“There’s just so much darkness in the world.” I pressed my lips together, unsure how to share all that spun round me: gratitude for him, distrust of his secrets, disgust and horror at the world.
He nodded, as if he understood all that I couldn’t speak.
He picked up my gloves, threaded them on my fingers. I swallowed, a lump stuck in my throat. “Come to me,” he said, his voice a question, “if ever you need help again.”
The lodge was cloudy with heat as he slid on my gloves. I nodded and untangled my hands from his. Then I flung up the doorway flap and stepped beyond.
The sky was forlorn, white and ash and bone. It was almost dusk. A time of pauses, a moment straddling possibilities. Niabi crouched before a fire, stirring a pot of lye soap. I lowered onto the log beside her, and she settled a blanket around my shoulders. I bent toward the flame as the Osage wordlessly moved about their tasks, unhurried and purposeful. Beyond, gusts rose in the blackjacks. “Have I told you the tale of Prairie Rose and Whirlwind?” Niabi asked.
I pulled my knees to my chest and shook my head no, the pound of music low against my back.
“Long, long ago, when time was young,” Niabi said, sweeping her hand the length of their glade, her colorful bracelets clattering, “the prairie was quiet, and Earth Mother was alone. She longed for color and for sound. For blue flowers of a clear sky, pink ones of a spring dawn. Buried deep underground in her caverns, humming along her lost rivers, she yearned to be known.”
Stot and Wa-ah-zho came round the lodge, bowls of broiled beef and vegetables in their hands. Wa-ah-zho tucked his blanket across his chest, over the ivory moon of a shell gorget pendant. As Niabi told her tale, a story of wildflowers and wind, of bravery and magic, Stot placed a bowl in my lap. “Once, long ago, there was a girl named Prairie Rose who believed she was ordinary.” Niabi finished her tale, her hand brushing her hound. “But I reason, there is no such thing as an ordinary woman. So you see, memories are always intertwining, one reality blending with another.”
I shivered, haunted by the legend of Prairie Rose and this idea of women connecting through time. Niabi handed me a bowl of water to wash, and I plunged my hands into the basin, the cold liquid biting. I scrubbed at blood crusted along the pad of my hand, then flicked off the water. The wet splotches darkened the dirt: spider-thin rivulets spreading like daddy longlegs. It was time to return home. There was much in our corner of the frontier left unresolved. Stot was unharmed, but I must make sure the Browns were safe as well. I thanked Niabi for the tale, her care, the food, then walked toward the stable yard.
Thin winter light spilled through leafless branches like watered yellow paint, and gusts roared across the meadow, speaking garbled words. A new memory replaced long ago moments, of when the apparition of Willie Matthews overcame me. Along the embankment, I looked for the legendary woman astride her mustang, but she didn’t appear. I shivered, faraway from this moment, my mind elsewhere, clouded with smoke and wondering and worry. By the horses, One Eye prowling the clearing, Niabi brushed a lock of hair off my forehead. “I understand your need to go home—I’ve that same restlessness inside me too,” she said. “But it’s okay to need others, to ask for help.”
I nodded. I felt like a woman beginning. The longer I lived in these wild spaces, the clearer it was I needed others.
She stepped back, tipped her gaze skyward, her black hair glistening almost blue with the overcast. “I sense a storm,” she said. “The wind is wrathy. He rages, from the west.”
Snowstorms here were rarely brutal, but I’d heard otherworldly tales of the ice storms of No Man’s Land, of whorling blizzards that left trees draped in a canopy of ice and the frozen hills slick. Unlike Kansas’s pillowy drifts of snow, the storms here could have a harsh, glassy coating that made journeys precarious and unwise. But ice storms were rare, one every handful of years, and my saddlebags had food and water, along with a tent and some dry firewood. I vaulted onto Cricket and winced, my body tender but surely able to withstand the ride home. Ithanked Niabi again, and then Stot and I were off, dashing through the tall grass, fleeing into howling wind, the gusts blasting my cheeks raw, until I couldn’t feel my nose. Our horses’ hooves clattered across the hard ground, galloping into the broken colors of winter: black, white, gray, muddy mists. I pulled up my cloak and swallowed the brittle air, cold burning down my throat.
Chapter Thirty-Five
We’re lost,” Stot said, the leather of his saddle creaking in the cold.
“Nah.”
He sighed, pocketed his compass. “Will there ever be such a time when you’ll listen to me?”
I brushed my hand across my brow, swiping off the snow that fell in round puffs from the sky. “Probably not.”
Night raced on, graphite shadows roaming eastward and a gauzy, melon-orange hue smearing the dip of the valley. It smelt of darkness and rime and was altogether too cold.
Stot pinched his hat by the brim, held it crown down to shake off snow. “There’s tree cover ahead, probably a creek. Make camp there?”
The light waned, details of the timbers becoming fuzzy and like smoke. The borders of individual trees lost, the shape of leaves. “I don’t give up easy,” I said.
“Damnation, I’m not giving up,” he said. “Dark has fallen, and this snow could build. It’s best to make shelter now.”
I rolled my eyes. “We’re not in the wastelands of the Dakotas.”
“And you know where our homesteads are?”
I felt spun about directionless, but my land tugged at me from beyond. I gestured vaguely southeast, the snow searing the cuts on my hand. “Cowboys don’t get lost.”
“Mmm.”
The distant terrain shimmered pearlescent in the snowfall. Stot’s thighs angled Shark down the slope toward the forest canopy, the shape of his muscles in relief against the black cotton of his trousers. I followed, my body sore from riding, but I longed for home. It was almost as if I needed to be on my land to heal.
We clattered below the trees, the branches’ scrawling black fingers reaching earthward, the low limbs dusting our slickers with snow. We skidded down the slope toward the creek.
“Wait.” Stot held up his hand.
The land beyond was a haunting expanse of luminous ivory, like beginning starlight, all the way to the horizon. There were no trees or flowers. It was as if we’d stumbled upon another realm.
