The moment he'd seen the amulet hanging around Henreid's neck, Cort had known what would have to be done. It was trig of the cully, trig indeed to so well befriend the island's only gunslingers that they could not see him for who he was - a spy sent by Farson himself. He didn't know what the Good Man wanted with the island, no more than he knew why ( Read more... )

The sky was blue, the afternoon clear, and Cort Andrus was in a mood blacker than most men hoped to see in a lifetime - had woken up in it, as a matter of fact. The night before he'd polished off the last of the Garlan rum, and now not only was he left with only home-distilled swill as hair of the dog, but his head was pounding fit to split. He was ( Read more... )

Training here on the island isn't like training in Gilead; for the first thing, Cort didn't have a yard full of whelps to corral on a daily basis. For now it was just the one student, and that was well enough, being as it was a new kind of training for him, too. For the first time, he didn't train towards a test; he taught no creed, he did not call ( Read more... )

There was a reason that Cort had never lived in the Castle, in Gilead; quarters had been offered to him many a time, and there'd been those who'd called him crazy not to take them, especially once Aileen had come to stay. The castle was the right and proper place for a girl, they'd said, and his own convenience would have been greatly abetted. ( Read more... )

A week had passed, and on each morning Cort had opened his eyes, expecting this strange fever dream to have passed in the night, leaving him sweaty, ill, but home on his pallet in Gilead. Unfortunately, he had continued day after day to wake healthy, whole, and stranded in some bizarre world that existed, as far as he could tell, on no sane level ( Read more... )

Cort Andrus stalked through the marketplace, packages swinging from a net bag looped around one massive shoulder, as he turned towards home. What had been murmurs the week before were now unhushed conversations, delivered in many voices and in many words but all to the same point, as they reached his ears. Gilead's last great hope, dead on the ( Read more... )