Page 28

The inn had never been his mother’s dream, but his father’s.

It was his pa’s before him, named Colson the town chancellor had cordoned it off with paper notices that read DANGER. UNSTABLE FOUNDATION.

But John Colson was a dreamer. What he envisioned tended to come to life between his hands.

He could whittle dry root into game pieces.

He could fix all that was broken: shoes, windowpanes, creaking doors, axles, wheel spokes, and saddles.

He had enough ideas to fill three men’s skulls and they’d still overflow.

But he was a Craftsman of Kenton Hill, so he went to the mines.

They mined coal in Kenton Hill. Always had.

The low-bearing hills hid the largest coal seam on the continent.

Patrick had seen miners slam their pints together and salute the enduring role this town had played in the great mechanism of the Trench since he could walk.

But do those fuckin’ swanks deign to thank us?

To share any of the profit of our labor?

No! the rest would shout, and resentment would brew among them until it was thick enough to turn a softer man violent. Those men, blackened by soot, addled by liquor, would take that violence home to their families.

In the brink, nary a Crafter town differed.

John Colson had been determined to set a different course.

His miner’s pay funneled into the refurbishing of the inn, and he spent his nights working instead of drinking.

Eventually, the inn reopened, and it fell to his wife to manage its books and fill its rooms, serve its patrons and stock the bar.

Eventually, it became the establishment John Colson dreamed it would be, though he barely saw the inside of it.

His days were spent down the shafts, in the dark, earning the wage necessary to keep Colson & Sons open despite Tess’s protests.

The inn is bleedin’ us dry, John. The repairs, the heatin’. We’ve barely turned a profit since it opened. It’s been years, John. Years! And you’re still down that blasted mine every bloody day.

It’ll turn around yet, love, you’ll see , John would say. For years he said it. By the time Patrick returned from his siphoning, he’d stopped believing it.

By then, Patrick knew the truth. He and his brothers would all mine coal with their father until they keeled over.

He knew his mother would climb that fucking staircase every hour of the day until her legs gave out, and he knew that the money his father had promised would never arrive.

Even with the addition of his wage and Gunner’s, there was always a bill to pay, always a repair to be made, always a shift the next day, the bell for the nightmen ringing out at dusk.

And yet, it had been a future Patrick was willing to bear.

There was nothing else for him if there was not that staircase, that bell, the obstinate resolution of John Colson’s dream.

Patrick’s life then was a warm accumulation of smoke and his mother’s rare smiles and the bedroom he shared with his brothers.

There was nothing else to miss as much as home.

That was what he’d told himself when he returned from Belavere City, all the way down the platform, right to the back door he now stood before, wiping his boots on the same straw mat he had back then.

The house was hidden behind the pub. Three rooms for five people, turned four. John’s portrait still sat in its silver frame on a sideboard. The kitchen smelled, as it always did, of pastry and onions and rendering fat.

The oldest Colson brother sat at a round table with mismatched legs, leaning back on a chair their father had once occupied in a time before his capture. It still rankled Patrick to see someone else in his place.

Gunner turned his weary head to Patrick and watched him remove his coat.

The two brothers were alike in many ways.

Both dressed in a fashion that did not match their surroundings: finely tailored pants, a brass-buttoned waistcoat, a starched shirt, shoes shined like a lord’s.

But the contrast between them was stark.

Gunner’s beard now reached his chest and was streaked in early grays.

On a reddened visage, his dark eyes floated, unable to anchor themselves.

He slumped in the chair, hair in disarray, one hand shaking on their mother’s kitchen table, the other holding a bottleneck in his lap.

“The boss man is here,” Gunner muttered darkly. His eyes rolled to the counter where Tess slapped pastry onto a butcher block. “Better hide your sherry, Ma, ’fore he confiscates it.”

“Shut up, Gunner,” Tess said, taking a rolling pin to the pastry with unspent fury.

“You here to lecture me, Patty?” Gunner said now, leering over the tabletop. He pointed to a place on his chin. “Come to smack some sense into me?”

Tess slammed the rolling pin on the counter. “I said, shut up!” She turned to Gunner with all the fierceness of a warden. “Do you want a place to sleep off that fuckin’ bottle you took from my shelf, son? Or should I send your sorry arse home to Emily? Eh? Which will it be?”

At the mention of his wife, Gunner sobered, relaxing back into his chair, averting his eyes like a petulant child.

“As I thought,” Tess muttered. She turned to Patrick. “You want breakfast?”

He nodded but didn’t take his gaze from Gunner. He wondered how long his brother had been here, taking up space in Tess’s kitchen. How long would the bender last this time? “I went to see Emily,” Patrick said. “Knocked on her door.”

Gunner shrunk, the great hulking brute of a man collapsing in on himself. “What’d she say?”

“Says she’ll take you back, so long as the whiskey and bluff stay behind.” Patrick stared a hole right through his brother’s head.

Gunner swallowed thickly, ran his tongue over his dry lips, probably tasting the final remnants of bluff. A glimmer of hope sparked his muddy eyes. Their father’s eyes. “She’ll have me home?” he asked, words wobbling. He leaned forward to hear the answer, bottle slipping sideways.

Patrick took it from him, then emptied it into the sink. “It took some convincin’, but yes. God help her.”

“Thank you, brother,” Gunner said quietly, somewhat brokenly. He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hands and Patrick saw something pitiful in him. A kicked dog. “Clean yourself up, Gun. She ain’t givin’ you more chances after this one. You hear me?”

He nodded, wiping his hands on his pants. “I’ll straighten out,” he said, to himself more than anyone else. “Tell her for me, will you? And tell her… tell her I love her.”

“Tell her yourself,” Patrick said, disgust in his voice. “She’s a good woman.”

“I know.”

“You ain’t gonna trick another into marrying you.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” Patrick said, louder than before. Heat rose from his collar and Gunner could see it. He pressed his lips together.

Patrick stepped close, then knelt until their eyes were level. “Then don’t fuck up again,” he ordered. “Next time she kicks your arse to the street, I won’t darken her doorstep on your behalf.”

Gone was the big brother who’d have clocked Patrick in the chin for daring to speak down to him. The man who would sooner die than let another man stand over him.

Gunner Colson was nearly a husk now, carrying around the wet weight of someone barely recognizable. He nodded, sniffing and wiping his nose on his cuff. “This’ll be the last time, Pat. I swear it.”

He hadn’t always been so pitiful. The Gunner of their childhood had been strong.

Impenetrable. Admired. He had taught Patrick how to relight discarded cigarette stubs, how to throw a punch, which schoolbooks had the nude models sketched onto the pages.

He had pulled Charlie Fawcett by the collar all the way to the old quarry and threatened to throw him over the side after he’d taken Donny’s lunch.

He’d been a force to be reckoned with until he’d been sucked down those mines. He had come back up much like the rest—hollow, afraid, in desperate need of some relief.

“It’s just the walls, Pat,” Gunner said, his voice whisper-thin now. Patrick knew he was moments from losing consciousness. “The walls keep fuckin’ fallin’ in on me.”

Patrick was familiar with the sensation—the weight of the tunnels pressing inward, puncturing organs, skull cracking beneath the pressure, the whole world dark and desperate. Calamitous panic. Fear. Sometimes Patrick woke with his blood screaming in his ears.

“You’re aboveground now, Gun,” Patrick told him, taking his brother’s slack head in his hands. “Look around you. No dirt. No struts.”

“No fuckin’ canaries,” he said, smiling wetly.

“No canaries,” Patrick agreed. “You’re a man who wears a nice suit now.” He patted Gunner’s shoulder once, then stood straight again. “I need you on your feet again soon. There’s business.”

“There’s always business,” muttered Tess from behind them. She was stirring something that smelled like a stew. “All this bloody business, and never any peace.”

She wasn’t referring to Colson & Sons, of course. These days they had housekeepers, cooks, barkeeps. No, it wasn’t the inn that kept that bitter lament on Tess Colson’s tongue. It was the Miners Union. Yet another thing their father had burdened her with.

Patrick sighed, turning back toward the door. “There’s a community meeting tonight,” he reminded her.

“Don’t I know it,” she murmured. “You’re not stayin’ for breakfast?”

He shook his head. He didn’t want to stay here another minute looking at his dosed brother in the chair of his missing father. “It’s a busy day,” he said. He donned his coat again, then jutted a finger in Gunner’s direction. “He can’t have hard liquor at the bar anymore, Ma. Tell the keeps.”

She looked for a moment as though she might argue. But she glanced at her eldest son and bit the inside of her cheek again. Nodded.

Gunner had dozed off.

“If I hear he’s fallin’ off your barstools, I’ll be handling him myself.”

Tess’s eyes darkened, but again she nodded, swallowing warily. She looked Patrick up and down like she barely recognized him. “You sound like him ,” she said, and Patrick didn’t need to ask whom she referred to.

He turned his back on her.

The air outside was colder this morning. The seasons were turning. Soon, the hills would turn brown and frostbitten, the gas would run low again. The water heaters would groan ominously.

But no one in Kenton Hill would grow cold in their homes. No one would go hungry. No coal would be spared for Belavere City or anyone else. Not anymore.

Patrick entered the narrow alley that ran down the side of Colson & Sons.

He was due to meet Otto and Scottie, see what news they’d heard along the tunnels, then the Miller family about the produce distribution at the marketplace.

There were problems to be solved. Always fucking problems. Running a town was a succession of crises—there was no bottom to the barrel.

“Pat!”

He’d barely set foot into Main Street.

Sam jogged toward him, the boy’s face shiny and harrowed. “Pat… I’m sorry…” The boy looked over his shoulder frantically. Patrick half expected a cavalry on his tail. “She’s gone.”

“What?” Patrick’s stomach hollowed. “How long ago?” How far could she have gotten? His feet turned to the south, to the old train tracks.

Sam panted heavily. “She said we’d walk together, that she wanted to explore… then she was just gone—”

Patrick whirled again, his skin prickling. Sam took a purposeful step back.

It always seemed to Patrick that there was something on his face or in his voice that unsettled people. Warned them. Perhaps it was the mere fact that his last name was Colson.

“A walk ?” Patrick repeated, voice deadened. He decided it was not a good idea to grab the boy by the collar. He was just a kid. “You took her on a fuckin’ walk , Sam?”

“I told her no,” he said, gripping his cap in his hands. “But she threatened to break apart the buildin’! And you weren’t in the pub. And she promised it were just a walk—”

Patrick shook his head. Cursed at his feet. “Where did you lose her?”

“By the candlemaker’s,” he answered in a hurry. “Turned around and she were gone.” He made a gesture with his hands, as though Nina had turned to smoke before his eyes.

Patrick looked up Main Street, filled now with merchants and Crafters of every trade completing their day’s work. The trolley rattled by, filled with ruddy-faced children dressed for school. Nina was nowhere.

“I think… I think she’s gone, Pat. She’s made a run for it.”

“No, she hasn’t,” Patrick said, already walking, feet falling hard against the cobbles. “I’ll find her.”

Sam hurried to catch up. “But… where?” he asked, exasperated. “I searched everywhere.”

“Go home,” Patrick told him. He did not spare the boy a glance as he took off. Patrick ignored the nods of those he passed and took a left turn at the end of the road, where the streets turned to canals and funneled out into the hills.

You’re still here , he thought, quickening to a jog. And if you’re not, I’ll be bringin’ you right back.