She took the red survey stake from her saddlebag and stood it upright in the corner of the study, beside the trunk, where she would see it every morning when she sat down to her books. A stake, a trunk, a tally book, and a piece of yellow wool: four small things, and each of them, she suspected, was a door. She had spent eighteen years building an empire out of iron, and she had been proud of it, and she had been right to be proud of it. But tonight, for the first time, she wondered what an empire built out of iron was for, if it could not protect forty steers, or a waterhole, or the truth about the man she had married. She did not have an answer. She had only the thread, and the morning, and the ride to the sheep camp, and the feeling — new and strange and almost frightening in its lightness — that after eighteen years of being iron, she might finally be ready to learn how to bend.
She woke before dawn, as she always did, and she dressed in the dark, and she saddled her own horse in the yard while the house was still asleep, because there are some rides a woman must begin alone. The sky was the color of hammered tin, and the air smelled of coming rain, and as she rode out through the Bar Seven gate toward the sheep camp at the edge of town, she carried with her the tally book's numbers, the survey stake's red paint, and the image of a little yellow jacket folded in a trunk — and, underneath all of it, the question she had not yet dared to ask aloud: if Duncan Pryce had lied to her about the cattle, what else, in eighteen long years, had he lied to her about?
Ana Zubizarreta had walked the three miles from Juniper Creek to her aunt's sheep camp so many times that her feet knew the path the way other people knew prayers. The trail climbed out of town past the last fences, past the place where the grass turned from town grass to open grass, and then it followed the Sweetgrass River until the river bent and the valley opened like a hand. On Sunday mornings in October, the light came low and gold across the valley, and the sheep moved through it in a slow tide, and Miren's dogs worked the edges of the flock with the grave concentration of small officials.
That Sunday, the light was the same, and the sheep were the same, and everything else was wrong.
Ana saw the wagon first. It stood beside Miren's hut with its wheels chocked and its team hitched, and it was not a shepherd's wagon. It was too clean, too well kept, its boards painted black and its ironwork polished, and the horse in the traces was a Bar Seven horse, big-boned and patient, with the brand on its shoulder like a signature. Ana stopped on the trail with her basket of bread and apples banging against her hip, and her first thought was a foolish one, the thought of a schoolteacher: somebody important had come to the camp, and she was not dressed for it. Her second thought was sharper. Nobody from Bar Seven ever came to the camp. Not in eighteen years. Not since the fire.
Miren was standing outside the hut with her arms crossed. She was sixty-three years old, short and broad and weathered down to something hard and bright, like a river stone, and she did not look surprised. She looked like a woman who had been expecting a visitor for eighteen years and had used every one of those years to decide what she would say.
Beside her, in a dark dress and a coat that had cost more than the whole camp, stood Rosalind Carmichael.
Ana had seen the baroness of Bar Seven before, of course. Everyone in Juniper Creek had. She was a tall woman of fifty-two, with grey in her dark hair and a face that had been handsome once and was now something harder and more interesting: a face that had learned to give orders and to be obeyed. Ana had seen her in town at the mercantile, at the church door on the rare Sundays she came, at the cattle sales where men twice her size waited for her nod. She had never seen her look uncertain. She looked uncertain now. She was holding something wrapped in oilcloth against her chest, the way a woman holds a child, or a secret, and her hands were not quite steady.