Dawn came up gray over the valley, and it smelled of wet ash.
Elias woke to the sound of Mara's breathing close beside him and to the ache in his shoulder, a deep, throbbing pull that ran from the graze down into his arm whenever he tried to move it. For a moment he did not know where he was. The cabin floor was hard under his back, the blanket over him smelled of smoke, and the light coming through the shutter was the color of cold water. Then he remembered, all at once and in no particular order: the torches after midnight, Jeb Carver's shout, the barn hay catching with a sound like a sigh and then a roar, June with a bucket in both hands and her hair coming loose, Mara beside him with a rifle, and Walt Grady dropping his torch in the dirt and shouting the truth so loud that even the horses stopped screaming to listen.
He sat up too fast and the room tilted. Mara's hand was on his good arm before he could fall back.
Easy, she said. Her voice was rough with smoke and with no sleep. "You bled half the night into that bandage, and I am not carrying you to the barn to look at it."
I can walk, Elias said.
You can sit, Mara said, "until I say otherwise."
June was already at the door, barring it back, her face smudged black at one cheekbone, her light brown hair tied back with a strip of cloth torn from something. She looked out at the yard and then back at them, and her mouth did a strange thing, trying to smile and failing.
The barn is still standing, she said. "Most of it. The hay is gone, and the back wall is charred, but the roof held. The horses are all right. I counted them twice."
Elias got to his feet with Mara's help and went to the door. The yard was a ruin of wet black straw and trampled mud. Water stood in the hollows where they had thrown it all night. The barn door hung open, and smoke still curled thin and white from the back corner, rising straight up into the still air because there was no wind at all. The air itself tasted of ash and creek water and burned hay, and under it, faintly, the clean smell of pine.
At the valley's mouth, boot and hoof prints churned the mud, and one torch lay dropped and dead in the grass.
Walt Grady, Elias said.
He stayed, June said. "After he shouted, he stayed. He helped us throw water until the fire was out. Then he sat down on the woodpile and would not move, like a man who had finally put something heavy down and did not trust his legs to hold him without it."
Mara came to stand beside Elias at the door, her shoulder almost touching his good one. She did not look at the barn. She looked at him, at the bandage on his shoulder where the blood had dried dark through the cloth.
Dr. Marsh will need to see that, she said.
Later, Elias said.
Soon, Mara said, and that was the end of the argument, in the way it always was with her.
They had not been out ten minutes when horses came up the trail, steady and unhurried. Elias reached for his revolver and stopped himself: Mara already held the rifle, June already watched the trail, and the man riding first was unmistakable — Sheriff Amos Greer, broad and slow-moving in the saddle, with two deputies behind him and Walt Grady walking beside his horse, his hands empty.
Greer reined in at the yard and looked around him without hurry, the way a man looks at a field after a storm, taking in the barn, the wet straw, the bandage on Elias's shoulder, the rifle in Mara's hands, and Walt Grady's face.
Well, Greer said. "It seems you saved yourselves before I got here."
We did what we had to, Mara said.
That is usually how it goes, Greer said, and swung down. "Where is Carver?"
June pointed toward the storm cellar behind the cabin. "We tied him in there," she said. "He tried to run when Walt shouted, and Elias caught him by the coat before he reached the fence. He has been quiet since. I think the quiet frightens him more than shouting would."
Greer nodded, and his deputies went to the cellar. Jeb Carver came out blinking in the daylight, his hands bound, his shirt torn, his loud face gone suddenly small. He looked at Walt Grady and opened his mouth, and then closed it again when Greer looked at him.
You will ride to Cedar Hollow with us, Greer said to Carver, not unkindly, "and you will tell the judge what you did here, and why."
Carver said nothing. He did not look at the sisters. He did not look at Elias. He looked at the ground, where the dropped torch lay, and then he let the deputies lead him to a horse.
Walt Grady stayed where he was, by the woodpile, until Greer turned to him.
And you, Greer said.
Walt took off his hat. He was twenty-seven and worn thin by work that did not sit right with him, his shaking hands pressed flat against his thighs to hold them still.