It was Sela who said the dangerous thing, in the middle of January, while they were forking hay down from the lean-to loft in the blue cold of the early morning, with Duchess below them stamping and blowing like an impatient supervisor.
She said it without looking at him, up into the loft shadows, in the tone she used for weather reports and other facts too large to carry carefully:
"I was not lost, when I came to your fence. I want that understood before anything else grows on top of it. I was not wandering. I was looking."
Eli stopped with his fork mid-lift. "Looking for what?"
"For a place." She threw down a forkful and the hay-dust hung golden in the shaft of light from the loft door. "After the band broke, I went north first, to the remnant β my uncle's people, what's left. They are good. They would have taken me in and married me to a good man and I would have spent my life being grateful at the correct volume. I stayed one winter." She came down the ladder with the ease of long practice and faced him in the stable gloom. "Everywhere I have been since my mother died, Eli, I was a problem being solved. At the agency I was a ration. To the soldiers I was a movement to be reported. To the traders I was a β negotiation. Even to my uncle's people, who love me, I was a mouth and a marriage and an old story to be settled decently. I was never once just a person in a place, the way you are a person in this place. You are not solving yourself out here. You are just β here. It is the rarest thing I have ever seen and I rode four hundred miles in my life without finding it."
"You left your people to look for that."
"I left to look for a place where I could be all of what I am at the same time β my father's daughter and my mother's daughter and my own self, not whichever piece the day required. Where I would not have to be small to be safe." She looked around the stable β at the mended tack, the sorted tools, Duchess tearing hay β with an expression he had never seen on her, undefended and almost shy. "I may have found it. I am not saying I have. The mare is round as a barrel and spring is a long way off and there is a rich man counting my scars like debts. But I may have found it, Eli Crowe. Here. I wanted you to know that the looking has β paused."
The loft. The dust. The mare. His heart going like a hammer on hot iron, badly, in a rhythm he could not use.
What Eli said was: "The mare's feed wants cutting back a touch. She's carrying rich on that leg's rest."
Sela looked at him for a long moment. Then, with enormous gentleness and absolutely no mercy, she said, "Yes. The mare is fat. We were speaking of the mare." She picked up the fork. "I will cut her feed, Eli. You cut yours when you are ready."
She went up the ladder for the next forkful and he stood below catching himself β catching the hay, catching his breath, catching the full size of his own cowardice and examining it like a cracked casting. For it was not indifference and it was not confusion. It was fear, six years practiced: the knowledge that everything he had ever let himself need had been used as the handle to move him. The farm in Virginia. The squad. The wife he had almost had, in the life before the war β no. He would not line them up like bottles. One war was enough for one morning.
He was still standing there when she came down again, empty-handed this time, and stopped on the last rung so that her face was level with his, which put them closer than they had ever been except the night of the four wrists.
"I am not asking you for anything," she said quietly. "Understand that. I learned at your fence what it costs when a person's words get taken for a price tag. I am telling you where I am standing, the way you'd tell me where a fence is down. So you don't walk into it in the dark."
"Selaβ"
"Feed's cut," she said, and stepped down past him, and put her hand β briefly, deliberately, the way you test ice you fully intend to cross β flat against his chest as she passed, over the hammering, and went out into the morning to her work.
He stood in the stable a long time after, with his hand over the place hers had been, like a man holding a wound closed, or a door.
Chapter 14
He found it at first light, on the coldest morning of the year, because Juniper was standing wrong in the corral β the bay mare held herself like a table with one short leg, and there was blood on her shoulder gone black in the frost.