The roan's tracks went on up the narrowing trail ahead of them, hoof by hoof into the rocks, toward the screen of juniper — toward the one place in all Cedar Valley that Etta Marlowe had never told a living soul about, not in eight years of exile, not even in her sleep.
Chapter 19 — The Box Canyon
The mouth of the canyon was not a gate. It was a refusal — a slot between two leaning walls of rock, choked across with piled deadfall and old cut brush, and it took Etta a long minute, standing in the slot with her hands flat on the stone the way she'd done at twelve years old, to believe what her hands told her.
The deadfall had been tended.
Cut brush does not stay woven eight years. Some of these limbs were gray and dry as bone — and some, threaded in among them, were green-cut within the season, supple still, laid in with knowledge. Somebody kept this door. Somebody came and went, and kept the mouth of the Marlowe strong room shut against the valley like a cupboard in a house nobody admitted to living in.
"Stay here," she said to Dan, low. "Hold both horses. If I'm not back by the time the shadow moves off that point, ride for Mrs. Fenn — not the town, Fenn — and tell her the day book's wanted early."
She went through the slot sideways, leading nothing, moving the way she had learned to move in other people's horse country a long way from home, and the canyon opened around her the way a hand uncloses.
It was smaller than her memory and larger than her hope. A quarter mile of grass gone gold in the fall of the year, thick on the ground because nothing had grazed it down to dirt; a seep spring at the far wall with its pool dark and still; red rock rising on every side so high and sheer that the sky was a ribbon. And horses.
Horses everywhere, in the still morning, heads up at her arrival and then — because she made no threat in her body and horses read bodies the way men read print — settling again. She counted the way her father had taught her, by bands and not by heads, and then by heads anyway, standing with her back against the canyon wall because her knees asked her to.
Forty, give or take the foals. Mares with this year's foals at foot and last year's yearlings leggy beside them. A handful of geldings gone fat and lazy. Two old stallions keeping a dignified distance from each other across the water. The Association's secret estray herd, the books had called it, in the records she'd paid to read in the capital — estrays, unbranded, gathered for the common good.
Every horse she walked among carried the Flying S on its left hip.
And every horse she came close enough to touch — and they let her touch them, these horses that had been handled once by Marlowe hands and remembered the grammar of it — carried the Flying S worked over something older, the hair grown in white along old scar lines beneath the new burn, so that if you clipped the hip or waited for the summer coat you could read the truth under the lie like print under a thumbprint. Rocking M. Rocking M. Rocking M again, on a gray mare who turned her head and blew softly into Etta's hand, and whose name came back out of eight years like a stone out of a river.
"Clover," Etta said, out loud, in the middle of the hidden herd, with tears standing in her eyes that she did not wipe because there was no one there she had to be strong for. "Clover, you old thief. You were old when I left."
The mare was her father's gray, twenty if she was a day, sway-backed and sound. She had been the first horse Etta ever gentled, at nine, under her father's eye. She was supposed to have been sold to a rendering man in seventy-seven, according to the records. According to the records, everything here was gone.
At the far side of the canyon, where the grass was shortest and the seep ran out in a bright thread, a bay mare stood over her sleeping foal with one ear on Etta — a mare Etta did not know, young, canyon-born probably, some daughter of the stolen string. But the foal at her feet she knew the moment he lifted his head at her coming, blinking the sleep off, all legs and curiosity.
Up his left hind leg, bright as spilled milk on a red-brown ground, ran the splash.
He was roan-red like his grandmother — like Petra, who must have been his dam's full sister — and he wore the Marlowe mark where God had put it, where no iron could work it over and no clerk could write it out of a book. The line throwing true, in the dark, in secret, eight years after the night men had burned a house to make the whole valley forget the name of Marlowe.
Etta went down on her knees in the grass, careful and slow, and the yearling — for he was a yearling and not a baby anymore, whatever her heart said — came two steps toward her on his own, the way Marlowe horses came to a Marlowe hand, and put his nose down to her open palm and breathed her in.
"There you are," she said to him, and to all of them, and to the walls. "There you all are."
When she walked back through the slot at last, Dan took one look at her face and did not ask a foolish question.