He lay awake a while, listening to the river and the small night sounds of a camp settling, a married stranger in a hidden valley, his brother's warning turning slow circles in the dark like a hawk that has not yet chosen where to fall.
Chapter 8
: Moonlight
The alarm came in the deep of the night, three nights after Jonas had finished the lower ditch: a boy's voice crying out from the horse herd, a drum struck twice, and then the whole camp waking the way a single body wakes β all at once and without confusion.
Jonas was on his feet with his boots half-laced before the second drumbeat faded. Beside him Siyane rose already veiled, swift as a shadow detaching itself from the wall, and thrust his coat at him as they went out.
"Horses," she said. "Something has them running."
The herd had broken from its night ground on the valley's west side β forty head and more streaming along the river meadow in the moonlight, maddened by some scent or sound the men had not yet found. Riders were already out, wheeling to head them before they reached the broken ground at the valley's mouth, where a horse at a gallop could snap a leg in the rocks. Jonas ran for the meadow's edge, caught up a startled mare by her halter rope, and swung onto her bare back with the rope for a rein.
What followed was not heroism but horsemanship, which is better. He rode wide of the herd's flank, low over the mare's neck, turning the leaders by pressure and presence rather than noise, as his father had taught him. On the far side another rider mirrored him β Siyane, veil streaming, riding as if she and the horse had settled their arrangements in another life. Between them and the valley's riders, the herd's wild circle bent, slowed, and at last stood, trembling, in the bright meadow.
It was in the dismounting that it happened. Coming down off a lathered horse at the river's edge, Siyane's foot found a stone slick with water. She went down hard on one knee in the shallows; her hand flew out to catch herself, and the veil β wet, weighted, its fastening torn β slipped from her face and hung from one shoulder like a black flag surrendered.
The moon was full. Jonas saw his wife's face for the first time.
There was no deformity. There had never been a deformity, and the rumor, he understood at once, was a fence her people had built on purpose. She was fair β fairer than any woman of the valley, with the pale skin of a white woman that the sun had touched but never claimed. Her eyes, raised to his in one unguarded instant, were blue, a pale clear blue, startled as a deer's and twice as proud. And along her left jaw ran a scar, long and fine and silvered by its years, from below her ear to the edge of her chin β a knife's signature, healed clean, that did not spoil her face but wrote upon it.
She did not cover herself. That was the thing he remembered afterward, more than the scar, more than the eyes. For three breaths she let him look, kneeling in the shallows, and her chin rose rather than fell.
"Now you know what Harrow's spies must never learn," she said. "A white face in Nahlin's valley. He would pay for the description alone."
"Siyane β " he began, and stopped, because she had risen, and something at her throat had caught the moonlight.
A locket. Silver, oval, old, swinging for a moment outside the dark cloth of her dress before she gathered it in her hand. But in that moment the light had done its work, and Jonas had seen what no mistake could explain: engraved upon its face, in fine old lines, were two willow trees, their branches bowing toward one another over a narrow stream.
His hand went to his own chest before he knew he had moved. Beneath his shirt, on its worn cord, his father's locket answered his fingers through the cloth β silver, oval, old. Two willow trees bowing toward one another over a narrow stream. He had carried it since he was nineteen, since the winter Amos Hale lay dying and pressed it into his palm and told him it had belonged to his youth, which was all Amos ever said of his youth.
"The locket," Jonas said. His voice came out rough. "Where did you get that locket?"
She held it closed in her fist, and something crossed her face that was older than the scar β grief, and warning, and a resolve he was only beginning to learn the depth of.
"It was my mother's," she said. "And you are not ready for the rest of it tonight, standing in a river in the dark. Neither am I."
"Tomorrow," she said, and drew the wet veil back over her face with steady hands, and became again the figure the whole valley knew. "Tomorrow I will tell you my name."
She walked past him toward the camp, upright as a queen in wet skirts, and Jonas stood in the shallows with his father's locket cold against his heart, and knew that whatever waited for him tomorrow, his life β already taken apart once this week β was about to be taken apart again, down to the foundation stone.