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

Swinney stepped forward. He cleared his throat.

"We left her," he said. "She ain't none of your concern."

"Says who?"

"Says the Colonel."

The boy looked to where the Colonel's fire flickered a good ways off. He knew he should lower his voice but didn't.

"What does he care?"

Swinney let his hands fall open, silent.

The boy looked at him, his eyes slowly widening.

"The Colonel is married," he said.

The men shifted on their blankets and stumps. The boy looked at them a long moment. His voice was low. "He's had his way, then."

It wasn't a question.

The men said nothing. Their assent.

Then he whispered it, the question that remained: "Against her will?"

None of the men looked at him. They looked at the fire or their hands or their boots but not at him. The boy swallowed thickly and thumbed the bandage on his head.

"So be it," he said. He sat back on the stump and stared into the fire.

Sometime later he discovered a giant pocket sewn into the inner flap of the coat, on the left-hand side, as if made for something specific.

"Say," he said, "I get something out of all this?"

Swinney stood and pulled an object from beneath his bedroll. The men handed it one to the next, circling the firelight until a woolen sock, heavy as a giant's foot, arrived in the boy's hand. He slipped off the sock, and the Walker Colt sat in his lap. It was a giant of a pistol, twice the weight of a newer Colt, built to kill not just men but the horses they rode, this one outfitted with trick grips that glowed like a moon in his hand. It looked made for a man twice his size, a frontier treasure for which men would surely kill. For which they had.

"You earned it," said Swinney.

"Yeah, you did," said somebody else.

The boy pointed the pistol into the dark of the man's voice.

"Five shots left," he said. "One through my head."

Nobody spoke, and he knew they wondered what spirits might have snuck through that wound of his. Into his head. What meanness. He did not feel like a boy anymore. He felt old as any of them. Older even.

He rode for three days among them, quiet. Alien.

Waiting.

One night, Swinney pulled him aside.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" he asked.

"Tell me how to get back."

"You got to be shitting me."

"Tell me," said the boy.

The third night, he lay down to rest early. The cold was coming down out of the north and the ground could keep a man from sleeping if he didn't get to sleep early enough, with some sunlight still left in the dirt, the rock. He pulled the bandage from his head and felt the scabby place where the ball had passed along his skull, an inch from ending him.

After a time he rose from his pallet of old sacks amid the snoring of his compatriots and moved toward the far-off embers of the Colonel's fire, silent as a wraith, one hand on the grip of his pistol to mask its glow. When he passed Swinney, he saw two white orbs look at him. Just as quickly they disappeared, closed, and whatever they saw prompted no movement.

The boy kept on picking his way among the stones, the heads, making no shadow, no sound. The coals of the Colonel's fire glowed red, the flames low. His black thoroughbred stood seventeen hands tall, thick-muscled, big haunches twitching in its sleep. A stallion. The boy did not see the saddle sitting in the shadows, but he saw the Colonel's slouch hat lying there beside him, the twin tassels still gold even for all they'd ridden above.

The boy pulled back the sleeve of his new coat and crouched, slow to lessen the crackling of his boots, and took the hat by the hand indentions over the crown. It would cover the scar. As he turned to the horse, the shadow of the round brim crossed the Colonel's face. The boy saw him shift, his hand groping for the butt of the pistol under his bedroll. By the time the Colonel sat upright, he must have found himself all alone, his gun pointed toward empty space. Leaves, fire-spangled, quivering where the horse had been, hoofprints welled with firelight.

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.