"Ana," Miren said, without turning her head. "Come here, child. It is time you heard this, and it is time I stopped deciding for you what you are old enough to hear."
Ana went to her, slowly, because her legs did not seem to belong to her. The dogs came and pressed against her skirts, and the sheep moved around them, and the wind came down off the hills with the smell of sage and cold water in it. Rosalind Carmichael looked at her — really looked at her, the way the baroness had never looked at her before — and Ana felt the look like a hand laid against her cheek. It was not the look of a woman inspecting a schoolteacher. It was the look of a woman seeing a face she had seen before, in another place, in another year, and trying not to believe it.
"Mrs. Carmichael," Ana said. Her voice sounded thin to her own ears. "You are welcome at the camp."
"I am not sure I am," Rosalind said. "Your aunt has not decided yet." She looked at Miren. "I brought what I found. I would like you to see it before you send me away."
Miren did not answer at once. She looked out over the flock, over the valley, over eighteen years of mornings exactly like this one, and then she jerked her chin toward the hut.
"Inside," she said. "The wind takes words here. Words are too dear to waste on the wind."
Inside the hut, the air was close and warm with the smell of wool and mutton fat and the peat fire that never quite went out. Miren's world was in that one room: the low bed, the table scrubbed white by use, the shelf of jars, the loom in the corner with a half-finished length of cloth on it, and everywhere, in baskets and on hooks, wool. Wool in its natural colours, wool dyed with onion skin and indigo and madder, and one basket, set apart from the others, of a yellow so clear and bright it seemed to hold the summer inside it. Ana's eyes went to that basket the way they always did, because the scarf around her own neck had come out of it, knitted by Miren's hands from wool dyed with the yellow flower that grew only on the high Basque slopes, the flower her people called by a name Ana had never learned to pronounce properly and Miren said in her sleep sometimes, when she dreamed in the old language.
Rosalind unwrapped the oilcloth on the table. Inside was a small coat of yellow wool, so small it could only have fitted a baby, and the sight of it stopped Ana's breath. It was not a fine coat. It was a working coat, knitted thick and plain, with wooden buttons and a hood, and the yellow of it was the exact yellow of her scarf. The exact yellow of the basket. Ana put her hand to her throat without thinking, and her fingers found the scarf, and the scarf was warm from her own skin.
"Where did you get that?" Miren said. Her voice was very quiet. Too quiet. The voice of a woman holding a door shut with her whole weight.
"From a trunk," Rosalind said. "An unclaimed trunk at the station, from 1872. Edith Marlow was about to put it up for auction. I opened it because I thought it might be mine — because Bar Seven has lost cattle this quarter, and I thought the trunk might hold papers. Instead it held this." She laid the coat down gently, as if it might break. "And this."
She set a tintype on the table beside the coat. In the little dark photograph, a man in a cattleman's coat held a baby wrapped in a blanket. The man's face was turned toward the child, and the child's face was turned toward the camera, and even in the dim light of the hut, Ana could see that the man was looking at the baby the way a man looks at something he has just pulled out of a fire and cannot quite believe is alive.
"That is Elias Carmichael," Rosalind said. "My husband. He died in 1872. For eighteen years I have believed that he burned your camp to take your land, and that he died in the stampede that followed, trampled by his own cattle. I believed it because Duncan Pryce told it to me, and because I needed a simple story. A villain is easier to carry than a mystery." Her voice broke, just a little, and she steadied it with visible effort. "This photograph says he was holding a child. No one ever told me about a child."