn't.
"You're coming with me this time," Grace said. "I can talk to Cal and Martha. I can't tell a walking plow from a hole in the ground."
"That's fair."
"When can you get away?"
Russ considered the fields, the mules, the work already laid out for the coming week. "Couple days. Once the north field's turned and Walter's got the stock settled into a routine that doesn't need me standing over it."
"Two days, then."
They sat down that evening with a stub of pencil and the back of an old feed receipt, working out what to ask Cal for and what the Hollow had to offer in return.
Russ's list came first — the second walking plow, the good cultivator, whatever harness hardware Cal could spare, replacement iron for the parts that were wearing thin on the Hollow's own gear, maybe an hour of Cal's forge time if the man was willing.