Chapter 3
It took an hour to go a quarter of a mile.
The mare could bear the leg for six or eight steps and then had to stand, and the woman could walk perhaps twice that before the blood and the hours caught up with her and she had to stop and lean on the fence wire or on nothing, standing bent with her hands on her knees, breathing the way she had breathed at the post. Eli did not offer an arm. He had understood at the post, with the certainty of a man recognizing his own weather, that an offered arm from a stranger in the dark might read no different to her than the hands that had put the bruises on hers.
So he walked ahead with the mare, and stopped when she stopped, and did not turn around, and let the stops be hers.
At the corral he got the chestnut into a stall with hay deep under her and warm water, and poulticed the fetlock with the clay-and-herb mash he used on his own stock, working by lantern while the mare stood trembling and then, gradually, did not tremble. The woman watched from the stall door, and she watched his hands the way she had watched the knife.
"You know horses," she said.
"Some," he said. "Enough to know that leg wants rest and warm, not rest and cold. She'll mend if she didn't tear something deep. A week will tell it."
He brought water for the woman then, in the tin cup from the cabin, and he gave it to her the way you give water to anything that has gone long without: a little, and wait, and a little more. She held the cup in both hands because neither hand alone could be trusted yet. The cup shook. She drank, and stopped, and drank again, and when she lowered it there was a care in her face, a listening inward, that he remembered from men after battles who could not yet believe their bodies intended to go on living in them.
He led her β no, he walked first and she followed, which was becoming the grammar of them β into the cabin. One room: a stove, a table he had built, two chairs, shelves, the bed against the wall under the window with the quilt his mother had made in a life so far away it belonged to a different man with the same name. He lit the lamp, set out beans and bread and salt, put the second chair on the far side of the table from his own, and then, while she stood in the doorway deciding, he did a thing he had decided on the walk up from the fence.
He took his blankets from the bed and his coat from its peg.
"The bed's yours," he said. "I'll be at the forge. There's a bar for the door" β he showed her the stout oak bar and its brackets β "and it bars from inside. Nothing comes through that door you don't lift the bar for. Not me. Not anything. You understand me?"
She looked at the bar, and at the blankets in his arms, and something crossed her face that was not gratitude and was not yet trust β it was the expression of a person recalculating a problem whose terms had changed without warning.
"You do not know me," she said.
"No, ma'am."
"I could be anything. A thief. Worse."
"You could be," he agreed. "You don't know me either. That's the whole reason I'm sleeping at the forge." He went to the door and stopped with his hand on the latch, and because it mattered that it be said by him and not assumed by her, he said it plain. "A lock a body can't work from her own side isn't shelter. It's just a better-built cage. The bar's yours. Good night."
He slept in the lean-to by the forge in his blankets with his coat for a pillow, in the smell of coal and iron, and some time deep in the night he woke once and lay listening β not for danger. For the sound of a horse leaving, or a door bar lifting, either of which was hers to make and neither of which came.
In the morning the bar was still down. He knocked, once, softly, and waited until he heard it lift before he so much as touched the latch, and when the door opened she was standing back from it with her hair combed by her fingers and her wrists wrapped in strips torn from her own hem, and she had already been up long enough to have the fire lit and the water on.