Fire Raiser by Melanie Rawn Page B

Adams’s eye. And they’d kept on arguing through all the issues of war, society, law, politics, ethics, and religion that had come up ever since.
    Only in matters of race had violence occurred. In this, the county was truly Southern. There had been murders before the Civil War, and lynchings during Reconstruction, and the resurgence of the Klan in the ’20s had intensified the nightmare. The last act of race-related violence had been almost forty years ago: the murder of Holly’s parents on their way back from an NAACP meeting. This had shocked the entire community so profoundly that when the Klan abandoned Pocahontas County, nobody mentioned how odd it was that some of the families had been residents for generations. As for how many people knew the departure had been prompted by magic . . . who could say?
    “It was Holly’s Aunt Lizza,” Lulah had explained. “She was that good—and that heartbroke over her sister’s death. She didn’t care if Mr. Scott took her Measure and then shredded it to bits right in front of her. We couldn’t any of us figure out what was goin’ on, until one day Griff found her collapsed on the kitchen floor. When she came to, first thing she did was start reweaving—Clary Sage had to knock her out with things you don’t want to know about. We all got together and discussed it, and decided if somebody wanted to punish us for usin’ magic against these people, so be it. And we finished off what Lizza had started. Hexes, spells, blights and blastings, all sorts of things nobody suspected the girl had in her. She nearly wrecked her health, physical and magical. But one by one the Klan members sold up and left. There was an investigation, of course, but we had precedent—I ever tell you about what a McNichol did to a slavecatcher way back when? Anyhow, Mr. Scott came in to have a look—he was short on deputies like Alec and Nicholas at the time, so he investigated us himself. He wrote the whole thing off as not quite kosher, but none of us had profited materially or magically, so he let us be. Lizza was sick for almost a year after—and much as she wanted to, there wasn’t any chance of her bein’ able to take care of her sister’s child. So Griff took her to California, and I took Holly to raise. And we never from that day had another whisper of trouble. We had equal justice, and we had peace. My brother and Marget bought it with their lives.”
    Forty years later, the Westmoreland Inn was hosting a county gathering that featured every possible shade of human skin. If anybody had a problem with it, they kept it to themselves. But Lachlan was pretty sure nobody had problems. It reminded him of something he’d sensed when Holly had taken him to a couple of Civil War battlefields during their first spring at Woodhush: it was as if all the violence and hatred and bitterness that could possibly exist in that particular piece of land had simply exhausted itself. Nothing was left but quiet, and a certain weariness—and the grass, doing its work, just as Sandburg had written. Evan had tried to explain what he’d felt on the drive home; Holly had given him an odd look, then patted the growing curve of her belly and said, “Daddy is a very wise man, did you know that?”
    Lachlan considered that Elizabeth Amarantha Flynn Griffen had been the general on that particular battlefield, with her rage and her grief as artillery. And after she’d won, Pocahontas County had been left in peace.
    At the bar, he smiled at the blonde who usually worked the counter at her family’s restaurant over in Prince Rupert, and asked for, “One large glass, two ice cubes, and the rest vodka.”
    “—Jerusalem artichokes are perfect. Has to be a hundred and ninety proof or it won’t do the job. Then—”
    Evan turned his head and smiled. “Jerusalem artichokes, huh, Rocky? Quite a change from corn mash.”
    There was a saying about the various nationalities that had settled Appalachia: the English