Devon Monk - Dead Iron

“I found him, Mr. Gregor.” Shard LeFel’s voice was like hot wine, and there were folk in the pews who sighed at the sound of it. “And not a moment too soon.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“He’ll be telling us all now, Mr. Gregor,” the sheriff said. “Take your family home, if you want—get that poor boy in bed. We’ll take care of matters here on out.”

“I’ll stand and stay,” Mr. Gregor said.

The blacksmith glanced down at his son, who looked up at him with tearful eyes before burying his face once again in the crook of his mother’s neck. Mr. Gregor placed his hand gently on his child’s head, and the boy turned his face away. Elbert’s eyes were dazed, and Rose shook her head, her heart catching when she thought of what he must have been through.

Then the little boy looked at her. Saw her there, in the shadows. And smiled.

Rose pressed her hand over her chest, as if the boy’s eyes had shot an arrow. A cold and fearful sensation crawled over her skin. That little boy was not Elbert. He might look like Elbert; he might cry like Elbert. But that boy had more of the Strange to him than Rose had ever seen in a child.

She pressed herself up against the stairwell wall, wishing there were more than just shadows between them.

The sheriff took a few steps away from Mr. Gregor so he could catch everyone’s attention. “Listen up, folks. Mr. LeFel has something to tell us all.”

The townspeople had filled the church to the brim, every pew taken, and every wall with people standing along it, right up to stuffing up the aisles. Rose saw more people gathered than she’d seen at the last county fair. Must be nearly three hundred tucked up tight in the room that wasn’t built to hold more than a hundred, most.

“Mr. LeFel?” Sheriff Wilke gave the rail man the floor.

LeFel glided up to take his place behind the podium. When he smiled, it looked like an apology.

“Good people of Hallelujah, I bring you most distressing news.”

Before he could continue, the church doors opened, and a fresh breeze sliced through the thick air, drawing the candle flames straight up on their wicks again.

“Hear there’s been a ruckus,” Alun Madder said as he sauntered in, his brothers, Bryn and Cadoc, shoulder to shoulder with him.

They all clapped their gloved hands together and rubbed them like they were scrubbing warmth up out of a campfire.

“What seems to be the trouble?” Alun asked.

Everyone in the church turned at the brothers’ entrance. Except Rose. She watched LeFel’s face screw into a dark visage of hatred. The kind of hatred that made a man carve another man’s heart out and spit in the hole left behind.

Rose unconsciously clutched the locket beneath the thin cloth of her dress.

At that small movement, Mr. LeFel looked up away from the Madders, his eyes searching the shadows where she stood until he spotted her there. He was startled to find her watching him; that was clear. And the smile he gave her was no comfort. It was a warning.

“Settle in, and quiet down, Mr. Madder,” Sheriff Wilke said. “All of you. Mr. LeFel has the podium.”

Alun’s eyebrows rose. “Didn’t see you there, Mr. LeFel,” he said without a hint of apology in his voice. “Must be the rising moonlight so bright it struck me blind. Carry on. Carry on. And do take your time.” He and his brothers folded thick arms over their wide chests and simultaneously leaned against the church doors, blocking the way out.

Mr. LeFel licked his lips and glared at them. “As I was saying, I have dire news for us all.”

He glanced out over the people gathered. There was that aristocratic air about him. It hooked up each and every eye and mind, and not a soul seemed able to lean away. When he flicked that gaze at Rose, she put her hand back on the gun in her pocket and glared at him.

He scowled, looked back at the Madders, then once again looked at her. But this time there was surprise, and some kind of new understanding, in his expression.

“Mr. LeFel?” the sheriff prompted.

LeFel finally turned his attention back to his breathless audience.

Rose’s heart thumped hard. In LeFel’s look was the same cold creeping she’d sensed in the boy. But she felt the sure pressure of someone else looking at her. She glanced down the stairs. Alun Madder was indeed watching her. He smiled . . . and nodded.

She didn’t know that it should, but it seemed a reassuring gesture. She didn’t know if he saw the hatred in Shard LeFel. She didn’t know if he saw the Strangeness of him and his man. But all the same, she was glad to see there was at least one—no, three other people in the room who weren’t caught under Mr. LeFel’s thrall.

“I was out,” Shard LeFel crooned, “taking an evening constitutional, and by and by I wandered past the widow Lindson’s property. I heard a terrible crying—a child wailing—and beyond that, I heard a woman singing. But not any church song. It was a witch’s tune.” He paused a moment, letting his words steep.

“I didn’t want to believe it myself.” He shook his head, and more than one head shook along with him. “But when I stepped up close to look in the window, I saw Mrs. Jeb Lindson, working her magic—the devil’s magic—on this poor boy.”

He nodded again, and this time all the folk nodded with him.

“Nonsense.” Alun’s voice cut across the silence like a fire across the plain. “Do you have any proof at all? Anything that would cast that poor woman as a witch?”

Shard LeFel’s head snapped up and Rose saw the devil himself behind those eyes. No, worse than the devil; she saw the Strange. “Of course,” Shard LeFel growled. Then, regaining his composure, “Of course I have proof. Mrs. Gregor, if you would just pull up your son’s shirt, you’ll see the mark, the cursed spell, she left there on his back.”

Rose couldn’t see Mrs. Gregor’s face from her place on the stairs, but she heard her gasp as she drew up Elbert’s shirt.

Rose instead watched Sheriff Wilke’s reaction, since he could easily see the boy’s back. He frowned and shook his head.

“It’s a pentagram.” Mrs. Gregor stood up with Elbert in her arms. She turned toward Mr. Gregor. In doing so, she revealed the boy’s back to the room.

Very clearly, the mark of a star standing on one point was scratched into his back.

“Mae Lindson has done harm to this boy,” Shard LeFel said. “And that’s all the proof needed. She is a witch.”

“Witch,” Mr. Shunt repeated from the shadows.

“Witch,” the people in the church echoed, inhaled, exhaled, back and forth to one another, the word building and growing, breathing stronger at each repetition until it seemed as if the very walls vibrated with it.

Until another word was born in its place: “Burn. Burn her.”

Rose couldn’t believe her ears. In just as much as a heartbeat, the entire town had gone mad. Regardless of if Mrs. Lindson was a witch or not, this was a civilized age. People didn’t go around burning people just because one man stood up and called them a witch.

Her heart was pounding and every instinct told her to run, to flee, to get away from these people before they turned on her and called her something worth burning.

But Mae was her friend. She had to do something. Anything to help her. To stop this. Which meant she had to stand up against Mr. Shard LeFel.

And an entire town of people with murder in their eyes.

Rose pulled her shoulders back and walked down the stairs, her boots making too much noise for such a quiet room. Her knees shook and her hands went slick with sweat.

“You’re wrong,” she said, blunt as that.

Mr. LeFel looked over at her, hatred twisting his face into a mockery of a smile. He opened his mouth to speak, but Rose spoke first.