The day widened.
On the far bank, meadowlarks started their bright, absurd songs. A fish jumped, round as a thrown stone, and left a widening circle in the water. All the indifferent, abundant beauty hurt worse than her foot for a moment.
But I am alive,she told herself, and the sentence felt both like a victory and a problem. Being alive meant more choices, and choices were knives.
Where to now?
Along the river would mean water and cover, but would Thomas follow her there?
The carved bird warming against her palm offered no counsel.
Suddenly:Grey Horse is near.The thought came not as a hope but as a certainty that slid into her bones. Still, she could not sit and wait for rescue as if she were a child in a tale. She had moved away from Thomas and must move again.
She rose, favoring the injured heel, and stepped into the shallows to let the water take her tracks once more. She waded downstream this time, letting the sun rise at her shoulder. After a few dozen yards she cut out of the river where a deer path scuffed the bank, a line no wider than her foot leading into a stand of willows. Deer knew how to move without drawing eyes. She would borrow their wisdom.
?
By full morning the world was a different thing: gold bright and buzzing, the night’s edges softened into distance. She moved in fits: walk, crouch, listen; walk, crouch, listen. Twice she heard someone behind her, somewhere out of sight—the clatter that a man who believed he owned the land when he walked on it. She froze each time, breath shallow, heart a bell struck once and struck again by its own echo. Each time the sound veered away and was eaten by the day.
Hunger made itself known as a small, complaining animal. She paused where the willows thinned and picked a handful of wild grapes clinging stubbornly to a vine. Small and hard, their skins were sour, their flesh slight. They shocked her mouth but charged her blood enough to make her legs feel less like wood.
She broke off a willow switch and stripped it clean with her teeth, tasting green bitterness. With it she bound her hair at the nape of her neck, a poor cousin to her braid but a thing that made her feel less undone. The motion steadied her.
When the sun stood a hand’s width above the horizon, she came upon an oxbow, a loop of river that had nearly cut itself into a new bed and then changed its mind. The near bank rolled gently down into a crescent of sand. Cottonwoods leaned in, their roots like fingers, and between two such roots yawned a shallow hollow, dry and leaf-littered, just large enough for a curled body.
It felt like a place made to hold her, as if some previous fugitive had shaped it once and left its shape in the world for the next one who needed it.
She slid in, drew leaves up over her skirts until the world smelled of tannin and dust and last year’s rain. She let herself, for the first time since running, truly rest in what she perceived a safe place.
Her body trembled now that it had permission. She hugged herself around the carved bird and breathed until the air stopped rasping and started being air again. The leaves were scratchy against her cheek. A ladybird beetle walked industriously across the back of her hand and then lifted its spotted wings and flew.
She laid her palm on her breast and felt the bird’s small shape between hand and heart, the two pulses—hers and the world’s—coming into some kind of rhythm.
Words rose, uninvited. Not a prayer exactly. Not even sense. Just a stringing of small true things:I am here. I am not his. I am afraid. I will move again. I will be found by or I will find Grey Horse. I will not break.
For a long time, she lay there with those feelings, letting them braid together without forcing them to make a rope.
When at last the urge to move returned, no longer stung by fear but prodded by hunger despite the knowledge that Thomas would be searching for her, she eased from the hollow, brushed leaves from her dress, and touched the willow tie at her neck as if to confirm that something still bound the past to the present to the future.
She stepped back toward the river.
The day’s light had sharpened. Somewhere not far off, a hawk cried—a high, clean sound that cut straight through the world and made it ring. She lifted her face to the sky before she could stop herself.
“Please,” she said to the empty blue under the hawk’s thin arc, and the word felt less like a plea and more like a decision made aloud.
Then she put her feet to the path again, alone, the river at her side, the carved bird warm in her palm, and walked into whatever the day would dare bring.
Chapter Twenty-Three: The Clash
A cry tore through the air like a wounded thing, faint but sharp enough to stop Grey Horse cold. His head lifted, every sense on guard. A woman’s voice: Violet’s.
He had heard many cries in his life—of fear, of rage, of birth, of mourning—and this one carried the weight of all of them.
Grey Horse wheeled his pony without a word. Ezra looked at him sharply. “That her?”
Grey Horse’s eyes burned. “Yes.”
Ezra kicked his horse into a lope. “Then we’ve no more time.”
