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

He called out when someone walked past, his voice strange with disuse. Before long another man stood beside him, unhitching the ropes with thick fingers. He slid to the ground and leaned against the horse. The blood receded from his vision, leaving old Swinney standing there before him, loose loops of rope in his hand. The boy rubbed the chafed skin at his wrists. He touched his head lightly, the bandage, the long crust of blood.

"I a prisoner, Swinney?"

Swinney shook his head.

"No, boy."

"Should I be?"

"Colonel said you done him a favor puncturing that son of a bitch. Said he never did like him."

"So is he…"

Swinney nodded.

"Bled out. Colonel's orders."

"And the girl?"

Swinney turned from him.

"Come with me, boy. You need to eat."

They walked toward the light of the fire. The boy staggered along behind, finding his legs. He was still disoriented, his boots tripping along the ground.

"Where are we?" he asked.

Swinney was to the left of him. He said something, but the boy didn't quite hear him. He stepped closer.

"What?"

Swinney answered again. Again the boy didn't catch his words, not fully. He stopped and clamped his nostrils and blew to clear out his ear canals.

Swinney came around to the front of him.

"Your ear?"

The boy tapped his left one, just underneath the bandage. Swinney came around to that side of him and leaned forward to whisper into the ear. The boy heard only strange mufflings, like the whisper of a foreign language.

"I can't hear," he told Swinney.

The older man came around to his good ear and patted him on the shoulder.

"I said, a few days north of that farmhouse. It's been near a fortnight. Doctor said you was bad concussed. Ear ain't much to lose, considering what you could of."

The boy nodded. "North," he said, mostly to himself.

Swinney looked at him a long moment. His belly shook.

"Lucky dog," he said. He turned.

The boy thought to say something, but nothing came.

He followed the old man the rest of the way to the fire, the men and horses glazed with flame. The boy sat on the white heart of a hickory stump, and the others showed him their smiles, yellow-toothed, dark-gummed. He cocked his good ear toward the fire. They handed him a tin of stewed pork and he slurped down its contents in a single go.

When he handed back the empty tin, he saw the sleeve of his coat.

One of the men leaned into the fire, showing his face.

"She sewn it for you," he said.

"We had to cut away your old," said Swinney. "We was going to give you Oldham's."

"Oldham?" said the boy.

"Man you killed," said somebody. "Probably you ought to know his name."

"You know all their names?" the boy asked him.

A chuckle rose multilunged from men's chests, choral.

"She wasn't wanting you to wear Oldham's," said Swinney. "She sewn you that one out of old what-have-you."

"Rags and quilts and such."

"Bedsheets, too."

"I heard scraps of old Oldham hisself."

"A coat of many colors."

"Yea," said another man. "Like Joseph's of old."

The boy held the sleeves toward the fire's orbit. Ribbons and patches of cloth cross-laced the coat, thick-stitched. He stood among the men and worked his arms inside the coat and found the cut of it closer than any he'd ever worn, his small frame normally swallowed in volumes of wool. This one hugged him like a second skin. He thought of who'd stitched it, of how she must know the contours that shaped him.

"How is she?" he asked them.

They rustled. No one spoke.

"What the hell y'all done to her?"

The boy looked around, his face darkened.

"Should I of stuck every last one of you? That it?"

One man, then another, put a hand to his knife.

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.