He was dressed and at the stable door with the Springfield when Sela came out of the cabin β dressed too, booted, her hair braided back, the carbine in her hand and her mother's band bright on her wrist. She had clearly not slept any more than he had. She looked at the horses, then at the north ridge, where the sky was still the color of deep water.
"Before light, then," she said. "He likes the hour. It goes with his story β dangerous woman, desperate man, the fog of it." She checked the carbine's load with the economy of a person who had done it ten thousand times, most of them in her father's company. "Eli. I am going to say the thing once, in the manner of this house."
"Say it."
"If it goes badly β if it goes the way he is paying for it to go β you are not to spend yourself being a wall in front of me. I am not a thing that is kept, even by dying. I have my rifle and my arithmetic and I have beaten worse weather than Ward Calloway." Her voice stayed level, but her hand, resting on the stall door, had gone white at the knuckles, and he loved her for the whiteness more than he would have for any speech. "What I am asking is not small and I know it. Stand beside me. That is the whole of it. It has always been the whole of it. Not in front, where you can be spent. Not behind, where I would be alone. Beside."
He had prepared, over the dark hours, a different speech β the old one, the Virginia one, the one where he sent her south on Duchess's fastest stablemate with the dawn at her back and turned to face the road alone, as was proper, as was the arithmetic of posts. He had it ready, sentence by sentence. He had believed, walking the yard at midnight, that it was even wise.
He looked at her standing in the stable door with the rifle and the white knuckles and the whole unrun, untied, unpriced fact of her, and the prepared speech went out of him the way breath goes out of a man who has been hit fairly.
"The fast horse is saddled in case one of us needs to ride for Tully," he said. "It isn't for sending you. Beside, Sela. I hear you. It took me six years and a war to learn the position, but I hear you."
She crossed the yard and put the kettle on. They ate supper β for that is what it was, though the sun was not yet up: beans, bread, coffee strong enough to testify. They ate it at the table like any other meal in that house, unhurried, while the light went gray in the window and the horses kept their northern vigil, and Sela remarked on the beans, and Eli remarked on the coffee, and neither of them said one word about dying, because the house had never once run on fear and they were not going to feed it at the last breakfast.
After, she cleaned the carbine at the table though it was already clean, and he worked the forge bellows to a small bright fire β not for work. For light, and for the smell of the place being itself. He thought about the widow in Virginia, holding a cup to a tied man's mouth in the dark, the bravest thing he had ever seen β and understood, watching Sela oil a rifle in the lamplight, that he had been wrong for seven years about what the bravest thing was. It wasn't the cup. It was a person deciding, after everything, to go on being a person in full view, and to let another person stand in the light of it β beside, not in front β and take his share of the weather.
"Eli," she said, without looking up from the rifle. "When it starts. Whatever I say out there β it is mine to say. Do not carry it for me."
"I won't," he said. "I'll carry the other rifle."
"That," Sela said, "is the most romantic sentence ever spoken in this territory. I will treasure it when we are old."
The sky over the north ridge went from iron to pearl. Hoofbeats came down from the north β faint, many, unhurried. The hour had arrived, and it found them fed, and armed, and standing.
Chapter 21