Summer contest Co-Runner-Up

Halden Vale came back from the hunt, dusty and sweating, in no mood to be followed.

The outlaw’s blood had dried in dark streaks along one cuff. His own had made a thinner line beneath his shirt, where a bullet had grazed the flesh and carried on. Outside, the crowd gloried in the victory, cheering and pressing forward as the body was hauled back through the east gate on a mule board, limp beneath a coat no longer belonging to any living man.

Halden hadn’t looked back, not even once.

He crossed the threshold of his office with Colonel Brack speaking at his shoulder.

“…riders are being sent east again before dusk. I’ve told Harrow to double the watch along the lower road, but if any of his remaining men are still in the badlands, they’ll scatter. We should have search parties out before nightfall.”

Halden pulled off one glove, the leather resisting at the knuckles, damp with sweat. He dropped it on the edge of his desk, then worked the other free.

“Scatter to where?”

Brack stopped half a pace inside the room. He was a narrow man with a soldier’s build but a clerk’s eyes. “There are caves beyond Marrow Ridge.”

Halden gave him a tired look. “They’ve no water, no food, and half of them are carrying wounds. If they want to crawl out and die where no one has to bury them, let them.”

The office had held the heat of the midsummer sun. It sat in the panelled walls, the thick rug, the old leather chairs, and the brass cabinet handle that burned against his fingertips when Halden opened it. The fire in the hearth was low, kept alive out of habit rather than need, a red bed of coals under a cage of blackened wood. Above it hung the portrait of Halden’s wife, her painted mouth caught in the soft lie of a smile she had never worn often in life.

Brack lingered near the door.

“The people want addressing.”

“The people have their death. What more do they need?”

“It would calm them to hear you speak.”

Halden took a key from his pocket, unlocked the cabinet, and selected a glass.

“I’ve been riding since dawn, Colonel. I’ve been shot at, lied to, spat at, and expected to look solemn while half the town cheers over a corpse they were too afraid to hunt themselves. If they need more comfort, tell them to pray.”

Brack’s mouth pressed into a line. “And what of Lady Mina?” Halden’s hand paused at the whisky.

“What about her?”

“She hasn’t been seen since the riders returned.”

“She’ll keep to her rooms,” Halden said.

“She may need someone with her.”

“Then send a maid.”

Brack opened his mouth, then thought better of it. The silence that followed was answer enough, but he gave a small bow all the same.

“Shall I have someone posted near her rooms?”

“No.”

“My lord, given her attachment…”

Halden turned, glass in one hand, bottle in the other. He didn’t raise his voice. He only looked at Brack until the colonel remembered himself.

“My daughter’s attachments have caused enough inconvenience for one day.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Dismiss the men. Pay the riders, then have the head displayed until sundown. Be sure to take it down before it starts to sweeten. I want his face seen, not smelt.”

Brack bowed again. “And after that, my lord?”

“After that, Colonel, this town remembers who governs it.”

Brack left, closing the door behind him.

Halden stood still until the footsteps faded down the corridor. Only then did he let the tiredness settle into his shoulders.

It had been a hard hunt. Hot enough to make leather stink. Dry enough that every breath scraped the throat. The outlaw, Silas Rook, had led them over broken land and salt flats, through gullies where the horses slipped on shale, and the men cursed under their breath. He’d been clever; Halden would give him that. Too clever for a gutter-born upstart with a borrowed coat and grand ideas.

But cleverness had limits. A man could know every hidden path between the governed towns. He could bribe guards, turn farmers, charm lonely daughters with songs and stories and pretty talk about freedom. In the end, though, a man still bled when shot.

Halden poured whisky into the glass. Not much. Two fingers, neat and amber. The bottle clicked softly when he set it down.

He opened the small silver ice chest on the side table and took out the tongs. The cold came up at him in a pale breath, welcome after the blood heat of the day. He chose two cubes and dropped them into the glass. They struck the liquid within with a clean crack.

There were few civilised pleasures left in the borderlands. A quiet room. A good chair. A drink cold enough to remind a man he was not made of dust, no matter how much of it the world threw at him.

He lifted the glass.

The first swallow burned through the dryness at the back of his mouth, rolled over his tongue, then slid down with a heat that intensified as it went. Smoke, oak, a trace of honey beneath the bite. He closed his eyes and let the taste settle.

Halden noticed the letter on his desk the moment his eye reopened.

It had been placed in the centre of the blotter, exactly square. Heavy cream paper. Folded once without a seal. Not that he needed one.

Mina had been six when she’d learned to write her own name. She had made the M too large, always stabbing it upward like the peak of a roof. Her tutors had admonished her for years. She had kept it anyway.

Halden took the letter up between two fingers and opened the page.

By the time he reached the bottom, his expression had settled into something unreadable.

The ice shifted in his glass as he aimlessly tilted the tumbler, turning the parchment over to check the back, before laying it flat on the desk and smoothing it with his palm.

His hand was steady as he lifted the glass to his lips, draining its contents in a single swallow before drawing an ice cube into his mouth. The cold struck his teeth as he pressed it between tongue and molar.

A soft knock came at the door, and without waiting for him to reply, it swung open. Mina stepped inside.

The room felt hotter than the corridor. Older too, as if the walls had been breathing in smoke, whisky, and the decisions of men who felt themselves more important than they really were for longer than she had been alive.

She wore a dress the colour of a clear morning sky, too bright for the room built from dark wood. Tiny pearls had been sewn along the cuffs in neat little rows, catching the firelight whenever her hands moved. Thin silk gloves covered her fingers, pale enough to make her hands look soft and carefully kept. It was an outfit for gardens, parlours, summer balconies, anywhere but here, where the air tasted of whisky and dust. A single white flower had been pinned into her hair, soft-belled and pretty, its pale throat turned slightly towards the fire. A few strands had escaped their pins and clung to her tear-damp cheek, making her look younger than she felt.

Still, she knew how she appeared.

Pretty. Grieved. Young enough to be pitied by men who’d mistake her softness for innocence.

Her father sat behind the desk with the letter laid flat beneath one hand and the empty glass near the other. Dust marked his coat. Blood darkened one cuff. He looked carved into the chair rather than seated in it, his face emptied of emotion. Only the small movement at his mouth gave him life: the ice cube shifting between his teeth as he sucked at it, slow and thoughtless, as if even now he had found something in the room to wear down.

“F-Father,” Mina said, the familiar stammer catching on the word. She gave the small, polite nod she’d been taught as a child. It felt ridiculous now, that tiny dip of the head.

Her father didn’t return the greeting.

The ice simply moved between his teeth as his eyes took her in, not quite angry, not quite sad.

For a moment, Mina wished he would shout.

Anger would have been easier to handle. Anger would have meant the words she’d written had found somewhere tender to strike. Sadly, her father had always been careful not to let emotion betray his true feelings. Instead, he simply watched her, his face as still as the portrait above the hearth.

“He wasn’t right for you, you know that,” he said at last.

The words were spoken softly, almost kindly, and Mina felt the heat rise through her chest and into her throat before she could stop it.

“S-So you killed him?” “No. I killed him because he was a dangerous man. To my town, and to my daughter.”

“He wanted b-better for this town.”

“He wanted power.”

“He wanted p-people free of you.”

Ice cracked between her father’s teeth as he held her stare.

“Planned to free the town from a governor’s chair, did he? There’s always some boy from the dust roads. Some hungry little hero with a pistol, a grievance, and a coat he thinks makes him look big. Why do girls raised behind clean windows always mistake foolishness for depth?”

Mina’s hands tightened at her sides. “D-Do not make him small because you feared him.”

“Why would I fear him?” her father laughed.

“Y-you feared him enough to turn the entire town against him. Enough to c-chase him across half the borderlands with thirty armed riders. Thirty riders for one outlaw and a handful of half-s-starved rebels.”

Her voice shook on the last word, but she didn’t let it break.

“He had m-more courage than every man you paid to hunt him.”

“And where did it get him?” Halden asked. “Headless, hanging above the town gate, so every other boy with empty pockets and ideas above his station can look up and think twice.” Halden smiled around the ice. “Ambition above one’s birth is a common sickness.”

He lifted the letter then. “And this? What do you hope to achieve with this? You think to stain my name by claiming you were the mind behind his little rebellion?”

Mina said nothing.

“In what world do you think people would believe my p-p-poor stuttering little Mina?” he asked, mocking the stumble with a softness that made her skin crawl. “My pretty little girl in her pretty dresses, with her flower garden and her needlework and those big doe eyes every servant in this house has been trained to pity.”

His smile thinned as he picked up the whisky glass and drew the second ice cube into his mouth. He crunched down on it, hard enough that Mina heard it split, before he thumped the glass back onto the desk.

The sound cracked through the room, louder than he seemed to expect. His fingers stayed on the rim a moment longer, his expression tightening as if the force had jarred something loose inside him. Then he let go.

“Do yourself a favour,” he continued. “Forget Silas Rook. Go back to your room. Tend your flowers. Read your little romances. Leave running the town to those who know how.”

Mina said nothing. Her hand rose to the flower in her hair, fingers brushing the pale bell as if the pin had come loose.

“I am willing to let this little transgression pass,” he continued, lifting the letter between two fingers. “We’ll dispose of this fake confession of yours, and if you are lucky, people will only remember you as a foolish girl who lost her head over the wrong man.”

He held the page towards the fire, close enough for the edge to warm and curl.

Or close enough that it should have.

His hand stopped short.

Only by an inch, perhaps less, but Mina saw it. The tiny falter at his wrist. The brief confusion in his eyes, as if the fire had moved away from him rather than his own arm refusing to finish the task.

Mina met his gaze, and the smile that followed pleased her only because it took him off guard.

“But it’s not fake, Father. Every word of that letter is the truth. And you don’t need to worry. Your p-p-poor stuttering little Mina is not all that grieved. Silas was just a means to an end.”

The stammer vanished so cleanly that Mina watched confusion pass across his face before understanding followed.

Halden stared at her.

Mina reached up and plucked the white flower from her hair. Its soft bell crushed easily between her gloved fingers, leaving a smear of pale sap on the delicate silk.

“I liked him,” she said. “More than I meant to.”

Her eyes flicked to the glass, then back to him.

“But you were always the point. Or your chair was. Silas was easy. Righteous men usually are. Give them a noble enough reason, and they’ll mistake your plan for theirs. A plan that was always destined to fail.”

Halden’s hand twitched against the arm of the chair.

Mina smiled then, small, sad but not at all innocent. “I wouldn’t try to move, Father. Not now. You’ll only embarrass yourself.” Her eyes went to the empty glass. “You have always locked away your whisky and your glasses. I remember you catching me at that cabinet when I was little. I told you not to touch it. You shouted that often, as if the bottle mattered more than the child reaching for it. Still… you never locked away the ice.”

Halden’s gaze shifted to the crushed flower in her hand.

“Foxglove,” Mina said. “Pretty enough for a girl’s hair. Common enough for a garden. Dangerous enough that Mother made sure I knew never to touch it with broken skin.”

Her father's fingers tightened against the chair, but they didn’t rise.

“I needed you hot, tired, and bleeding a little if luck allowed it. I needed you dragged out under the midsummer sun, chasing Silas through dust until the day had done half the work for me.” She looked him over, almost gently. “And you helped. You never drink water. Not when there is whisky and ice.”

Her father's mouth worked, but nothing came out.

“By morning, they will have everything they need to rule your death as unsuspicious. Heat. A wound. A hard ride. A man who came home, drank whisky instead of water, and died in his chair.”

She walked around the desk, took the half-singed letter from between his fingers, and dropped it into the fire.

“I only wanted you to know first,” she said.

The paper caught.

“What you lost. And who took it.”