He yanked his mouth from mine. “Damnation, Minnie,” he muttered and kissed down my neck. I dropped my head back against the tree, gripped his hair, and my body lost a season of tension. His mouth along my throat, his hands skimming my sides. I dug into his handkerchief knot, and he stilled, his mouth hovering below the ridge of my jaw.
“Scared?” I murmured.
His palms trailed up toward my breasts, his eyes turbulent, and he lowered his mouth back to mine. I tugged at his tie, fumbled with his buttons, my hands scraped over the hard ridges of his muscles, and then his palm cupped my breast, and it was teeth and lips and the searing of ice along bare skin. It was so much and no pauses. We were lost in tumult, too gone to worry about the right choice.
“You’re injured,” he said.
I drew him back. “Stop talking.”
He smirked, spoke against my lips, “This is what you want?”
I nodded, and he kissed me, his body against mine, until we were just heat and skin and blood, the air liquefied, snowfall hazed about, us just a hot pulse in an icy landscape. And then, somehow, we were beneath the draped canvas in the untamed wilderness, clothes tugged free, my body shivering in the freezing air, blazing where his hands touched. The fire dissolved, embers extinguished by snowfall, and it was just our bodies and moans and movements in the dark.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Crystals crackled and swayed in the breeze. Trees bowed, iced limbs arching earthward, creating ethereal corridors. The dawn sky clear and blue as if cleansed, the forest tranquil in the aftermath of storm. The cosmos before me a glittering marvel, as if I’d left my home and wandered the borderland of a new world. I could hear everything as my boots crunched through snow. Icicles encased the branches and dripped from crisp leaves. I tugged off my woolen gloves, touched a frozen oak leaf. The rime seared, melting against the warmth of my fingertip, a smear of liquid drizzling down to my wrist. With beauty always came destruction. The ice storm had crushed trees, heaped limbs across the ground, as if an overgrown god had thrown a fit in the woods.
Stot crouched beside the fire, packing our breakfast of oats. Afterward, when I’d rolled away and curled onto my side, he’d reached out to hold me. He’d cursed when I told him no, but he let me go. Through the night was the sound of his breathing and branches crashing against the earth. This morning we’d packed our gear and fed our horses in silence.
A rattle of finches, with their red napes and speckled bodies, swooped across the buffalo trail, flitting between branches, erratic in their exuberance. I couldn’t believe I’d done such a thing. Sakes alive, he was marrying another woman. I’d lost control, again. Let myselfbe ruled by passion, impulsively done whatever I’d wanted, without a thought for his intended or for how sleeping with him would shatter the community we’d built. I rubbed my palms over my face, the wool scratching my raw skin.
Gleaming in the snowmelt before the campfire, a mirage of my land took shape, the meadow glistening shades of gold. The ground rippled, and with a zap my fertile grasses transformed to heaps of sand. The terrain shifted through mutating images, the feathered oat stalks and red paintbrush flowers shrinking, a gale thrashing the meadows, dirt replacing what had once been. The earth aged; the landscape transformed. There was a sense that I observed some horrifying future, my land a barren wasteland of dust.
I saw the homesteader then, in the midst of the prophetic terrain. The woman who seemed an echo of my mother. She waded through the billowing, red-speckled haze, her feet sinking below the layers of sandy loam, a peculiar metal shape roaring behind her, a wrap clenched at her neck, the yarn worn and dissolving away. The solitude, the sorrow, the exhaustion a mimic of my own days. I didn’t know who she was, this woman I kept seeing. Perhaps she was my ancestor, somewhere in another age. Her land black ash, mine white ice. All of our stories, interwoven and repeating. It was the same story; it was something I’d never heard before.
I turned and walked through the woodland to the creek’s edge. The water softly buzzed, and into the void the ancient voice spoke,You’re in the right story.
A clump of snow fell from a branch and smashed into the stream. Other voices chatted, sharing the uncertainty and shame that spooled about me. Boots sounded behind—Stot moved down the slope. He placed his blanket cloak around me, his palms a weight on my shoulders, his breath puffs of steam across my neck. I turned, wrapped the blanket tighter. “I got it.”
Snow crunched as he shifted. He took off his hat, ran his fingers through his hair. His face raw angles, his nose and cheeks pinked in thecold. He didn’t say anything. Shirt tucked into dark trousers, ironed vest buttoned, not even a hemline cuffed up. He was stability in chaos.
I stepped around him and headed back fireside.
“Wait,” he asked.
I halted, held myself steady.
He rubbed the band of his hat. “You’re upset. I thought—” He studied my face. “Last night we seemed to want the same thing.”
Course I’d wanted to be intimate with him—didn’t mean I was proud of my choice. The finches kept chattering. “It’s that feller from before?” he asked. “Your sister’s husband. Lark.”
Lark had nothing to do with right now—I hadn’t thought about him in an age. Flurries drifted down, white dusting Stot’s black hair.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“You think I actually know?” I lifted my skirts and rushed uphill.
I didn’t know myself, my emotions foreign to me. And even if I’d known what I wanted, I’d just ruin my desires with want, with need, with my utter lack of control. I brushed my hands across my cheeks, swiping away freezing tears. Before the fire, I kicked at the snow, covering the flames as Stot hovered at the edge of the clearing. I tossed the cloak at him and mounted.
“Home,” I spoke to Cricket.
As we slammed across the frozen white earth, black trees flickering past, all the days of my life stuttered by, stretching far back into memory. There was a sense that I’d stepped into a tale in the middle, the storyteller already speaking an age, me just catching up as they spoke. All the chaos and trauma and mistakes had brought me here, into the great quiet of the prairie, to this land that whispered and echoed with all the sorrow of timelessness.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Through my cedar-framed windows, white pillowed across the landscape and broken limbs scattered the forest understory. Ice crept inside, fractals freezing across my wood floor. A week before, I’d thought I’d scented spring, but winter held on, a fog I just couldn’t escape. I kept slipping into other stories, glimpsing a realm of ash, a land of mist and smoke. The homesteader, her frail, dry knuckles grasping the disintegrating tangles of a rag, a black smudge brushing the underside of her jaw, a fraught yearning twined into her sorrow. I understood her. Our narratives spiraled together, until I couldn’t quite disentangle the ice and embers of her tale from my own.
Crouched before my hearth, I scrubbed at soot that had scattered from the fireplace onto the walls. A charcoal stain marred the periwinkle linsey fabric that I’d shoved into a gap. I considered the baffling sounds wedged into the homesteader’s vision, the metal shape hulking behind her. Magnolia had shown me sketches of horseless carriage prototypes; I knew there was talk of motor cars propelled by engines, but I’d never glimpsed one. I thought of the women as my ancestors—but the homesteader’s carriage wasn’t something from long ago. Now I wondered not only about who she was but aboutwhenshe was.
