She shook the bundle open over the spring shaft.
They came out in a fluttering, rustling cascade — not a will, not a document, but dozens: copy upon copy of the Vega will and the grant papers, each one wrapped in its own oilcloth skin, each one sealed, each one bearing the territorial stamp and the executor's mark. Thomas Callahan had spent twelve years and a surveyor's patience making sure that the truth about the Ash River valley could not be killed by killing one piece of paper. He had made it a school of fish. He had made it weather.
June threw them into the shaft by handfuls, and the spring took them.
The underground stream ran cold and fast beneath the hill, straight as a laid pipe, out to the river below the ford — June had floated bark boats down it as a child, timing them against her father's watch, and knew to the minute how long the river took to deliver what the spring was given. The oilcloth skins were waterproof. The copies were light. They would surface in the pool below the crossing, in full view of the crowd on the bank, like a shoal of strange silver fish rising — truth arriving by water, into the hands of everyone, impossible ever to gather back.
"Stop her!" Brandt shouted, and his men moved — two steps, three — and stopped, the way men stop at the edge of a drop they can suddenly see. Because the crowd on the riverbank had seen the first copies surface. The schoolteacher was already wading in her skirts, hauling them out shining wet. The priest had one open, reading aloud in the dawn, in a voice that carried up the hill like a bell: —being the last will and testament of Aurelia Sandoval de Vega, heir by grant of His Majesty— And a trapper's boy was running down the bank with three more in his arms, and the word heir was traveling through the crowd faster than any horse in the territory could have carried it.
The trapper's boy came scrambling up the hill with an armful of the shining bundles and made straight for June — to give them to the owner, as a child gives found eggs to the house — and June, with a presence of mind that surprised her more than anything she had done that day, turned him gently by the shoulders and pointed him back down toward the crowd. "Not to me, love. To everyone. Read the name out when you hand them over." And the boy went down the hill shouting it, clear as a bell over the water: "Aurelia Sandoval de Vega! Aurelia Sandoval de Vega!" — her mother's name, in a child's voice, in the open air, in the valley that name had bought and hidden and saved.
June turned around. She was empty-handed. Her arms ached. Her throat bled a little, fresh, where the excitement had reopened it, and she did not care, because Dane was standing in the yard with both halves of his life in his two fists — no. One half. Hers still lay in the open chest at Brandt's feet, in the dirt, in the dawn — and Brandt was looking at it, and at the river, and at her, with the expression of a man watching a building he owns burn from a distance too great to matter.
"You cannot unring—" he began.
"I know," June said. "That's rather the point of a bell."
"You've thrown away the evidence," he said, rallying, throwing his voice to the yard, to his riders, building his record even now. "Copies in a river are not an exhibit—"
"The registry in Helena," June said clearly, "has the master copy. My father registered it in '74, Marshal — you said so yourself, in this yard, before these men, not twenty minutes ago. Those—" she nodded toward the river, where the priest's voice went on, steady as a plow, "—are just the announcement. The evidence was never in my hands. It was in yours. You just couldn't read the whole of it in time."
For a moment — one moment — the mask came entirely off, and she saw the man under the administration: old, and tired, and nakedly, ordinarily murderous, a clerk with a pistol. His hand moved.
It was the riders who stopped it. Not Dane — Dane was already moving, too far away, with a shoulder full of someone else's rifle butt from the morning's work. It was the riders: Brandt's own. The nearest, a sergeant with twenty years' service in his face, stepped — quietly, irrevocably — between his marshal and the girl, and two others closed at his elbows, not raising their carbines, simply present in the way of men who have finished a sum and found it wanting.
"Sergeant," Brandt said, in a voice of great and terrible mildness, "stand aside."
Chapter 20
"No, sir," the sergeant said. "I don't believe I will."