They found the end of the barrel rope at first gray light, halfway up the north draw, and Etta got down from her horse and picked it up and held the chewed, unraveled knot in her palm a moment like something she'd been given back.
"Told you," she said.
"You did," Dan said. "I've decided to take your word on horse matters from now on. It'll save time."
Her tracks were plain where the draw gave onto grass: a mare traveling with intent, halter line dragging and sometimes looped up over her neck where she'd tossed it, striking north and a little west at a working trot. Not a panicked horse. A horse with an errand.
"Salazar's men lost her here," Dan said, reading it over her shoulder. "Their sign turns back. Hers doesn't."
"She never liked being led past her own place anyway." Etta swung up. "Come on."
They crossed the creek at the old ford and came up, as the sun cleared the rim, into the country above the homestead — and there they found Petra's trail running straight and unhesitating past the burned place, close enough to brush the charred corral rails, and Etta reined in without meaning to.
The house had been gone eight years and the ground still remembered the shape of it: the stone foundation, black at one corner; the chimney standing with nothing to warm; the door lintel fallen across the threshold, split and silvered by weather, with the words still on it where her mother had watched her father carve them the year Etta turned six. HANDS AND HORSES. The letters were blackened but whole. She had believed until that moment that nothing on this ground was whole.
"Etta," Dan said, gently, from a little way off, the way you speak to someone standing near a grave.
"I know it." She looked once more, and made herself look away. "Eight years I've run this ground in my head every night, and I kept coming out here to find it all ash. The lintel kept." She gathered her reins. "Petra's not stopping to grieve, and neither am I. Her trail's fresh past the spring. She watered and went on."
Half a mile above the spring, where the trail pinched between two boulders, they found the halter.
It hung at head height on a snag of dead juniper, swinging a little in the morning wind, the lead rope chewed through and dangling — and below it, in the dust, the scuffed half-circle of a horse who had stood and worked and rubbed and worried at a problem until the problem surrendered. Etta took the halter down and turned it over in her hands. There was roan hair in the browband. There was juniper bark ground into the rope where she had set it against the snag and sawn with her whole neck.
"She carried that thing four miles," Dan said, "just to have the pleasure of taking it off herself."
"She was four months old the first time she let herself out of a pen," Etta said. "My father stood in the yard with his coffee going cold, watching her work the latch, and he said, 'That one will never stay anywhere she doesn't choose to stay.' He was prouder than if she'd won a race." She coiled the rope and hung the halter on her saddle horn. "Last night she chose. I just wish I knew what she's choosing — home's a strong word for a horse, Dan, but she isn't running wild. Watch her line. She hasn't grazed a step since the spring, and a loose horse with no purpose grazes. She's going somewhere the way a letter goes somewhere."
The trail climbed. Above the homestead the country changed the way it had when she was a girl riding it bareback — the open parks narrowing, the draws deepening into the breaks, the old horse trails her father had cut winding up through rock and juniper where no wagon had ever gone. Twice they lost the sign on stone and twice Etta found it again, once by a tuft of red roan hair on a snag of brush at mare height, once by nothing Dan could see at all.
"How do you know she went up there?" he asked, at a place where the trail appeared to end in a wall of fallen rock.
"Because I know where this trail goes," Etta said. "My father kept the broodmares in a walled pasture past those rocks every summer — grass that never burned off, water that never failed, and one way in. He called it the strong room. When I was ten I thought he'd named it for the horses." She stood in her stirrups and studied the wall — the tumble of rock, the screen of old juniper grown thick across what might, or might not, be a gap. "I know better now. He named it for keeping things safe from men."
Dan was quiet a moment. Below them the valley lay out in the morning, Cedar Bluff small and white at its far end, smoke rising straight from chimneys, all of it looking peaceful as a picture in a book. "Etta," he said at last. "If that mare ran home — really home, to the place she was foaled and pastured — and if what's kept up there is what you've been hunting eight years—"
"Then Salazar didn't steal one horse last night," Etta said. "He kicked the door of the strong room and the bell rang. Come on. Quiet from here, and keep your horse back from the mouth until I see what's kept — and who's been keeping it."