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“There’s room.” Meda shrugged. “There’s room for those who respect our sacred places, who work the land with respect, or leave it as they find it. I’ve already given you my allegiance. This isn’t bargaining. It’s truth.”
“I’ve already given you my allegiance,” Fallon returned. “This isn’t bargaining, but another truth. The land here, or in the east, over the oceans, the oceans themselves, isn’t mine to give. But it will be held in the light by your people, and all people.”
“I pray for the day we see that truth. But we have a war to win first.”
As she rode on, Travis let out a long sigh. “She just gets hotter.”
Fallon rolled her eyes, and nudged Laoch into a trot.
Later, as the sun dipped, sent its first roses to bloom over the peaks in the west, she spotted a settlement tucked into the basin near the foothills of what her map told her was the Sierra Nevada.
“Should be good farming land,” Travis commented. “Good pasture.”
“Whatever’s left of Reno’s to the northwest. And Lake Tahoe. It could be a good spot for a base.” Fallon scanned the houses, the farmland—probably ranch land out here, she corrected. “Let’s see if we can convince them to join up, maybe we can spend the night here before we head north.”
“I don’t see much security.” Meda continued on in an easy walk.
“We’re still, what, a mile away?” Scanning, Fallon looked for any sign they’d be met with hostility. “They’ve got cook fires going. I can smell them. Meat cooking. No electric power. I can see solar on a few roofs, and somebody built a couple windmills. We’ll ride in slow, so they have time to look us over.”
And the crows came.
With their first shriek, an alarm sounded with the manic clanging of bells. Even as Laoch leaped into a gallop, riders on horseback poured out of the trees, headed for the settlement. The air rang with gunfire, tore with screams. Fallon saw a flash of fire streak from one of the houses, take out a rider.
On the gallop, Meda nocked an arrow, took out another.
“Travis! Grab that kid, three o’clock.”
He looked where his sister indicated, said, “Oh hell,” and veered off toward the little girl who stood frozen with her hands over her ears.
Fallon drew her sword and rode into battle.
At least thirty, she thought, most armed with handguns or rifles, a few with axes or swords. They shot wildly, indiscriminately, and even without Travis’s empathic ability, she sensed a kind of desperation.
She blocked bullets, slashed with sword. If she enflamed the guns, she’d disarm the defenders as well. Even as she considered it, Faol Ban leaped on a rider, tore him off his mount. She caught the symbol of a PW tattooed on his arm.
On another slap of magick, a fireball whizzed by. She felt the heat from it—entirely too close. She wheeled Laoch, shot her own fire at another PW. When he fell to the ground, a woman rushed outside, began to pummel him with her fists.
As she charged a swordsman, Fallon had to throw up her shield to block an arrow. She glanced up to the boy perched on a roof with a bow.
“Goddamn it, watch it! We’re the good guys.”
It took less than ten brutal minutes. At the end of it, bodies littered the ground, blood soaked into it. She looked up at the crows, circling under an endless sky painted with reds, golds, pinks, and a magnificent beauty.
“You’re done here.” She thrust her sword up, and added their bodies to the rest. “It’s done,” she called out. “They’re down. Travis?”
“A-okay. They’re not all dead,” he added.
“Good. I want to know where they came from. Meda.” She turned. “You’re hit.”
“A graze.” With as much disgust as discomfort, Meda looked down at the sleeve of her jacket, torn by the bullet, stained with the blood from the wound. “I bartered my ass off for this jacket.”
“I’ll fix it, and you. It’s done,” Fallon called again. “We’re here to help. I’m Fallon Swift, with my brother Travis, and Meda of the First Tribe.”
A man stepped out on the porch of a house. Maybe thirty, she thought, with a scruffy beard, a mop of brown hair under a cowboy style hat.
“Yancy Logan. Thanks for the assist.”
“Glad we were in the neighborhood. Are you in charge?”
He took off his hat, dragged his fingers through the mop before he set it back in place. “I might be, seeing as they killed Sam Tripper, who more or less was.”
A woman stepped out behind him with a wailing baby on her hip. Fallon felt a quiet power from both of them. “You’re welcome here. Yancy, she’s The One.”
“Okay, honey.” He blew out a long breath. “I guess we should start cleaning up this mess out here.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
They burned twenty-two PW bodies and three from the settlement they called Bright Valley. Fallon worked with a healer on wounded, both friend and foe.
She tended last to the knuckles of the woman who’d run out to use her fists on a downed PW.
“I don’t think we’d have held them off if you hadn’t shown up, so thanks. I’m Ann.”
“Ann. You’re welcome.” She glanced over as Yancy’s wife—Faith, half-Apache on her mother’s side, Fallon remembered—brought her a mug of tea. “Thanks. I gave some balm to Wanda, your healer. You should use some a couple times a day for a day or two.”
“They feel fine now.”
“The balm will keep it that way. I noticed you’re mostly women and children.”
“Out of a hundred and fifty-six—sorry, fifty-three now—we have fifty-five men over eighteen. We haven’t had much trouble before.” Faith handed Ann another mug. “Small groups of nomads or Raiders, but nothing like today. We thought we were ready, but we weren’t.”
“We got complacent,” Ann decided. “I haven’t seen a PW raid s
ince I got here.”
“How long ago?”
“Almost five years now.” Ann, a small, diamond-shaped scar on her left cheekbone, flexed her healing knuckles. “We got hit by one outside of Reno, and had to run for it. I had my sister and little brother—not blood, but heart.”
“I understand.”
“Well, we got out. Lost everything but what we could carry and ran for it.”
Fallon heard the bitterness, understood the pummeling fists. “Sometimes you fight, sometimes you run.”
“My brother got horses. He’s got a way with horses and animals altogether.”
“An animal empath. My youngest brother—blood and heart—is the same.”
“Then you know. We rode south, and ended up here. Bright Valley, it’s a good place, with good people.”
Ann paused, rubbed both hands over her face. Her voice wavered. “Sam, I want to say Sam was a real good man. One you could depend on, and everybody here . . .”
She dropped her hands again, straightened her shoulders. “He’s going to be missed. People around here aren’t bloodthirsty, but they’re going to want to hang the ones who killed him that aren’t already dead.”
“Yancy will calm everybody down,” Faith predicted with a steadiness that rang with truth. “He’s got that way.”
“If anybody can, Yancy can.”
Faith smiled at that, then the smile died away. “But I don’t know what in hell we’re going to do with them. Where we’d put them, how we’d deal with them.”
“We’ll take them.”
“Where?” Ann shifted her attention back to Fallon.
“I’ll explain, but we need to talk to the prisoners.”
“Yancy’s got Sal watching them. They’re tied up tight in the sheriff’s office—Sam’s office. Sam,” Faith said and pressed her fingers to her eyes for a moment. “We don’t have a jail, but they’re tied up, and Sal won’t let them pull any crap. Ann, can you take her? I’m helping ride herd on the young ones.”
“Sure, I can.”
They went out of the small building into the street, where blood still stained the ground. But people worked to board up broken windows or led horses back to a town paddock. She signaled to Travis and Meda.
