No, not the boys.

“Come out here, and bring what you were given!”

Worse.

“Farson wants his property! We’ve come to take it!”

Not the boys but the Big Coffin Hunters.

“Never, ye dirty old white-haired prick,” she whispered. “Ye’ll never take it.” Her eyes moved from side to side in small, shooting peeks. Scraggle-headed and tremble-mouthed, she looked like a diseased coyote driven into its final arroyo.

She looked down at the ball and a whining noise began to escape her. Now even the pink glow was gone. The sphere was as dark as a corpse’s eyeball.

10

A shriek came from the hut.

Depape turned to Jonas with wide eyes, his skin prickling. The thing which had uttered that cry hardly sounded human.

“Rhea!” Jonas called again. “Bring it out here now, woman, and hand it over! I’ve no time to play games with you!”

The door of the hut swung open. Depape and Reynolds drew their guns as the old crone stepped out, blinking against the sunlight like something that’s spent its whole life in a cave. She was holding John Farson’s favorite toy high over her head. There were plenty of rocks in the dooryard she could throw it against, and even if her aim was bad and she missed them all, it might smash anyway.

This could be bad, and Jonas knew it—there were some people you just couldn’t threaten. He had focused so much of his attention on the brats (who, ironically, had been taken as easy as milk) that it had never occurred to him to worry much about this part of it. And Kimba Rimer, the man who had suggested Rhea as the perfect custodian for Maerlyn’s Rainbow, was dead. Couldn’t lay it at Rimer’s doorstep if things went wrong up here, could he?

Then, just to make things a little worse when he’d have thought they’d gone as far west as they could without dropping off the cold end of the earth, he heard the cocking sound of Depape drawing the hammer of his gun.

“Put that away, you idiot!” he snarled.

“But look at her!” Depape almost moaned. “Look at her, Eldred!”

He was. The thing inside the black dress appeared to be wearing the corpse of a putrefying snake around its throat for a necklace. She was so scrawny that she resembled nothing so much as a walking skeleton. Her peeling skull was only tufted with hair; the rest had fallen out. Sores clustered on her cheeks and brow, and there was a mark like a spider-bite on the left side of her mouth. Jonas thought that last might be a scurvy-bloom, but he didn’t really care one way or another. What he cared about was the ball upraised in the dying woman’s long and shivering claws.

11