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Once inside the enormous tent, Esta didn’t bother to find a seat in the bleachers. There was an area to the left of the entrance, where men in cowboy hats and worn jeans leaned against the railing to watch the show. It was a standing room, and the men who filled it didn’t look like the type to sit still long. They watched the horses and riders with a kind of critical squint, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and commenting on the mounts each performer rode. A few who had positioned themselves closest to the arena’s entrance hooted and hollered whenever a female rider went past or shouted slurs at the brown-skinned men who wore cavalry uniforms. The performers either didn’t hear or pretended that they didn’t care. They kept their shoulders back and their eyes forward as they kicked their horses into action and entered the arena to the cheers of the crowd.
Two men held court in the center of the arena. They looked like inverted images of each other—one fair and blond and the other with ruddier skin and dark hair—with horses to match. They were dressed in fringed leather that could have belonged in a Vegas show, and they took turns using a large, cone-shaped megaphone to announce each new act that rode into the arena. Esta figured they must be the Curtis brothers.
It quickly became apparent that, even with the clear skill of the riders, the Curtis brothers’ version of the Wild West was about as authentic as Harte’s old act as an expert in the mystical arts. She wondered briefly how it must feel for the buffalo soldiers to parade around for the same people who would keep them from sharing a table at a restaurant in town, or how the Lakota must feel about displaying their traditions in the same arena as the painted clowns who distracted the bulls. Esta wondered why any of them did it—if there was some benefit from being part of the Curtis brothers’ entourage, or if the men and women were there in the ring because it was the lesser of the evils they could have chosen from. Maybe they thought they could change their fate.
Esta knew otherwise. In the end, history would march on toward a future where people would still be pushed down, kept away, and discarded. Maybe once she’d hoped that by destroying the Brink, she could change the future, but with everything that had happened, she wasn’t so sure anymore. Fear and hatred and ignorance seemed so… inevitable.
Yet the future had changed, she reminded herself. The problem was that it had changed for the worse. She needed to concentrate on the job in front of her—finding the artifacts and containing Seshat’s power—so there could be a future to worry about at all.
On posters at the train station, Pickett had been billed as a “bulldogger,” whatever that meant. Esta didn’t really care as long as the cowboy still had the dagger and didn’t put up too much of a fight handing it over. With any luck, they’d never have to actually meet. Nothing good could come from that—especially not for Pickett himself. But for a long while, there was no sign of the cowboy. The show felt endless. Rider after rider, act after act, and Esta wondered if Pickett would ever make an appearance.
Nearly an hour in, the fairer of the two Curtis brothers announced the next act—a sharpshooter. At his signal, a woman rode into the arena, her horse kicking up dirt and dust. Esta couldn’t help but be transfixed by the drama that filled the ring. In this time, before microphones and loudspeakers and in an arena filled with the chattering noise of a crowd, the woman relied on a sort of pantomime to create her act, flirting with the audience as she accomplished ever-more impressive feats by hitting impossible targets. Somehow Esta wasn’t surprised to feel the warmth of magic sifting through the air whenever the woman took aim. Mageus had hidden among the theater folk back in New York. Why wouldn’t they hide in plain sight here as well?
After the sharpshooter left the arena to thunderous applause, Esta’s patience was finally rewarded.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the fairer of the brothers called. “We have a real treat for you today. Direct from the plains of Texas comes the dusky demon himself, a man who can subdue even the strongest steer with nothing but his force of will—Bill the Bulldogger Pickett!”
Pickett tore into the arena, a blur of speed on horseback, before he came to a dead stop mere inches from the Curtis brother who had announced him.
Esta had expected a giant of a man, a showman decked out in fringe and beadwork like the rest of the performers, but Pickett was dressed simply in the clothes of a working ranch hand: dark pants and a lighter shirt, with a hat that looked well loved and faded from days under the sun. She couldn’t see much of his face beneath the brim, but his dark-brown skin had reddish undertones, and a heavy mustache shadowed his upper lip.
Pickett didn’t turn when the men in the gallery around Esta whistled and shouted slurs. Under his command, his horse didn’t so much as flinch when a bottle lobbed from the crowd shattered on the ground before him. Beneath the broad brim of his hat, his expression was placid, uninterested. Like he knew exactly who he was, even if everyone else was a fool. While the Curtis brothers droned on about Pickett’s achievements, he busied himself with tying a rope into a lasso.
Esta admired confidence like that, and as she watched Pickett work—methodically, carefully—she thought she understood why Harte had entrusted the Pharaoh’s Heart to this particular man. There was something steady about him. Something that set him apart from the others she’d seen prancing around the arena that day.
Once the Curtis brothers retreated, the mood in the arena changed again. The drums rolled once more, and at the sound of a rim shot, a steer was released into the ring. Pickett was off, faster than anything Esta could have expected. Faster than anyone she’d seen yet that day. In a matter of seconds, he chased the animal down and tossed a rope around its horns in one try, jumped from his horse and wrestled it to the ground in a single, fluid motion, and finished by tying up the animal’s four legs. The entire process couldn’t have even taken a whole minute, and then Pickett was back up on his horse, tearing around the arena again in a victory lap, while a couple of other men wrangled the steer away.
The audience cheered, whooping and hooting their approval, but the cheers were peppered with the same slurs from before. The men standing near Esta seemed more disgusted by Pickett’s expertise than impressed, but Pickett continued to ignore them as he circled the ring, waving his hat but not letting so much as a smile curl beneath the heavy mustache. As he passed the standing gallery, Esta saw that Pickett’s eyes were sharp, probably on the lookout for any others who might mean to cause him trouble.
Another drumroll rose, and another steer was released into the arena. Pickett kicked his horse into a gallop until he was next to the animal, but this time, instead of using the rope, which was still on the other animal, he swung himself out of his own saddle and leapt five, maybe six feet, onto the steer’s back. The animal was more than twice Pickett’s size, but that didn’t seem to bother him. He grabbed it by the horns and then slid off so he could dig his boot heels into the ground to slow the beast. He twisted the horns until the steer’s nose was pointing upward, and then he did something—Esta couldn’t quite tell what it was, but she thought he might have latched onto the animal with his mouth—and a moment later Pickett’s hands were in the air. He waved them in a victory wave as he was dragged along. The steer took maybe three or four more steps before, unbelievably, impossibly, it stumbled to its knees and went down. The bull writhed beneath Pickett’s hold until, finally, it seemed to give up and remained there on the ground, completely subdued.
Esta searched for the feel of magic sifting through the air once more, but of course there wasn’t any of the telltale warmth. Pickett never would have gotten out of Manhattan if he’d had the old magic. This was something else—talent, perhaps. Mastery, definitely. All born of a lifetime of work.
The crowd was strangely silent for a second before the arena exploded in shouts and cheers. As he stood and waved his hat to the crowd, Pickett looked even smaller than he had atop his horse. Next to the steer, he seemed utterly human.
It was the strangest and perhaps most impressive thing Esta had ever witnessed. Even once Pickett had released it, the steer remained on the ground, as shocked by what had happened as everyone else.
Esta was so taken by the display in the ring that she almost didn’t notice the movement of the two men to her right. A pair of other performers were dragging the stunned animal out of the arena and Pickett was taking his final bow, but at the edge of the standing room, a group of marshals weren’t watching the show. They had already started moving into the crowded standing-room area, and soon they were joined by others. Even if they weren’t looking for her specifically, Esta realized they’d find her easily enough with the way they’d surrounded the crowd of men.
With her affinity, it would have been simple to slip away unseen, but the Quellant was still thick in her blood. Her affinity was out of reach.
The Thief is dead, Esta reminded herself. The marshals could be looking for anyone, but she wasn’t going to take a chance of being accidentally found. Considering her options, she decided on the most expedient and gave the man in front of her a violent shove, which caused him to topple into the man next to him.
The effect was immediate. In a matter of seconds, the standing room erupted into angry shouting, and Esta ducked away from the heat of the growing brawl and slipped out the back of the big top as the marshals rushed in.
THE MARK OF THE ANTISTASI
1904—Texas
Jack Grew rolled the whiskey around in his cup and studied the way it sloshed from side to side. Watery and sharp, it had definitely been cut with something else, but the drink was doing its job, at least. The tension of the day had started to ease after the first biting swallow, but it wasn’t gone. And it wasn’t going fast enough.
The amber liquid stared back at him, mocking. The porter who’d first reported seeing Esta on the train had been no help. The man had been bewitched so resolutely that what came out of his mouth was nothing but rubbish. Which meant that Jack was stuck. He couldn’t leave Corsicana without answers—not when the trail had gone cold. There was nothing to do but wait until the haze of whatever spell the porter was under lifted.
He stared down into his cup, and it hit him suddenly that the color of the whiskey reminded him of something… Esta’s eyes. They’d been the most unsettling shade of gold, much like whiskey. For a short time, she’d made him believe that she wanted him. Even after all he’d lost in Greece, even after all he should have learned there, Jack had let himself be swayed once more by a set of round hips and a pretty pair of long lashes batting in his direction. The memory of it was almost enough to turn his stomach.
Jack lifted the tumbler, ready to throw it against the wall. He wanted to watch the glass shatter, the amber liquid splatter and slide down the wall. He wanted to imagine it was Esta he was destroying. But he stopped himself. What was the use of wasting a perfectly good drink, especially one that he’d already paid for? Instead of tossing the glass, Jack took one of the cubes of morphine—how was it that there were only three left?—and dissolved it in the whiskey, watching as the amber-colored liquid turned cloudy. Just as Esta’s lovely eyes would when he finally finished her.
He was on his third drink and feeling almost calm again, when the saloon doors opened in a burst of noise. Jack turned to find Hendricks there, panting heavily with a shit-eating grin on his face.
