My friend stands at the stable door, and even though she’s supposed to be back in Glory, taking care of the Worst Tavern, I’m so glad to see her. She’s wearing a printed wool challis dress, with beautiful patterns in swirling red and purple. I throw my arms around her and hug tight, before remembering she doesn’t much like to be hugged.
I step away sheepishly. “Sorry. I’m just really glad to see you.”
“I forgive you.”
“What are you doing here?”
“About a week after you left Glory, I missed you and decided to come to San Francisco to find you.”
I study her face. “That sounds like a bunch of hogwash.”
She frowns.
“Mary? What happened?”
She becomes fascinated by the bridle hanging beside Peony’s stall. “Nothing. I mean, I left before something could happen.”
“Mary! Tell me!”
Her frown deepens. “It wasn’t safe for me, all right? Once my friends left, everyone expected me to . . . be like I was before. Some of the men were . . . demanding. They just assumed that because I’m a girl from China, I’m in a certain line of work. So I left.”
“Oh. I see.” And I do. Mary was a prostitute before she joined up with us in Glory. At barely seventeen years old.
“This town is even bigger than when I was here last,” she says, but I won’t let her change the subject just yet.
“What about the Worst Tavern? Becky left you in charge.” She glares, and I hold up my hands in protest. “Not judging. Just asking.”
She sighs. “Old Tug and some of his Buckeyes are working the place in shifts—when they’re not working claims. They’re terrible cooks, but no worse than Becky.”
“And how is Tug? Wait . . . is he one of the fellows who—”
“No! He’s the best man in Glory, if you ask me. Kept an eye on me as best he could, but he couldn’t be there every waking moment. Even Wilhelm could only loom so much. But you and Becky and the Major—you’re the leaders in our town. And once you left . . . one of the Buckeyes’ claims was jumped. And a group came down from Rough and Ready trying to make trouble. Almost had our very own gunfight, but Tug talked them down. It’s just not the same without you all there.”
“So you set off for San Francisco. All on your own. Mary, that was dangerous! You could have—”
“Hey! I stowed away on a ship and traveled across an ocean all by myself. And if I recall correctly, you covered half a continent with nothing but your mare and a saddlebag. So don’t be lecturing me about it now!” Her eyes are bright and fierce, made more so by the meager lantern light.
“You’re right. I’m sorry. And I’m sorry we left you there all alone.” It doesn’t set well, that Glory could turn out as lawless and frightening as any other frontier town. As if Glory’s residents are a parcel of naughty children who play dangerously when their mama and daddy are away. That could be Glory’s future, instead of the “sanctuary” Jefferson imagines.
“Wasn’t your fault,” Mary says. “I was the addle head who said she wanted to stay.” The fight melts out of her, and she leans against the stall, looking a little defeated. “If I go back there, it has to be with friends. And when I do, I think maybe I should find someone who will marry me. A single girl from China . . . it’s just not safe. You know, California isn’t a very good place, if you’re not white.”
She’ll get no argument from me.
“But now I’ve found you—which, by the way, was easy as pie. Everyone knew you from your description. Not many white women in San Francisco.”
This does not sit well at all.
She says, “I can stay here, right? You don’t mind?”
“Of course. Actually, we might be able to use your help with something.”
I fill her in on everything that has happened with Hardwick. By the time I’m finished, she’s grinning like a kid at Christmas. “This will be fun,” she says.
After Mary leaves to claim a cabin of her own, I go to my room and grab my saddlebag. It’s easier to heft than I’d like. I spent so much money buying the Charlotte. Doing something about Hardwick is proving more complicated and expensive than I expected.
I sit on the floor at the end of my cot, saddlebag between my feet. Inside is a small pile of gold. A few eagle coins remain, along with a handful of gold nuggets I could get assayed if I need more money—though plenty of folks here take raw gold in payment. Still, there’s more saddlebag than gold by weight.
Back in Glory, I practiced working with gold every day, and although I’ve had a few opportunities here in San Francisco to use my witchy powers, I need to be more disciplined about it. No one becomes a dab at something by laying about, Daddy always said.
I close my eyes and reach out with my gold sense. The shape of it eludes me at first; there are so many individual pieces. The coins ring loudest at first, at 90 percent gold. Nuggets are sometimes purer than that, but not these. One is so muddled up with quartz ore it’s barely fifty percent. For my idea to work, I need this pile of gold to hum a single, familiar song, but this seems more like church ladies at a picnic all vying for attention.
I concentrate harder, trying to imagine all the little bits of gold as a single entity. It doesn’t work. There are too many tiny pieces to keep track of, and they insist on singing their own tunes.
So instead of focusing on the whole mess as one, I wrap my thoughts around as many individual pieces as I can, holding their shapes in my mind. A twenty-dollar piece, a half eagle, the largest nugget.
I stretch out my hand, and I close my fist as if grasping that sound-shape in my mind. Then I open my palm and fling it across the room.
The saddlebag slithers along the floor and thumps into the far wall. I gasp, my eyes popping open.
I did it.
I’ve called gold to me before, and pushed it away, but it’s another thing entirely to move something else with it. My shoulders ache, like I’ve been lifting hay bales. A throb is forming at the base of my neck.
I clench my fist and summon the gold back to me, but the saddlebag doesn’t move, just gives a little hiccup on the floor and stays stubbornly still. I stretch out again with my gold sense. What did I do wrong? I used the same . . . aha. All the bits of gold settled into new places when it slid across the floor. I have to wrap my focus around the mess all over again if I’m to move it.
I take my time about it, going slow and careful. It’s several heartbeats before I’ve latched on well enough to give it another try. My patience is rewarded; the saddlebag slides—faster this time—back across the floor, and I stretch out my boots to stop it. The impact shivers through my knees.
Eyes closed, thoughts swaddled tight around the gold, I open my fist and fling it away again. The saddlebag rips across the floor and slams into the wall. My fist closes tight, and it returns; this time I open my hand and stop it just before it hits me.
Over and over again, I practice: slide thump, slide stop, slide thump, slide stop.
The muscles in my neck and shoulders burn, and my head feels like there’s a tiny miner inside, jabbing with a tiny pickax. But in a way it’s also calming. It takes so much concentration, leaving no room to think about anything else.
Slide thump, slide stop.
A soft tap at the door interrupts me.
“Come in,” I say.
The door creaks open, and Jefferson pokes in his head tentatively. “I cleaned up your dishes,” he says, as though it was a monumental feat of heroism.
“Thanks.”
His gaze goes from me, to the saddlebag against the wall, and back to me, sitting cross-legged on the wood plank floor. “Practicing again?”
“Yep.”
He frowns. “Lee, are you feeling all right?”
“Why? Don’t tell me I’m covered in gold again.”
“Your face is flushed,” he says, plunking down beside me at the end of the cot. He stretches his legs out. “Like you’ve gotten too much sun. And your eyes are as bright gold as I’ve ever seen.”
“Huh. Well, I’ve been trying something new.”
“How’s it going?”
“It’s going.”
“Show me.”
“All right.” I’m suddenly nervous, like I’m performing for the most important person in the world, but I concentrate a moment, and sure enough, the saddlebag goes scooting across the floor.
“Isn’t that something!” Jefferson says. His gaze turns thoughtful. “We can use this. Somehow . . .”
“I’m trying to figure out how to direct it better. Stop and start, change direction, that sort of thing. But it’s hard. It . . . makes my head hurt a little.”
He’s staring at my face now, in a peculiar way that sets my heart to thumping. “Your eyes. They’re almost glowing.”
“Oh?”
Jefferson’s fingers reach up to gently touch my cheek. “They’re beautiful.”
“Oh.”
His gaze drops to my chest, and his eyes narrow.
“What?”
“That locket,” he says, indicating the charm with his chin. “Have you tried working with it?”
Of its own accord, my hand goes to the golden heart shape hanging from my neck. Inside is a lock of hair, taken from my baby brother, who only lived a few days. “No, not really. Why?”
“You wear it every day. Remember how you found little Andy with it? When he was lost on the prairie?”
I nod, seeing what he’s getting at. When I told Mary about my gold sense, I was able to make it float in the air a little.
“You once told me that you feel the shape of things. You know the shape of that locket like your own hand.”
I reach behind my neck and undo the clasp. I lift the tiny chain so the locket slips off into my palm. Though I see it clear with my eyes, feel it cool and firm against my skin, my magic perceives it as a sparkling ember, ready to do my bidding.
Just like with the gold inside the saddlebag, I wrap my mind around its shape, then I push the locket away. It flies forward until, with a thought, I command it to stop. It hovers in midair for the space of a breath before dropping to the floor.
“Well, I’ll be,” Jefferson breathes. “You saw that, right? It . . . floated.”
“Yep.” I blink to clear vision that’s gone a little fuzzy. “I’ve done that before. It’s easy compared to moving a mess of gold in my bag.”
Jefferson’s eyes dance. “This is going to be useful.”
His excitement is catching. “I don’t know how yet, but we’ll think of something. Maybe you could help me practice?”
“Sure,” he says. “What do you need me to do?”
“I’d like to test my range. Can you take the saddlebag to one of the other decks and leave it in an open space?”
“Which deck?” He stands, tossing the bag over his shoulder.
“Don’t tell me. That’s the whole point. I want to see if I can figure out where it is.”
“If I took the locket, you’d find it, no trouble at all.”
“Well, yes, but I want to get better at this.”
“Then let’s give it a try,” he says. He bends down, kisses me quick on the lips, then closes the door on his way out. My cabin is suddenly empty and quiet without him.
His footsteps fade down the hall, toward the hatch that leads to the lower deck with the horses. Listening to his footsteps feels like cheating, so I close my eyes and focus on the gold instead of Jefferson’s boots. It’s like a torch in my mind, descending to the lower deck, growing gradually fainter, then brighter again as it passes directly beneath me and up the other stairs. Clever Jefferson.
The saddlebag finally comes to rest on the poop deck, where Jefferson and I watched the stars last night.
It’s at the end of the ship farthest from me now, but the torch in my mind is still bright. I reach out my hand, close my fist, and try to pull the gold.
It slips through my fingers like water.
I squeeze my fist and try again.
My arm shakes. Fingernails dig into my palm hard enough to hurt. My head pounds like a steam engine about to explode. I yank my fist toward my stomach.
The gold moves.
It slides across the deck, thumps down the wooden steps to the quarterdeck, and slams against a railing.
I fall backward, panting, dizzy, partly because the use of power is heady and strange. But partly because I think I’ve figured out what we’re going to do with it.
Jefferson’s boots pound down the steps and through the hallway. “Lee! Lee!”
The baby starts crying, and Becky shouts, “Jefferson Kingfisher, I just got this child to sleep!”
“Sorry, ma’am! Won’t happen again.”
I stand up and fling open the door. Jefferson is wide-eyed and grinning as he comes down the hall, saddlebag over his shoulder. He fights hard to keep his voice a whisper: “Did you do that?”
I grin back at him. “You know I did. I need to rest, then I need to practice again. I might have an idea.”
He plants a quick kiss on my lips. “You are a wonder,” he says, with that almost smile I love so much.
I want more than a little kiss. “All this practice. My shoulders hurt—do you want to come rub them for a bit?” As soon as the words leave my mouth, I know I’m the daftest girl who ever tried to flirt. My cheeks flame.
But Jefferson grins. He slips the saddlebag off his shoulder and quietly shuts the door. “That’s a good idea.”
He lifts my hair and kisses the back of my neck, sending tingles up and down my spine. “Jeff,” I say. Like it’s a warning. Or maybe an invitation.
“Just a little kissing, right?” he says.
“Right.”
His strong fingers sink into my muscles, hurting and relieving hurt at the same time. The throbbing in my head starts to subside. I let myself sink down into the cot like it’s the most comfortable featherbed that ever existed. Doing something about Hardwick can wait for a while.