HE FIXED THEIR FENCE, BUT HIS ONE CONDITION CHANGED EVERYTHING

Instead of digging deep holes in the frozen granite, Elias was constructing dry-stone timber cribs—four-foot-square pens made of notched cedar logs, filled with six thousand pounds of blasted rock and bound together with doubled strands of twisted wire. Once filled, a timber crib was heavier than an ox team; a thousand head of wild cattle could throw themselves against the perimeter without shifting the line an inch.

By sunset, the valley was filled with the bitter, sulfurous stink of burnt powder and the endless, rhythmic tink-tink-tink of cold iron striking rock.

Marshal Cole had not stayed in the cabin. The old lawman had taken off his star, laid his gunbelts across the meal chest, and walked out to the line with an eight-pound pick in his massive, gnarled hands.

“I’m an officer of the territorial court,” Cole had grunted when Aiona tried to hand him an axe. “I can’t take a side in a property contest until the court issues a writ. But there ain't no law in the territory that says a retired mule-skinner can’t help a lady move some gravel before the sun goes down.”

By nine o’clock that night, under a sky that had cleared into a terrifying, crystal-cold dome of black glass studded with ten thousand burning stars, they had completed five cribs.

The temperature had plunged to fifteen below zero.

The moisture from their breath froze into white beards on their mufflers; the sweat on Elias’s back turned to a brittle sheet of ice beneath his shirt the moment he stopped swinging the sledge. His palms were blistered through his leather gloves, the raw flesh sticking to the wool lining whenever he opened his hands.

“Enough,” Aiona called out from the darkness of the fourth crib. Her voice was cracked, barely a whisper. “Elias... stop. The horses can’t pull anymore.”

Elias stopped his hammer halfway through an arc.

He leaned his forehead against the cold ash handle, his chest heaving like a foundered steer’s, his breath coming in long, ragged gasps that burned his throat.

Beside the sledge, the gray gelding had dropped his head to his knees, his massive flanks trembling with exhaustion, white frost coating his entire body like sugar. The dun mare was down on her knees in the snow, blowing bloody froth from her nostrils.

Elias let the hammer fall into the dirt with a dull thud.

He walked over to the dun mare, dropped into the snow beside her, and gently lifted her head by the cheek-strap of her bridle. He pulled his knife, slashed the trace chains to free her from the heavy singletree, and rubbed her ears with his gloved hands.

“Get them inside,” he croaked, his voice barely recognizable. “Get them into the barn. Blankets on both of them. Warm mash with salt.”

Nielli caught the gelding’s halter, her small face streaked with soot and tears of cold exhaustion, and led the trembling animal toward the lantern light of the barn.

Elias tried to stand. His knees buckled instantly, the joints locked solid by four hours of lifting stone in the sub-zero wind.

Aiona caught him.

She came under his right shoulder, her buffalo coat rough against his neck, her small frame bracing his two hundred pounds with a desperate, iron strength that seemed impossible for a woman of her size.

“I have you,” she whispered through chapped, cracked lips. “I have you, Elias. Put your arm around me.”

Elias leaned on her, his arm dragging across her shoulders, his boots trailing through the red-stained snow of the blasting pit. Together, step by agonizing step, they crossed the eighty yards of frozen yard toward the cabin door.

The warmth of the cabin hit them like a blow.

Marshal Cole was already inside, having carried the last box of drill steel to the porch ten minutes earlier. He had built up the hearth with dry birch logs until the flames roared halfway up the chimney throat, and a pot of dried beef and corn dumplings was bubbling furiously on the stove.

Elias collapsed onto the bench by the table. He couldn't feel his fingers; he couldn't feel his toes. His boots were frozen solid to the stirrup-leathers of his trousers, the laces stiff as iron wire.

Aiona dropped to her knees in front of him.

She didn't take off her own coat. She pulled a bone-handled skinning knife from her belt and, without a second’s hesitation, cut the frozen laces of his boots from top to bottom. She hauled the stiff leather off his heels with two violent pulls, threw the boots into the corner, and caught his bare feet in her hands.

His skin was white, waxy, and cold as river ice.

“Nielli!” she barked toward the doorway as the girl stumbled into the room. “The snow bucket! Now!”

Before Elias could protest, Aiona plunged his feet into a wooden pail filled with fresh snow, using her bare hands to scour his skin with the granular crystals.

A terrible, nauseating agony exploded through Elias’s legs—the agonizing, burning torment of frozen flesh being shocked back into circulation. His hands clamped onto the edge of the pine table with enough force to crack the planking; a strangled, animal groan tore from his throat, his head dropping back against the log wall as sweat poured down his soot-stained face.