The town was no more than a collection of mud-caked dwellings and rustic amenities, populated by but a handful of men moving about with an unsettling lack of haste. Dust clung to everything, thick as ash in the heat of the early afternoon. The air was dry, that high, thin air that made the sweat on a man’s brow turn to salt almost as soon as it formed. Dogs hassled by swathes of flies clung to the shaded eaves of adobe houses, still and pervasive as moss in a cemetery. Glanton’s gang had come into town slow, like all men accustomed to the wear of the road, their boots heavy with the weight of miles and days uncounted.

  Bernadetta’s eyes, ever searching, drifted over the town like a hawk’s gaze across the prairie.

  She spotted them first—the Mormons. Not a name that held any particular meaning to her yet, but she saw them now. A group of them, working, stoic, loading crates onto the back of a wagon. Clean-shaven men in black suits with somber faces, no hint of the kind of grime that clung like a second scalp to the other men of that forsaken era.

  And then the shouting began. A woman’s voice.

  Harsh, broken, but loud enough to pierce through the dull hum.

  "You bastard!" the woman screamed. "I spent the night with your gangly ass, and you left without paying me!"

  Bernadetta blinked, her body halting to spite her innate inclination to flee.

  The Mormon man at the wagon glanced up from his labor, the faintest irritation coloring his sickly pale features. He was taller than most of them, and leaner. He seemed almost too neat for the rough work at hand, a stark contrast to the abject filth of his surroundings.

  He wiped a hand over his forehead and spat. “You lie! Like hell I would lay with a whore!”

  “See if I don't chop your dick and balls off, make a proper eunuch out of you.”

  Toadvine was watching from behind Bernadetta and chuckled, a low, hoarse sound that mingled with the clink of iron.

  “Look at that," he said, loud enough for the others to hear.

  One of the gang—maybe Shelby, maybe not—let out a low whistle, said, “Damn fine lookin’ woman.”

  Glanton gave no reply. Just watched her for a moment, quiet, the lines in his face unreadable. Then he turned and kept walking.

  "But ain’t none of ‘em worth touchin’,” said another, “probably got something rottin’ inside her.”

  There was a silence then—not sudden, but creeping. A stillness that passed over the street like the shadow of a passing cloud.

  The Mormon man turned, as if feeling it, and there stood a woman in the open door of the brothel. She was pale, her hair bound up behind her head like a penitent’s crown, and in her right hand she held a hatchet with the indifferent familiarity of one born to violence. She wore a simple dress cinched at the waist, the color of dried blood or faded rust, and there was a hardness in her eyes that seemed to predate the town itself.

  Her expression was unreadable.

  She walked forward.

  The men parted for her like dogs from fire. The Mormon, to his credit, did not flinch, though his eyes betrayed a flicker of unease.

  “Who the hell are you?” he asked.

  The woman stopped before him and let the hatchet fall into the dirt at her feet with a dull thunk. The sound rang louder than it should have, as if the ground itself acknowledged it.

  “I am the madame of this house,” she said. Her voice was even, unhurried, the vowels cold and unadorned. “That is all you need to know.”

  The man gave a bark of laughter, too quick. “The madame,” he said. “Well, shit. We’re being chastised by a whore wrangler.”

  But his voice broke a little on the word whore.

  She took a step closer. “You came to us four times. I remember. The first, you asked to be blindfolded and prayed over while you wept. The second, you insisted on reciting scripture while the girl—”

  “She’s lying!” the man shrieked, eyes darting to his fellows, who had begun to back away.

  She did not raise her voice. “The third, you asked them to call you Father. And the fourth, well. You remember. A spanking in the confessional.”

  Laughter rang out behind Bernadetta like musket fire. Toadvine was wheezing. One of the Mormons looked ready to vomit.

  “I’ll pay,” the man whispered. He reached into his coat and withdrew a billfold with trembling fingers, tossing the money at her feet like it might cleanse him.

  She didn’t move to pick it up.

  “Get out,” she said.

  He did.

  They all did.

  When it was over, the dust settling behind the departing wagon like an accusation, the woman knelt and retrieved the money. Then she turned to the girl still sitting on the ground, the one who had shouted—the one with the bruised cheek and the furious glare.

  “You alright?” she asked.

  “Fine,” said the girl, but there was a quiver in her lip.

  Edelgard—though her name was not yet given—offered a hand and pulled her up. “Get inside. Wash up.”

  The girl nodded and limped back toward the door, glancing over her shoulder only once.

  That was when Edelgard looked at Bernadetta. The girl had not moved, her hands curled into her coat like a hermit crab in its shell. But her eyes were wide, locked on the woman like a preacher’s son glimpsing the Devil and finding him noble. The woman tilted her head, and for a moment there passed between them something wordless. A recognition. Not of what they were, but of what they might be.

  Then Edelgard turned and disappeared back inside, and the wind went on whispering through the cracked bones of the street.

  They were well into the uplands by the time Bernadetta had settled back into the misery of the road and still could not cease thinking about her, the whole of the world laid out behind them in dust and dead creosote. The sky was a pale crucible. No birds had flown above the gang for miles, as though the heavens themselves had relinquished dominion over their processions. By nightfall they made camp in a gully choked with the black bones of floodkilled trees, and the wind whistled through their branches with a sound like breath caught in a throat.

  Bernadetta sat on a rock nursing what was left in her ration of beans, her eyes flicking up with every gust.

  Something rode the air. Not scent, not sound. Expectation. That shape of weight before it drops.

  When she heard hooves, she thought it must’ve been a trick. But they came again. Real. Sharp. Clattering down the slope.

  The men stood. Guns weren’t drawn but hands hovered. Toadvine spat into the fire.

  Then they saw her.

  Two figures atop a single dun horse. One held the reins. The other sat behind her, arms loose around the rider’s waist, her shawl trailing like shed skin in the wind.

  The rider dismounted without a word. She was tall. Pale as tallow. Her white hair was pulled back behind her head like a penitent nun, though there was nothing of penitence in her bearing. She wore a dark riding coat over what might’ve once been a governess’s blouse, now stained and mended, and she bore no weapon save for a woodsman’s hatchet looped through a leather ring at her side.

  “We’re lookin’ for the man named Glanton,” Edelgard said.

  Her accent was worn smooth, but in it was the trace of some old world—Spain, maybe. Or something older still.

  The second woman dismounted behind her. She wore her brown hair long, parted down the middle and tucked behind her ears. Her dress was simple, poor, her voice hoarse when she spoke.

  The men didn’t speak. They stared. The silence was heavy, unkind.

  Then Glanton stood from where he’d been crouched beside the fire. He regarded the women with no change in expression, but something beneath his face tightened like a fist.

  “You rode hard,” he said.

  The pale woman nodded once. “We came to terms.”

  He nodded back. No more words passed between them. The brown haired woman stepped to his side like it had always been hers.

  Bernadetta’s heart was hammering. She looked at the other woman—the axe, the eyes that had not blinked since dismounting. Like she was carved from marble and fury.

  The Judge stood then. He had not spoken since dusk.

  He watched the white-haired woman with the patient reverence of a man regarding an eclipse.

  “I’ve seen such a blade,” he said, voice slow, sonorous. “In Oaxaca. Once. A Quasi-Mexican queen held it when she declared her dominion over a mountain pass lined with the dead.”

  No one replied. The pale woman looked at him, unreadable.

  “Yours is cleaner,” he added.

  She turned from him without a word and knelt by the fire.

  Bernadetta couldn’t stop watching her. Neither could most of the men.

  The fire spat once. A coyote yipped somewhere out in the darkness, a thin cry quickly swallowed by the black void beyond the embers. Overhead the stars burned distant and pale, arranged in constellations inscrutable as ancient glyphs, hung like broken teeth in the mouth of the night.

  The fire had dwindled down to embers, smoldering red coals casting a dim glow over the sleeping figures sprawled across the hard, dust-choked earth. The men lay unmoving, twisted into uneasy shapes beneath threadbare blankets, their breathing low and coarse, almost lost in the rustling breath of the wind. The day's heat lingered in their bones, yet the desert's chill had begun to creep inward, slithering over them like a pale serpent seeking warmth.

  Edelgard sat watchful and silent, eyes flitting across the still camp. She never slept soundly, but tonight her vigilance had purpose. Dorothea, the woman she'd arrived with, lay close beside Glanton, her head resting lightly upon his chest. His arm holding her, his rough hand gentle in sleep, as if cradling something rare, too easily lost. Edelgard watched them closely, a hardness in her jaw. If the man’s gentleness should fail—if his voice turned cruel or his hand struck reckless—then perhaps some night like this, beneath stars indifferent to blood, her axe might find his throat. It would not be the first time her hands had grown red beneath pale moonlight.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  Across from the fire, at the edge of the waning light, sat Bernadetta.

  She was locked in a prison of her world’s making. Her knees were drawn close to her chest, arms wrapped about herself like someone who had never known warmth, whose sole defense against the world was to shrink from its gaze. Her eyes shone faintly, wide and wary, reflecting the dying fire like pools of standing water left by vanished rains.

  Edelgard rose slowly, silently, and crossed to her. She moved like smoke in the wind, settling softly beside Bernadetta, closer than was comfortable for strangers. Bernadetta stiffened as though by pure instinct, breath hitching slightly, a familiar sound to Edelgard—like an animal wounded too often to trust even the softest hand. So she took her time, waiting as, slowly, Bernadetta raised her head, eyes catching the scant remaining firelight, wary but intrigued to know of her intentions.

  “You’re not alone,” Edelgard murmured, voice low, firm, carrying gently beneath the wind’s faint moan.

  Bernadetta said nothing, but her posture subtly softened. Like earth yielding to water.

  Edelgard continued, quieter still, her words weighted with something unspoken, something understood only by those who had known the cruelty of power. “I know how it feels to be small. To live beneath a shadow so great you believe you'll never escape it.” Her voice grew sharper, edged by a fierce conviction. “But shadows fade. You can be more than what they've made of you.”

  Bernadetta’s gaze shifted, softening slightly, as if the words found some hidden mark deep within. Her silence lingered, thoughtful, accepting.

  Edelgard watched her a moment, then leaned back a little, folding her arms in a casual pose that belied the intensity in her eyes. “I remember you were there watching that spectacle in the street earlier. When I had to deal with that Mormon lout. And I’ll have you know, I made up most of what I said,” she confessed quietly, voice relaxed now, intimate.

  Bernadetta’s eyes widened, her surprise slipping into a faint, cautious smile. The first Edelgard had seen from her, shy as the desert flower that blooms in secret at night.

  “Which parts?” Bernadetta asked, voice barely above a whisper, tinged with amusement.

  “Well…” Edelgard allowed herself a faint chuckle, more felt than heard. A quiet, human sound rarely permitted to escape her carefully kept facade.

  She shrugged with practiced nonchalance.

  “Only all of it.”

  Bernadetta’s smile deepened, tentative but genuine, a slender beam of moonlight cutting through a wall of darkness. Edelgard only smiled faintly, but enough to allow a small warmth passing silently between them.

  They sat for a while after, the ensuing quiet more comfortable than is typically known between mere strangers. The wind whispered through the dust and scrub like a voice from some distant, forgotten world. Gradually, it was Bernadetta’s breathing that first slowed into the rhythm of sleep, her head gently sinking onto her knees. And before Edelgard followed beside her, she spoke once more, softly enough for only Bernadetta and the desert to hear.

  “Remember this: you need not remain what they have made you. You can become more.”

  Bernadetta fell into a dream of beasts.

  Shapes were shifting in the dark, something great and heaving in the bloodied dust.

  It was well after midnight when Bernadetta woke, some rustle in the sagebrush having turned her nerves to tinder, the wind cutting low over the stones.

  The fire had dwindled to embers.

  Shapes were hunched at a distance in sleep, except for Edelgard beside her.

  But further off she saw him.

  The Judge.

  Squatting naked by a smoldering juniper root, skin like bone-pale leather and eyes that glittered with animal clarity.

  He was speaking low to someone—or maybe not to anyone at all.

  Bernadetta crept closer, curiosity souring with every step.

  “…Queen of brothels,” he murmured. “With her papers sealed in beeswax and blood. Writ in an alphabet older than any found this side of Christ. They say it grants dominion from Sierra to sea.” She saw him smirk. The way his gaze flicked upward like he’d caught her watching, though she hadn’t made a sound. “But what is a crown to a body that rots from within?” he asked the night. “What use is a land of ghosts to the dying?”

  Bernadetta froze. The Judge turned the charred log in the firepit with his hand and licked his fingers clean. His voice was barely more than breath.

  “Death is the only sovereign here. All others are impostors.”

  She retreated.

  She laid down again and turned her head to the side, but didn’t sleep again that night.

  But at some point she blinked, maybe lulled briefly. That was all it took.

  She looked straight again and the Judge was gone.

  Wide-eyed, she waited until dawn came, pale and bloodless.

  They rode at dawn. The sky bruised at the edges of the world, the land still and waiting. The horses moved slow through the canyon wash, hooves drumming a steady rhythm upon the caliche, raising thin veils of dust that hung in the morning light like screens of fog. Beyond that the land sprawled flat and unyielding again, burned pale by the sun, and the wind moved across it with a sound like dry paper twisting in a fire.

  Bernadetta rode behind her. The white-haired woman. Silent. Straight-backed in the saddle, her posture unbending, regal in the way of statues or saints. There was a calmness in her bearing, and it unsettled Bernadetta more than any show of violence might have. A strength that did not declare itself, but loomed, like a bloodied blade half-buried in the sand. They had not spoken since the warmth of the fire was spread between them. Not a word exchanged since Edelgard had leaned close and told her in a voice no louder than breath that she could be more than what the world had made her. Words which clung to a lonely soul like a fever. They moved in her blood now. They itched in her skin. She had not known what to say, then or now. She only stared, her gaze clinging to the folds of that coat, the pale braid knotted at Edelgard’s nape.

  At this woman from another world. A queen in exile.

  Or, a liar in velvet.

  Doubt gnawed at her. What if it had all been her game? A kindness wielded like bait, the same way a trap’s jaws smile before they close.

  What if Edelgard only saw her as something to shape and discard? Another thing to rule over.

  Another piece to be moved.

  Bernadetta’s hands gripped the reins tighter. Her eyes darted.

  The others rode ahead and behind and to the sides, oblivious to her inner turmoil.

  Then came the scream.

  She jolted in her saddle, hand halfway to the pistol at her belt before she caught sight of them. Dorothea and Glanton, riding close. Too close. The girl’s laughter cut sharp in the stillness as she slapped him across the shoulder, his grin wolfish, pleased.

  Bernadetta’s stomach turned. Not with jealousy, nor even fear. But with recognition.

  Something was wrong.

  She looked about. No sign of the Judge.

  The sun sat high and cruel and without warmth. The horizon shimmered. And something in the air had changed.

  No cry announced it. No trumpet of judgment. But she could feel it just the same.

  A turning.

  Whatever force had once held the gang in orbit, it had shifted. Glanton still rode at the center, but the pull of him was weaker now, like a star losing its heat. The Judge—wherever he was, those fitful mumblings from the night before—had receded too, vanished like breath on a mirror. Their gravity had waned. And in its place, something else had formed.

  Not spoken of. Not voted on. Never declared.

  And that new sun was Edelgard.

  Bernadetta stared at her back again, at the calm rise and fall of her shoulders, the steady grip on the reins. The wind tugged at the hem of her coat.

  She did not speak. She did not command.

  But somehow, it was around her that the gang now moved.

  Not by fear. Not yet.

  By weight.

  Bernadetta felt a shiver run down her arms, dry and thin like the wind that carried it.

  She wanted to speak. But her tongue lay heavy in her mouth, and the sun had dried her voice into silence.

  The road ahead stretched on, unbroken. And she wondered, not for the first time, what it might be like to ride not behind—but beside. To carry such weight and not be crushed by it.

  And she wondered, too, if such gravitas was of unequal parts blessing and curse.

  The riders fanned out as they reached the valley floor. The air was dead, heavy. And then they found the thing in the sand. A horse’s belly which lay split, its entrails gone to the dust. But what lay inside it was worse. A man, peeled to the muscle, his arms pinned in the wet cavity like some grotesque parody of birth. His eyes were open. The heat had already dried them to glass.

  And the Judge was there also, stood beside his horse. None questioned it. As though he were an expected fixture of the land.

  Glanton dismounted, stepping through the dirt.

  He crouched beside the corpse, tilting his head like a man pondering a riddle.

  He reached out, his fingers running over the flayed hide.

  "Ain’t Apache work," Toadvine said.

  The Judge knelt beside the grotesquery. "No. Not Apache." He ran a great hand along the carcass, a lover’s touch. "A work of care. A work of purpose. A man flayed is a man remade. If he should rise, he would rise new.”

  He looked at the men, and they looked away.

  Edelguard had an unreadable expression. Bernadetta grimaced in the heat.

  No one asked what he meant, and they did not stay long.

  They stopped near sundown beneath a bluff of basalt and scrub, the sky overhead stretched taut with dusk’s final fire. The sun was a swollen ember behind the hills, bleeding red across the desert, and the horses steamed where they stood, their ribs slick with sweat. The men moved slow, bone-tired, their faces chalked with trail dust. A silence clung to the party—not the grim silence of dread, but something quieter, contemplative, like the hush before a sermon.

  Bernadetta sat beside her horse, her legs tucked beneath her, watching the horizon fade to ash.

  She was still thinking of the bone-hollow thing they’d found earlier in the carcass of the horse, and the way the Judge had been there, waiting, as though time and death both made house calls for him. She had not worried so much about Edelgard since.

  The others moved about with the methodical ease of men who had ridden together too long. Dorothea, ever radiant in spite of the dust, laughed softly at something Glanton muttered as he passed her a canteen. His hand lingered on her waist. She slanted into him to whisper something. Bernadetta looked away.

  She didn’t see Edelgard approach until the woman’s shadow fell long beside her.

  Bernadetta looked up. Edelgard stood with one hand on her hip, the other resting on the haft of her axe.

  Her pale hair was loose, windswept. The waning sun caught in her eyes like glass holding fire.

  She was holding a pistol.

  “Bernadetta. Have you ever fired a gun before?” she asked.

  The question hung in the air like smoke. Not cruel. Not mocking. Simple. Straightforward.

  Bernadetta blinked. “I—I mean… no. Not really.”

  Edelgard nodded. She glanced toward the others, then back down to her. “Come with me.”

  Bernadetta hesitated. “Why?”

  She turned, walking a few steps into the brush, before turning back again. “Because I haven’t.”

  Bernadetta swallowed, her mouth dry. “Really?”

  “I want you to teach me.”

  Edelgard set the pistol within her palm.

  It was warm from her grip. Bernadetta stared at it in her hands like it was once something living, newly dead.

  Edelgard stood framed against the dying sun, its light split in the strands of her hair, her coat dark and unmoving in the windless hush. The fire was gone from the sky but not from her eyes, and her voice, when she spoke, carried not with command—but invitation.

  “I want you to teach me,” she said again, quieter this time, as though the act of saying it cost her something.

  Bernadetta blinked. “Me?”

  “Yes. You.”

  She looked past Edelgard to the others. None were watching. The Judge was gone again. Glanton was leaned against a rock, Dorothea draped at his side, her laughter drowned beneath the creak of the windless pines. The rest were shadows, made less by distance than by irrelevance.

  Bernadetta’s grip on the pistol tightened. “I’m not… I’m not good at this. I—I’ve never really…”

  Edelgard took a step forward. Not looming. Not close. Just enough.

  The steel of her eyes had softened, but the edge remained.

  “Good,” she said. “That will suffice. I don’t want a soldier. I want you.”

  The wind shifted. A brittle whisper moving across the dry brush like something slithering through thought.

  Bernadetta looked down at the pistol.

  Her fingers flexed around it. The weight had not changed, but it no longer felt like a threat.

  She stood. Slowly.

  “You’re serious about this?”

  Edelgard nodded.

  Bernadetta’s breath caught, then let out in a shaky exhale. “Okay,” she said.

  They walked beyond the scrub together. The land yawned open before them, wide and waiting. And though Bernadetta’s hand trembled, her voice was steadier now. A strange current ran through her, not unlike heat. Or resolve.

  “Alright,” she said, lifting the pistol. “First… don’t point it at anything unless you mean to shoot.”

  Edelgard suppressed a giggle. “I should think not.” But her gaze was fixed on her. Attentive. Patient. That calm gravity she carried with her now handed over like a gift.

  Bernadetta felt her stomach twist. But it was not fear.

  “You learnin’ or teachin’?” Edelgard asked, her voice laced with a dry humor, the imitated accent, quiet and clean as smoke from a snuffed lamp.

  Bernadetta’s lips quirked at the corners. She looked up, met her gaze full.

  “Both,” she said.

  The last light was leaving the sky, pale and reluctant, slipping westward across the dirt.

  Wind passed low between them, and the silence that followed was not empty, but full—of things unspoken, of things beginning.

  Somewhere behind them, the camp breathed on, unaware. The fire crackled low. The horses shifted. And the stars began to come out, one by one, as if summoned.

  Neither girl moved to break the moment.

  The pistol remained in her hand.

  And the world kept turning.