Chapter 1
Max Wyse stepped out from the trees and into the light of a cold dawn.
He stood at the brow of a hill and surveyed the fields spread out below, now brown and fallow, and an old trail descending the hillside, disappearing into early morning mists that gathered in the distance. Patches of gray coated the earth, frost gray as the mists, gray as the old farmhouse and barn that stood below him on the hillside. But in the growing light, between gray patches, hovered a hint of green to come.
The earth was still but for a crow gliding silently from treetop to treetop, and a thin line of smoke that rose up from the farmhouse chimney, up from crumbling brick and rotting shingles, and cut across the pink horizon.
Outside the barn, a horse stopped grazing and lifted its head, and the earth seemed to pause, holding its breath in the moment before sunrise.
The young man hunched his shoulders, bare hands shoved in his pockets, and watched the sky brighten. He was on duty, on patrol, the kind he did every day, but he had stopped this morning on the hillside, thinking back to the day he was first sent out on his own, the day he was finally trusted, as though able to see the world for himself for the first time. As though the world were now his.
It had been ten years since that day. Ten years of putting out fires, of quelling fights, of borrowing a horse to ride out with the gang to capture and hang a bandit. Ten years of keeping the peace. But there were times, like now, when he wished he had something better to do. Something more important. He didn’t know what, exactly, and maybe ‘important’ wasn’t the right word.
A screen door slammed, the sound drifting up the hillside, and a distant figure walked to the barn.
He watched, feeling a pang of envy.
Because he doesn’t work for anyone. Because he has something of his own.
But Max Wyse had no interest in farming.
He shrugged. Life was easy. As long as he stayed in line, he had nothing to worry about. And that was something.
So he continued on his way, down the hillside, but still trying to see the world as he had seen it on that first day.
Behind him, orange rays of sunlight struck the trees, and the crows set up a racket as the day began.
