Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(29)

16

Ellen did not pray at first. She stood shadowed by lamplight, before her father and the market square crowd. Her left hand closed white-knuckled around her right. She looked back at her sisters; Hannah turned away. Claire did not, but Ellen avoided her older sister’s gaze as if there was fire in it.

Matt read that fire: if Ellen had not spoken at lunch, she would not be here now.

Whispers rippled from the clearing to the crowd’s edge and back. The Crier took notes.

By Matt’s side Sandy stood silent, tense. What should he do now, with all these people watching and Rafferty pacing, his high color deepening to purple?

“Ellen,” Rafferty repeated, in a tone of voice Matt could tell he thought was kind. “Pray. If you’ve told the truth.” Which even Matt could tell was not a choice between two roads so much as the choice between a devil and a cliff.

Ellen’s head bobbed. The first time she tried to speak no words came out, but on the second they emerged: “Mother, hear me—” the prayer the Criers sang this morning, its words made eager by her fear.

She watched her father while she spoke, as if the man was a crumbling wall that might collapse on her at any moment. She cut her finger with a knife from her belt. Blood welled to fall on stone.

No noise dared intrude. People must have breathed, hells, Matt must have breathed himself, but he only heard the splash.

A loud whip crack split the night, and he jumped. A hundred eyes darted skyward at once, toward the stars and moon. No winged shape passed overhead, no shadow rose from the rooftops. Shifting wind had snapped the flag on the market’s flagpole. Matt laughed nervously, and others joined him.

Sandy held herself tense as a watch spring. The Rafferty girls did not laugh, either. Hannah and Claire watched Ellen, and Ellen stared at their father, and Corbin Rafferty was silent and still and grim.

He raked the circled crowd with his regard. The blotched colors of his face merged and deepened. “Don’t you laugh at my girl. She said she saw the Stone Man. She said it came, and it came.” He swung back to Ellen. “Go on. Call it. Now.”

She gave no answer. Whatever she willed against him when she drew her knife, whatever doom she hoped to call down from the skies, it had not fallen.

“She made the whole thing up,” a man shouted outside the circle. Matt didn’t recognize the voice, or else he would have made the owner regret speaking. “She’s cocked, Rafferty.”

“You call my girl a liar?” Corbin’s voice low and dangerous now, as Matt had seen him crouch in bar fights. “Pray, Ellen.”

She lowered her head. Rafferty clutched his stick in a strangler’s grip.

Before he could do anything, Sandy spoke. “Corbin, she’s telling the truth.”

“Of course she is.”

The Crier kept writing. Matt wanted to break the woman’s pencil.

Sandy looked like she’d just torn off a bandage over a burn. “Look, I heard the same voice as Ellen, in my dreams. Most women in the Quarter have. But do you think this works like Craft, you just wave your hands and make things happen? The Stone Men didn’t come for a prayer, they came because your girls needed them. It’s wrong to draw them out like this.”

“The Stone Men don’t get to come into my family whenever they think it’s right. They don’t own our city.”

He roared that last, and Ellen flinched.

“You think,” Sandy said, “maybe they’re cutting in on your business?”

“What the hells is that supposed to mean?”

“You scared Ellen might call the Stone Men down on you someday?”

Rafferty stopped as if someone had nailed his feet to the ground. Only his head turned toward Sandy. “What did you say?”

“I said it’s disgraceful the way you treat those girls, shout them scared of their own damn shadows.” She stepped into the open space, toward him. “I say you’re scared they might call the Stone Men on you. I say stop this now and let these people go home.”

“I did this for us.”

“You do everything for you, Corbin. Let it go.”

Corbin Rafferty’s eyes went wide as an angry horse’s, and showed as much white, and he grew very still. Folk at the crowd’s edge turned away.

Rafferty’s shoulders slumped.

Sandy relaxed, too. But the girls did not, and neither did Matt, because he’d seen Corbin Rafferty drunk, had seen him fight, and knew his tell: that moment of slack before he moved snake-quick with a bottle or a nearby chair. Or with that cane, which he swung up and around, toward Sandy—

But the cane never fell, because Matt ran forward and grabbed Rafferty’s arm. Rafferty twisted fast and vicious, pulled free, and struck Matt in the side of the head. He stumbled back, ears ringing and wetness on his temple and his cheek. Matt smelled Corbin’s whiskey, saw his white teeth flash as the cane came down; he put his hand in its way, but the cane knocked down his arm, then struck the side of his head. Matt barreled forward. His shoulder took Rafferty in the stomach but the man squirmed like a hooked eel and Matt couldn’t hold him. The audience roared and Sandy joined the fray and somewhere a large beast or a small man snarled, and Ellen’s prayer rolled on like a river, or else that was the blood throbbing in his, Matt’s, ears.

There came a crash and a splintering sound, followed by a hush.