Cultermite. Bram stood. I'll go. Silas will go with you, Ellen said. Not a request.
He's been cooped up and he's stronger than he was. He can push the pace if the horse slows. Bram looked at Silas in the doorway. The boy's face was controlled and serious. He was looking at his brother.
The way Eloan looked at things she'd already decided to fix. All right, Bram said. We ride at first light. They left before first light. The road to Grabbend was 15 mi of hardpacked dirt and rock that got rougher in the last four miles as it climbed.
Bram and Silas rode at a pace just below punishing, not talking much because the pace didn't encourage conversation, and because Silas, for all his willingness to engage on a normal day, understood that this wasn't a normal day, and kept his mouth quiet and his attention forward. Greybend was awake when they arrived, more awake than usual, actually, with a small knot of people outside the pharmacists and a look to the street that Bram recognized as the look of a town in the middle of a problem it hasn't quite figured out yet. The pharmacist door was open. Bram pushed through. Coulter was behind his counter and he looked like a man who hadn't slept since Tuesday.
Voss, Coulter said. Tobin Harrow, Bram said. Six-year-old coughing, fever, chest involved. Coulter shook his head before Bram finished. I'm nearly out.
I've had 14 people through here in 2 days, and I ordered more 3 weeks ago, and it hasn't come. What do you have? Enough for maybe three families. Then I need some of it, Bram. The boy is 6 years old.
Coulter looked at him for a long moment and then at Silas, who was standing in the doorway, looking at nothing in particular with the focused stillness of a boy, keeping himself from saying something he'd regret. Coulter looked back at Bram. I'll give you enough for 2 weeks, he said. That'll cost you. I know what it'll cost me.
Bram put his money on the counter. They were out the door in 10 minutes. They'd made it back to the edge of town, moving at the same hard pace they'd come in on when Silas began to sag. Bram noticed it the way you notice something wrong before you can identify it. A change in the sound of the horse beside him.
A shift in weight distribution. He looked over and saw Silas slipping sideways in the saddle. Not falling, not quite, but his hands had gone loose on the rains and his head was down. Silas. Bram pulled his horse tight against the boys.
Silas, look at me. Silas looked at him. His face was gray white under the sunburn and his eyes weren't focusing right. I'm I'm okay. He said, and then his eyes rolled back and he went sideways and Bram caught him with one arm before he hit the ground.
They were half a mile from home. Bram's horse was spent. Silas's horse was spent. The sun overhead was its own particular cruelty. Bram held Silas across his saddle, checked his breathing.
It was shallow but steady, heat more than fever. The boy had pushed himself too far on too little and then made a decision without thinking it through because there wasn't time to think it through. He tied both horses to a scrub pine off the road. He took the medicine from his saddle bag and put it inside his shirt and then he picked Silas up and carried him. He couldn't have said afterward how long it took.
He knew that half a mile is not a long distance, unless you are carrying a 13-year-old boy in July heat after riding 15 miles and sleeping poorly for 3 weeks, in which case half a mile is something that needs to be negotiated piece by piece. 10 steps at a time, then 10 more, then 10 more after that. His legs went wrong somewhere around the 2/3 mark, not failure. Just a profound heaviness that turned every step into a decision. And he made a sound at some point that he was glad no one was close enough to hear.
He kept moving because stopping was not an option he had. When the ranch gate came into view, Eloin saw him from the garden and started running. She reached him at the gate and took part of Silas's weight without a word, getting under the boy's other arm, and together they got him through the gate and into the shade of the porch and down onto the boards. Nell was there immediately with water. Maisie hovered at the edge, quiet for once.
Finn watched from the doorway of the storage building with his collection of rocks pressed to his chest. Bram straightened up. His vision went white at the edges. He put his hand on the porch post and held it and breathed and the world came back and he reached into his shirt and pulled out the medicine and held it out to Eloin. She took it.
She looked at him. You walked half a mile. He said the horses were done. She kept looking at him in a way that was hard to read. Not surprise.
Exactly. More like someone filing something away. "Sit down," she said. "I need to go back for "Sit down," she said again. And something in the way she said it made it sound like the least negotiable thing anyone had ever said to him.
So he sat down on the porch step, and the world tilted slightly and then steadied, and he thought he'd rest for 5 minutes and get up and go get the horses. He didn't get up. The heat had taken more than he knew. His body made a unilateral decision about it, and he went down hard. Not dramatically.
He just stopped being able to stay upright. And that was that. And the last thing he heard before the dark came in was Eloin's voice. Very close, saying something that wasn't exactly words, more like the sound of someone who'd been through enough bad things that she she knew exactly what composure looked like under pressure. He thought the medicine is in her hands.
He thought that's the part that matters. And then he didn't think anything for a long time. He was out for 2 days. That was the part nobody told him right away. They let him think it had been one night, a bad night, the kind of night where fever takes you under, and you come back up feeling like you've been rung out and hung to dry.
It wasn't until the second morning when Bram woke up fully and saw that the light was wrong for the time he thought it was, and that Nell was sitting in the chair beside the cot with a piece of mending in her lap like she'd been there a while, that he started doing the math. "What day is it? " he said. His voice came out rougher than expected. Nell looked up from her mending without surprise, like she'd been expecting the question. "Thursday," she said.
He'd gone down on Tuesday. He tried to sit up and the room informed him firmly that it had opinions about that. He lay back down and stared at the ceiling and ran a quick inventory of his body, which was the kind of inventory you do after something hard has happened. Checking what still worked, what was sore, what was just tired versus what was actually damaged. Everything seemed to be there.
Everything seemed to be functioning. He felt like a horse that had been ridden too hard for too long and was taking stock. Tobin. He said fever broke yesterday morning. Nel said she said it the way she said most things plainly without decoration giving you the information and letting you do what you wanted with it.
He's in the yard. Mama won't let him do anything yet, but he's out there. Silas back on his feet. He tried to do fence work yesterday and Mama told him to sit down and he sat down. Bram absorbed all of this.
The ceiling had a crack running from the south corner toward the center that he'd been meaning to deal with for 2 years. He looked at it and let the information settle. Both boys were all right. The medicine had gotten there in time. He lay there for another few minutes, not because he couldn't move, but because he was letting his body catch up to his mind.
And during that time, he became gradually aware of the sounds coming from outside the chickens, which sounded substantially louder than four hens had any right to, and below that, the rhythmic sound of something being hammered, and below that, voices. Multiple voices. None of them ones he immediately recognized. "Who's outside? " he asked. Nell glanced toward the window.