Excerpt from Fallen Land by Taylor Brown, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The Colonel rode out into the light and struck his saber heavenward, no gleam upon the corroded blade. The band spurred their horses' bellies at the slashed order of charge, dropping down into the valley upon a thunder of hooves. The cavalcade fanned out as they descended, tearing divots from the soft turf. The boy, so scant of weight, pulled ahead of many in the onrush. He was not first to the house but first onto the porch, his horse needing no dally to stay her. The porch planks gave beneath his boots, sodden or thin-cut or both. The door was standing wide and he ducked into the sudden dark. Pistol first, knife second. The ceilings were low, the furniture neat. No roaches scattered before him. No people. Other men clamored through the door behind him. Outside, war whoops and the squeal of the slaughtered pig.

No one in the front rooms, the rear, the kitchen. He found the stairs and shot upward into the blue dark of the second floor, the balls of his feet hardly touching the steps, the point of his blade plumbing the gloom like a blind man's stick. The curtains were all drawn, the floor dark. He stepped from one room into another. Quilted beds neatly made, wardrobe of cheap wood. Then he crossed the threshold into still another room, this the darkest.

He swung the pistol toward her white back, the dark hair all upon its contours like a black eddy of stream water. She had not heard him, was watching the other door. Her thin shift was open at the back, skin and cloth pale as bone. He swallowed, suddenly nervous, and realized how hungry he was, his stomach drawn up empty inside him. Heart, heart, heart again. It sounded in the cavity of his chest. The pistol began to quiver like a pistol should, whelmed with power.

His voice a whisper: "Ma'am?"

She spun on bare feet, kitchen knife clutched to chest, face silly-hard with courage, fear.

"Which side?" she asked him.

"It don't matter which."

She was not looking at him, not listening, either, staring instead into the black tunnel of the barrel like she might jam the pike by willpower alone.

He looked at her and then at the gun, kinking his wrist to better see the thing. An object foreign to him. He lowered it to his side and sheathed the knife as well, and the two of them stood staring at each other, unspeaking.

"What's your name?" he asked finally, dry-mouthed, his words hardly crossing the six feet of space that separated them.

She pointed the kitchen knife at him.

"Ava. Any closer and I kill you."

The floorboards jolted, steps upon the stairs. He shot across to her, past the blade.

"You got to hide."

"Nowhere to," she said. "I'll take my chances."

"They ain't good."

A bearded sharecropper with tobacco-juiced lips, black-gritted, clopped into the room. The boy knew him but not his name, not at this moment. A Walker Colt hung loosely in the man's hand. He saw the girl and smiled.

"Christmas come early," he said.

The boy stood beside the girl, his mouth agape. She spoke to him without looking.

"You a man, or I got to protect my own self?"

His mouth closed. Slowly he raised the dueling pistol, ornate and empty, at the older man's heart.

"I don't reckon it's Christmas yet," he said.

The man spat a black knot on the floor and leveled his pistol at the boy, casual-like.

"Now Mr. Colt here, he beg to differ."

The boy went to thumb back the hammer of his weapon, but back it was.

"Where them pistol tricks, boy?"

"Don't reckon I need them."

Black caulking divided the man's teeth.

"You killed yet?"

"Plenty."

"No. I knowed you was a virgin the day we took you on. I knowed by plain sight and I know it still. You want to be a man? Tell you what, I'll let you watch."

The fingers of his free hand began to unbutton his britches as he walked slowly across the room, legs straddled.

Excerpted from Fallen Land by Taylor Brown. Copyright © 2016 by Taylor Brown. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Griffin. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.