Eli got to her at a run. The cut ran across the point of her shoulder, six inches long, shallow β a knife's work, deliberate and controlled, deep enough to spill and scar, nowhere near deep enough to kill or even lame her past a fortnight. It had been done in the night, to a horse in her own corral, by someone who knew horses well enough to wound one precisely and someone who knew him well enough to know it would be found at dawn like a letter left on a pillow.
He did not shout for Sela. She was already there β she came around the stable corner with her rifle in her hand and her hair loose and her eyes doing the work of a whole garrison, reading the yard, the gate, the sky, in one sweep.
"How bad," she said.
"Then let me work before it closes dirty." She handed him the rifle β handed him the rifle, hers, into his hands, and went to her knees in the frozen muck without a thought for her skirt or the cold, and he stood over her with the gun and understood she had just told him, in the clearest language she owned, exactly who each of them was in an emergency. "Hot water. The gray-green leaf from the jar, and the white root powder, and my sewing kit β the fine needle. Go."
He went. When he came back with the kettle she had already cleaned the cut's edges with her knife and her fingers, and she washed it out and packed it and stitched it with six small stitches as neat as her saddle work, the mare standing for it all with her head down and her ears swiveling at Sela's voice, which never stopped, low Apache, the whole time. It was her mother's tongue and her mother's gift both, and Eli held the mare's halter and said nothing and was, for once, not even tempted to arrange the world into nobody needing anybody.
"The fence," Sela said, when the mare was blanketed and eating. It was not a question.
"The fence," he agreed. "I saw it from the yard. East line. Didn't go look yet. Wanted the horse seen to first."
They walked it together. The wire was cut in three places along the creek stretch β clean cuts, nippers' work β and the strands had been laid back so neatly that from fifty paces the fence still looked whole. It was the nearness of the fifth post that stopped his breath: the cuts were all within a stone's throw of it, like a signature written around a name. In the frozen mud below the wire there were boot prints, two sets, and horse sign on the far bank where riders had waited in the willows, in no hurry at all.
"They watched the house," Sela said. "They cut your fence and cut your mare and then they sat in my willowsβ" she caught herself, and corrected, precisely, "βin the willows, and watched, to see the lights and to learn the hours. This is not anger, Eli. Anger is sloppy. This is a man composing."
"Calloway."
"Calloway has learned the law won't carry his letter fast enough, so he writes his own." She crouched and touched the cut wire with one finger, the way her mother, he imagined, must have touched a wound to read it. "My people say: when a man wounds your horse and not you, he is telling you the price of the next thing. He wants you to do the arithmetic in the night and be afraid by morning in the correct amounts."
"And if the arithmetic doesn't scare us?"
"Then he has spent a horse's blood to learn that, which is useful to us and expensive for him." She stood up and looked at the willows across the creek, and at the fifth post, and at him, and her face was calm in a way that had cost her something he respected too much to comment on. "But understand. They will not write letters forever. A man like that β when the letters stop working, he comes in person to deliver the last one."
He mended the wire that day, all three cuts, with Sela handing him tools and the rifle never more than an arm's length from one of them, and he did not straighten the stretch by the fifth post any better than the rest of it, and at dusk he stood a while with his hand flat on the cedar post that had held her, feeling the cold come up through the wood into his palm like a pulse from underground.
"When this is over," he said, not knowing he was going to say it, "that post comes out of the ground."
"When this is over," Sela agreed behind him, "we will decide together what it becomes. A post is not guilty, Eli. But it is finished being a post."
Chapter 15