by her telling, nearly as long as her arm, and Mara said it was barely as long as her hand, and June said Mara had not been there and could not prove otherwise, and they laughed, and the laughter did more for their courage than any speech could have. After supper, Elias cleaned his revolver at the table while Mara sharpened the kitchen knife on the whetstone, the sound steady and rhythmic, and June sang softly as she washed the dishes, an old song their mother used to sing, about a valley and a river and a house with its lamp lit, and Elias found himself listening to the words and thinking that this — this ordinary evening of work and food and song, with danger waiting outside — was exactly what he had spent ten years running from, because he had been afraid to lose it, and exactly what he had been running toward, without knowing it, all along.
When it was time for bed, Mara did something she had not done before, not in all the nights of the condition. She crossed the cabin floor in the lamplight, knelt beside Elias's pallet, and took his hand in hers. Her hand was warm and callused, marked by the saw scar across her left palm, and her fingers closed around his with a strength that surprised him, and steadied him, all at once.
Stay, she whispered, though he was already staying, and he understood that she did not mean the pallet or the night. She meant the house, and the valley, and the life they had chosen at the kitchen table. "Whatever comes tonight, you stay."
I'll stay, he whispered back.
She did not let go of his hand until morning, or nearly. She lay on her own pallet, close beside his, and held his hand in the dark, and June slept on the other side of the cabin, her breathing slow and even, and Elias lay awake a long time listening to the wind in the pines and the two women breathing, one on either side of him, and he thought about the river ten years ago, and about Thomas telling him to let go, and about how letting go had not been failure, and how staying was not failure either, but a quieter kind of courage, chosen night by night, hand in hand, until the dark itself grew less frightening. Staying was a choice, made in the dark, with a hand held tight, and it was the bravest choice he had ever made. At some point in the deep night, with Mara's hand still in his, he slept, and he did not wake to remember, and the wind moved through the valley, and the deputy kept watch at the trail, and the household waited, prepared and together and unafraid to face it, for whatever the night would bring.
They came after midnight, when the moon had set and the valley was at its darkest, and the first sign of them was not a sound but a smell: smoke, sharp and wrong, not the clean smoke of a hearth fire but the acrid smoke of hay catching. Elias was awake before the smell reached him, or perhaps the smell woke him, and he was on his feet with his revolver in his hand before Mara had sat up, and June was already at the window, her face pale in the lamplight.
Fire, June said. "At the barn."
Elias threw the door open and the night air hit him cold, and there, at the barn, was the orange heart of it: flame licking up the side of the hay store, and men moving in the dark around it, four of them, maybe five, with torches in their hands. Jeb Carver stood nearest the barn, his face lit by the fire, his mouth open in a shout Elias could not make out over the roar, and behind him Deke Marlow's shape moved, and another man Elias did not know, and Walt Grady, quiet Walt, holding a torch he had not yet thrown down, his face turned away from the fire as if he could not bear to look at it.
Water! Elias shouted. "Mara, June — water, and the horses!"
They fought the fire the way they had fought everything else: together, by hand, without stopping. Mara ran for the water barrels and came back with buckets, her skirts tucked up, her hair loose, throwing water at the base of the flames while Elias beat at the burning hay with a wet blanket, and June, barefoot and fierce, dragged the barn doors open from the inside and led the horses out one by one, talking to them steadily, her voice calm even as the fire roared and the smoke rolled over them. The chestnut gelding came out wild-eyed and plunging, and the gray mare came out trembling, and the sorrel came last, and June got them all clear and drove them to the far corral before she came back for more water.
Jeb Carver saw Elias at the barn and raised his rifle, and the shot cracked through the night, loud and flat, and Elias felt a hot, tearing pain across his left shoulder, as if someone had drawn a line of fire across his skin. He staggered, and his left arm went numb and then came back burning, and blood ran warm down his arm and soaked his shirt, and for a terrible moment he thought he was dying. Then he understood: the bullet had grazed him, torn a furrow along the shoulder, deep enough to bleed badly, to soak his coat and make his head swim, but not deep enough to kill, not deep enough to stop him. He pressed his right hand to the wound, and Mara was there, tearing a strip from her own apron and binding it tight around his shoulder with hands that did not shake, though her face was white.