They reckoned Harrow's strength the way farmers reckon weather, from every sign at once: word that came in at dusk that Harrow Consolidated was hiring gun hands at double wages in San Tomas and not asking their histories; Renner's cold accounting of the company's payroll, which said forty rifles was what the baron could field without borrowing; Tomaso's last report, which had told the enemy the door but nothing of what stood behind it. Forty rifles coming, then, down the Rio Sombra road within days, perhaps within two days, and the valley set about its preparations with the terrible calm of a household that has rehearsed sorrow before and knows the steps by heart.
The children and the elders went up first, before full dark, by the cliff path that switchbacked above the village to the caves in the Cerro de la Campana, where Willa's grandmother's grandmother had hidden from soldiers in another century. They went in a long, unhurried line, the children carrying what they could, a goat complaining softly among the bundles, Grandmother Saba refusing every offered arm and climbing with her medicine bag on her back and her chin high. Below, the village emptied itself of everything that could not fight and everything that could burn information: the herds were scattered into three side canyons, the houses were left neat and swept and poor-looking, and the riders of the valley, nineteen men and six women who shot as well as any of them, took their places at the slot canyon, where a single file of horsemen must pass within pistol shot of stone walls on both sides.
The evidence was copied through the night by lantern light, in Nahlin's house, in three separate hands. Renner directed the work from his blankets, dictating which pages mattered and in what order they must be read, his precise memory supplying from his head the page numbers of the originals so that any copy could be checked against them. Willa copied the deed and the contract. Jonas copied the letters, his slower script cramping his fingers, and Tomaso, silent, was given the payment ledgers, the wages of his own shame set before him as his penance, and he copied them without error until his eyes were red and the candles drowned. By dawn there were three sets. One stayed buried in a sealed jar beneath the floor of Saba's empty house. One went into the caves with the elders. And the third, the best and clearest, was rolled in oilcloth, sewn into a leather packet, and given at first light to the fastest rider in the valley, a girl of seventeen named Petrona, with orders to take it by the mountain trail to the territorial capital and put it into the hands of Marshal Gideon Park himself, and no other hands.
She went out of the slot canyon at a dead run as the sun struck the rim, and the valley watched her dust thin and vanish, and the hardest part of any war began, which is the waiting. That night Jonas and Willa climbed to the ledge above the village where the signal fire stood laid but unlit, and sat with their backs against the warm stone and the whole dark valley below them, its houses empty, its caves full, its canyon mouth held by friends lying still in the rocks. Neither of them spoke for a while. "When I married you," Willa said at last, "the law of it was marry or die, and I was so angry at the choosing being taken from me that I did not look at what I had been given inside the choosing. I look now." She found his hand in the dark with the accuracy of long practice. "If the morning goes badly, Jonas, I want it said tonight, in the quiet, that you were not the price of my life. You were the part of it I would have picked in a fair market with all the world to choose from. I am done pretending otherwise to spare either of us."
Jonas turned her hand over in his and held it the way a man holds something he does not intend to set down. "Then I'll say my piece in the same quiet," he said. "I came into this valley with a dead brother's errand and a rope around my neck dressed up as a wedding, and I've been waiting ever since for the day it felt like a sentence again. That day hasn't come. There's a scar along your jaw I've never once wished away, Willa. It is the mark of the year you survived to be standing here, and the veil never hid you from me, not for one hour. Whatever is in the canyon tomorrow, it doesn't get the last word on us. We do." Below them the dark held its breath, and somewhere down the Rio Sombra road, not yet audible, forty rifles were riding toward a valley that knew they were coming, and had sent its truth out ahead of them into the world like a rider in the dawn.
Chapter 21
: The Parley