They left the valley an hour after full dark, by the water gate, where the spring run passed through a cleft too narrow for a wagon. No one saw them go; Jonas checked the fact twice, from high ground, before he believed it.
Willa rode ahead, veiled, on a dark mare sure in the rocks as a goat. Jonas followed on Preacher, his bay gelding, who disapproved of night work in silence. The lockets rode at their chests, the slip behind Clara's face.
"Two hours to the river road," Willa said, barely above her breath. "Then we follow the water. A man watching a road watches the road. The river has too many edges for watching."
"Your father teach you that?"
"My grandmother. Saba says a road is a promise men make to other men, and promises are where ambushes live." She checked her mare and listened, the veil a black shape in the black night. "Ride as I ride. When I stop, stop."
They came down to the Rio Sombra, running shallow over pale gravel, loud enough to cover hoofbeats and cold enough to make Preacher shake his head. The moon was late, still below the ridges, and Jonas counted crossings in the dark.
At the third crossing, where the river bent against a bluff and the road climbed away from the water, Preacher found the first sign: his head came up, his left ear fixed on the bluff. Jonas touched Willa's sleeve, and they halted in the water, in the bank's shadow.
Nothing moved. Nothing sounded. Then a small round stone came off the bluff face and ticked down to the road β and a stone does not dislodge itself at midnight without a reason that has weight.
"One," Willa breathed. "Perhaps two. Above the road, not the river. They expected us on the road."
"They expected someone," Jonas said. "Let's not flatter ourselves into a grave."
"At midnight, in Harrow's country, with their horses held out of earshot? They came for a report, Jonas. Somebody's bought voice earned its silver tonight. Word went out that we would ride, though the hour was told to no one."
"Then they know the road, but not the hour, and not the river." He considered the black water sliding past their stirrups. "We stay in the river. It is shallow for the next mile. A man on a bluff cannot follow what he cannot hear, and he cannot hear us over his own river."
"And if they come down to the bank?"
"Then they will be between us and the bluff when they find their footing, and I would rather owe you an apology than flowers."
She made a sound that might have been a laugh. They moved into the current, walking the horses stone by stone, cold coming up through Jonas's boots. The bluff receded. Twice he stopped and listened, and heard only water, and once a heron's affronted cry.
They had been in the river perhaps forty minutes when the shot came.
It came from behind and above: a rifle's flat crack rolling off the bluff and back off the water. The bullet struck ten feet ahead of Willa's mare, throwing up white spray in the new moonlight. The mare stood trembling, gathered like a cat. Willa sat turned in the saddle, rifle half raised, not firing β there was nothing to fire at but an echo.
"Downstream," Jonas said. "Now. Deep water at the bend. Go."
They went at a jolting, splashing trot. A second shot came rounding the bend, wider, fired at a sound. Then the river widened, and Willa reined the mare onto wet sand, galloped its length, and re-entered where a rock shelf broke the surface β so any man reading sign by daylight would find a trail that vanished a hundred yards from where it had truly gone.
In the deep pool below the bend they stopped, belly-deep, and let the horses blow. The moon had come up while they ran, laying a road of light on the water.
"He fired early," Willa said, her veil wet to the hem. "A paid man, told to frighten, or to mark which way we ran. If he had been told to kill, he would have taken the first shot at twenty yards on the road, not the river at two hundred."
"Or he is a poor shot with a rich employer," Jonas said. "Either way he is behind us, and he must report a failure before he can become a pursuit. That buys us the rest of the night, if we spend it right."
"Dos Rios by dawn," Willa said. "We come in with the freight wagons, in the dust, like anyone. Marisol Vega keeps the way station, and she keeps her eyes open and her mouth shut, in that order, which is rarer."
They rode out of the pool and took the river road at last, openly, in the moonlight. If any watcher remained on the bluff, he watched an empty river shining, and a road that told him nothing.
Chapter 14
: The Empty Saddle