“Hold on,” Aiona whispered fiercely, her eyes locked on his, her hands never stopping their brutal, lifesaving friction. “Don't you dare pass out, Elias Kane. Look at me! Look at me!”
Elias forced his eyes open through the red haze of pain.
Her face was four inches from his. Her dark eyes were blazing with a ferocious, terrifying intensity that held him pinned against the logs more securely than an iron staple.
“I’m here,” he gasped through his clenched teeth. “I’m... here.”
“You stay here,” she commanded, her voice breaking into a ragged sob even as her hands continued to rub the blood back into his toes. “We have four more cribs to fill tomorrow. You don't get to die on me tonight.”
Marshal Cole stood by the hearth, holding a tin cup of whiskey he had taken from his saddlebag. He looked down at the two of them—at the scarred, graying soldier shaking with agony on the bench, and the dark-haired frontier woman kneeling in the dirt at his feet, fighting for his flesh like a lioness over a cub.
The old lawman slowly took off his hat, set the whiskey on the table, and looked out the frost-covered window toward the northern ridge where the red bluff stood black against the stars.
“God help Vance,” the marshal said softly to the empty room. “God help that boy if he comes down that trail tomorrow.”
Gradually, the blinding white fire in Elias’s feet dulled into a deep, throbbing ache. The gray waxiness of the skin gave way to a mottled, angry red as the blood surged back through the capillaries.
Aiona sat back on her heels on the floorboards, her shoulders slumping, her breath coming in long, shuddering sighs. Her hands were red, raw, and trembling with exhaustion, her fingers stained with the black powder residue from his socks.
Elias leaned down slowly.
He reached out, his blistered, aching hands catching her small wrists. He didn't say thank you; words like that were too small, too cheap for what had just passed between them in the dirt. He simply pulled her upward until she was sitting on the bench beside him, her head resting against his chest, her breath warm against the torn collar of his flannel shirt.
His arm went around her, closing the circle, tight and immovable as the cedar cribs they had built upon the rock.
“Tomorrow,” Elias whispered into her dark hair, his voice steadying into that deep, immovable gravel that sounded like the foundation of the world. “We finish the wire.”
Dawn on Monday arrived without warmth, bleeding through a sky the color of zinc.
The mercury in the little brass tube on the porch post remained curled in its glass bulb, inert as lead. When Elias stepped off the threshold, the soles of his freshly greased spare boots made no crunching sound in the snow; the crust had set into an impervious, vitreous glaze that rang beneath his iron heels like paving stone. Every breath drew needle-sharp cold straight into the roots of his teeth.
His feet, mottled with angry purple contusions from the frost-thaw of the night before, throbbed with a dull, sickening beat inside the thick sheep’s-wool socks. But the numbness was gone. Pain, to a man who had marched through three winters of mountain campaigns, was merely information—proof that the flesh still obeyed the will.
Nielli came out onto the porch carrying the heavy, four-tined wire stretcher and a leather pouch stuffed with two-inch galvanized staples. Her breath curled in thick, rapid puffs around her woolen muffler, her small jaw clamped against the chattering of her teeth.
"The roan horse won't drink," she said, looking toward the dark opening of the barn. "I broke three inches of ice in the trough with the poll of the axe, but he just stood there with his nose tucked between his knees."
Elias took the stretcher from her, testing the ratcheted iron dog with his gloved thumb. "He's cold-foundered. Aiona's boiling cornmeal and bran mash with half a cup of black molasses on the stove right now. Take it out to him when it cools enough to touch, and wrap his hocks in dry gunny sacks. If his legs stiffen, we lose our second team before noon."
The girl nodded once, her movements clipped and disciplined, and turned back inside without another word. The soft, easy child who had dropped fencing hammers by the creek three weeks ago had completely vanished; what remained was a soldier in a turned-down coat, moving with the cold economy of a garrison down to its last hardtack.
Marshal Cole stood fifty yards out along the northern boundary, his wolfskin capote pulled tight, the twin butts of his revolvers concealed beneath the frozen pelts. He was using a six-foot iron sighting pole to align the gap between the fifth crib and the red bluff.