Pell stirred, turned his head, mumbled, "Theodolite β leave it β" and
settled again, one hand groping vaguely toward the pillow. Silas went utterly
still, the lantern shuttered to nothing, the copied pages pressed flat against his
chest under his shirt. For a long moment the only sound was Pell's breathing
and the blood in Silas's ears.
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Then, from outside, the hound gave a single low growl.
Silas's heart stopped. But before the growl could become a bark, there was a
soft sound β Dokan's hum again, lower this time β and the unmistakable
quiet of a large hand closing gently around a muzzle. The growl died unborn.
A moment later Dokan's silhouette filled the tent flap for half a heartbeat,
then was gone: the signal. Finish or leave.
Silas's hands had gone slick on the charcoal. He wiped them on his trousers,
leaving black streaks, and thought β absurdly, with discovery a tent-flap
away β of Saya numbering the corners of each sheet, her fierce precision,
the way she'd said a copied book convicts them as if it were a prayer. He
copied two more pages with shaking hands β a list of water-rights filing
numbers, a note about "the springs secured by autumn" β and slid the red
notebook back under Pell's pillow exactly as he'd found it, corner out, red as
a warning flag. He shuttered the lantern, ghosted out of the tent, and was up
the canyon wall before the cookfire's embers had time to notice him.
They didn't stop until dawn, and they didn't speak until the sun was fully up
and the box canyon was a day's hard ride behind them. At a spring at midday
they stopped to rest the horses, and Silas knelt and scrubbed the charcoal
from his hands until the water ran gray. His hands were shaking. He tried to
hide it by wringing them out, and Dokan β who missed nothing β looked at
the sky with great interest until the shaking stopped.
"You did well in the tent," Dokan said then, as if commenting on the
weather.
"I was terrified in the tent."
"Doing well and being terrified are not enemies." Dokan spread the copied
sheets on a flat rock to dry what damp they'd taken, weighting the corners
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with pebbles, checking Saya's numbering in each corner. "My sister chose
her messenger correctly."
Silas drew the folded papers from inside his shirt β charcoal-smudged,
creased, real β and held them out like an offering.
Dokan looked at them for a long moment. "A copied book," he said.
"Convicts them," Silas finished.
They rode west with the evidence warming against Silas's ribs, and neither of
them saw the smoke until they were within half a day of home β a black
column leaning sideways in the wind, exactly where no smoke should have
been.
They rode the last miles at a gallop that nearly killed the horses, and came
over the final rise to find the barn a black skeleton against the evening sky,
its ribs of charred timber still breathing thin ribbons of smoke.
The smell hit them before the sight had finished landing β wet char and
kerosene, sweet and wrong. Slate shied sideways, blowing hard, and Silas
had to fight him down the slope. Dokan's face had gone to stone. And
underneath the smoke, under everything, one thought hammered in Silas's
chest like a second pulse: the cabin. Saya.
Silas was off Slate before the gelding had fully stopped, running for the cabin
with the copied pages forgotten in his shirt and his heart hammering against
them. The cabin stood. The door hung open. And on the porch steps sat Saya,
soot-streaked to the elbows, her hair coming loose from its braid, a wet cloth
in her lap β whole, breathing, furious.
She looked up at him, and the relief that broke across his face seemed to
embarrass them both.
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"The horses," was the first thing she said. "They are out. I got them out first."
"Saya β"
"Listen." She stood, wincing as her weight found the bad leg, and refused the
arm he offered. "Four men. At dusk, while the light was going. I smelled the
kerosene before I saw them β they poured it along the barn's west wall,
where the wind would take it. I had Slate and Maude out before the first
match struck. I beat at it with a wet blanket until the wind turned and took
the worst of it toward the rocks instead of the cabin."
One of her hands was blistered. Silas saw it and felt something cold and
murderous move through his chest.
"One of them grabbed my wrist," she said, matter-of-factly, watching his
face. "I put the wet blanket over his head and he let go to scream. They left
when the barn was fully caught. They did not come for the cabin. This was a
message, not a murder."
Dokan had gone to the barn's remains without a word. Now he came back,
holding something: three cottonwood branches, each snapped cleanly and
laid across the trail in a pattern Silas didn't recognize.
"She left my signal," Dokan said, and there was pride underneath the
grimness. "Broken branch, pointing west, three of them β many men, fire, I
am unhurt. I read it when we came over the rise."
"You taught her well," Silas said.
"I taught her everything," Dokan said. "She was always the better student."
Saya's fury, Silas realized, was colder than his own β his ran hot and wanted
to break things, hers ran deep and wanted to finish things. It was the
difference, he thought, between a man who had lost everything once and a
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woman who refused to lose anything ever again.
"Aikens?" he asked.
"Scarred knuckle," she confirmed. "He did not bother to cover his face. He
wanted us to know."
"Let me see your hand," Silas said.
She showed him, reluctantly β blisters rising across her palm. From her