That night the wind dropped. The smoke thinned. And far off to the north, very faint, she heard what might have been riders β or might have been the river, lying to her in her father's voice, telling her to sleep.
She did not sleep. Neither, she was certain, did he.
Chapter 5
In the morning the air had cleared enough to show blue, and Dane asked β asked, properly, at a distance, like a man requesting a sacrament β whether she would show him the river path, since the bay needed walking out and a man should know the water of a place he might have to leave in the dark.
She took the rifle. She also took, after a moment's war with herself, the coffee, in a tin pot, because the river in the morning was the one beautiful thing she owned outright and beauty had been making her generous against her better judgment.
The river path dropped between cottonwoods to the ford where the Ash ran green-gold over gravel. June had crossed there ten thousand times. She watched Dane stop at the bank, look upstream, and say, half to himself, "The deep pool's moved. It used to sit under the leaning snag β trout pool. We'dβ" He cut it off, but the word was out, hung between them in the clean air: we'd.
"You'd what, Mr. Mercer?"
"Nothing. A man I trapped withβ"
"Don't." Her voice came sharper than she intended, and she moderated it with an effort. "You've lied around me for five days, which I allowed, because you never once lied at me. Don't start now. It doesn't suit your face."
He stood with the bay's reins loose in his hand, looking at the river like it owed him money and forgiveness both. "There's a crossing two bends up," he said at last, "where the water braids around a gravel bar β you can get a wagon over in low water, which nobody at Sage Crossing knows because the trail in was grown over even twelve years ago. And a pool under the snag that was full of trout, and a girl who used to throw pebbles at them and miss on purpose because she said scaring them was enough sport."
June's breath left her slowly. She remembered the pebbles. She remembered β or believed she remembered, the way you believe a dream told back to you β a boy's voice saying you're wasting good stones on educated fish.
"You were here," she said. "When I was little. You were here."
"I was here once." He didn't look at her. "One night. I was thirteen. I have no business remembering your pebbles, miss, and less business saying so. It won't happen again."
"Why did my father neverβ" She stopped, because the answer assembled itself out of eleven months of grave-digging silence and twenty-one years of rules. Her father never spoke of anything that could be followed. He had buried the past deeper than he had buried himself, and she had been raised inside the burial like a second, smaller grave. "He never spoke of you. He never spoke of anyone."
"No," Dane said gently. "He wouldn't. That was the arrangement."
They walked the bay along the bank in a silence that was not empty but loaded, like the rifle across her back, and June felt the whole architecture of her life shifting an inch to the north β every rule her father ever gave her suddenly legible as what it was: not temperament. Fortification.
All afternoon she worked beside him and asked nothing more, and the not-asking cost her more than questions would have. He braced the barn's leaning wall with a diagonal beam, working shirt-sleeved in the returning sun, and she held the foot of the ladder and studied the scar that crossed the back of his left hand, an old, white, deliberate-looking scar, and thought: that was not an accident of trapping. A boy did not carry a scar like that out of a house he had merely visited once. Whatever night he had spent under her father's roof, it had marked him going out of it.
That night she woke to the sound of hooves, far off, unhurried, more than one horse, passing on the old north trail that no one used because it went nowhere anyone admitted to going. She came awake all at once, her father's daughter, and slipped to the window. The moon was up, thin and high. Below, at the corner of the barn, Dane Mercer stood in the shadow with his rifle held down along his leg, perfectly still, watching the dark treeline β had plainly been standing there a long while. Not a guest. A sentry.
The hoofbeats faded north. Dane did not move for another full minute. Then he lowered his head, once, like a man setting down a weight he fully expected to pick up again, and June understood β with a clarity that frightened her more than the riders did β that whatever he had ridden out of the smoke to escape, it had not finished following him, and that her valley, her kept and quiet valley, was not the place he had hidden.